Rebecca Millerjohn MA’16 has made a career out of empowering young people, whether as a middle and high school teacher in Houston and Chicago or youth services librarian at Madison Public Library (MPL).
Now, after a decade serving at MPL, Millerjohn has taken on a new role as the inaugural CDIS Commons Director, preparing to welcome students to what she envisions as “a service-oriented space for our students.” Located on the second floor of the new CDIS building, Morgridge Hall, the commons will open in fall 2025.
“Our role is to be a space where students and faculty are building community and connecting with one another,” she said. “The commons should be somewhere that students and faculty feel supported, valued, and empowered.”
A versatile educator
With experience designing and teaching curricula, managing complex education programs and conducting innovative research, Millerjohn can see education from multiple perspectives, and she understands how to create what she called “user-centered systems that work.”
Millerjohn’s early career was dedicated to classroom instruction. In 2008, she joined the Teach for America program and worked as a middle school educator in Houston for two years, followed by a four-year stint as a high school English teacher on the south side of Chicago. She then pivoted to graduate school, completing the Information School’s renowned MA in Library & Information Studies in 2016 and transitioning into the world of libraries.
In her recent role at MPL’s Central Library, Millerjohn served as youth services librarian for the Bubbler, a community-oriented makerspace program for art and hands-on learning. She said the role required constant attention to “how we connect[ed] and talk[ed] to our community,” a focus which she said will also be instrumental in the CDIS Commons. For her work at MPL, Millerjohn was recognized in 2020 by Library Journal as a “Mover & Shaker” in the field. “[Rebecca’s] project management skills balance the ‘dream big’ vision required to plan new projects with attention to details,” her colleague, MPL Head Bubblerarian Trent Miller, said at the time.
In addition to her role with the Bubbler, Millerjohn has been leading a sweeping research project, funded by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), with the goal of “building a digital toolkit for library program evaluation for libraries across the country,” she said. The toolkit is designed to help librarians integrate best practices around library program evaluation and observational assessment, techniques she has used at MPL for years. The open-source toolkit, Millerjohn said, was developed in partnership with public libraries in Skokie, IL, suburban Milwaukee, and Appleton, among others. As she begins her role with CDIS, the project is “in its final stages,” she said.
Directing the CDIS Commons
Millerjohn is excited to apply what she has learned over years in the library profession to her new role leading the CDIS Commons. The commons, designed to provide versatile workspaces and traditional library functions, will feature collaborative workspaces, an information desk to assist visitors, and open and reserve collections to support academic coursework and research.
“The commons will provide spaces, services, and people that make collaboration easier,” said CDIS Associate Director Kristin Eschenfelder. “Rebecca is the perfect person to lead the Commons because she has the experience and skills needed to manage our spaces and services effectively, and she is a compelling leader who knows how to bring people together.”
Before the building opens next year, Millerjohn emphasized, one of her priorities will be to “actively and transparently collect feedback” about how to ensure the commons is “fulfilling the needs of the people who use it.”
“What does it mean to engage a community? It means learning what they need and being responsive to it,” she said. Thus, some key questions she is focused on include: “What needs are students coming to us with? What about our faculty? And how can we meet these needs in an equitable way?”
Millerjohn also has some early ideas about how to engage students in the commons. These include CDIS passports, with students “earning stamps for engaging in different ways.” Broadly, she hopes to “create spaces and opportunities to highlight successes and innovations through visual displays, special programs and showcases, and student and faculty highlights.”
An overarching goal is to make everyone who visits the commons feel valued, Millerjohn said. “When people are valued, they feel like the space actually belongs to them, and they can bring their whole self to it and feel like there’s a community there.” After all, she added, a larger purpose of bringing the Department of Computer Sciences, Statistics and the Information School under the same roof in Morgridge Hall is to tighten the bonds of community and collaboration between faculty and students across the three CDIS departments—and beyond.
Treating the space like a garden
An avid gardener—“I spend as much as the time can with my hands in the dirt,” she said—
Millerjohn explained how she thinks about this unique new role through the lens of one of her favorite hobbies.
“When you move into a new space with a garden, you shouldn’t start tearing things out right away,” she said. You should wait and watch and see what’s happening. And right now, I feel like that is a big part of my role here,” she said, as she listens to students, faculty and staff about how the commons could benefit them. She called this process “learning the UW ecosystem.”
“There’s a cacophony of voices and needs and requests and thoughts, and using those insights to create systems that work is something I’m really excited about.”
Millerjohn added that in her new role, as in gardening, “Things can sometimes get messy. It will take a lot of upkeep and sometimes won’t be perfect. But that’s great—sometimes the weeds are what the butterflies love the most.”
Learn more about Morgridge Hall or take a virtual tour.
Read a recent progress update on the building’s construction.