Monday, June 1, 2015

Let's Get Real: Practical Ideas for Teaching Infolit

Teaching is not for the weak, we know that for sure. Teaching something as abstract as information literacy gets even more complicated. How do you teach students navigation skills, evaluation skills, copyright and plagiarism traps and have fun all at the same time? It's no easy task. And often, students respond with:





Last week I had the opportunity to attend an Information Literacy Conference, and it was great. I have never spent a day with librarians who only do information literacy. I mean, most of us have other tasks in our job descriptions, but for a day we could all pretend that our sole focus was creating an information literacy program, collaborating with faculty, and teaching research across the disciplines. 

Our keynote was Dr. Donald Leu from the NEAG School and Education at UConn and the New Literacies Research Lab. He has done fascinating research on how reading and writing is affected by the online environment. Any teacher or parent knows that technology is changing the academic and leisure behavior of children; Dr. Leu's research looks into what those changes are, why they happen, and how they effect the classroom environment. A couple of takeaway tidbits:
  • The term "digital native" does not translate to information evaluations of things like search results
  • New technologies require new strategies for reading at all levels of society
  • Point of view in print reading comes from a narrative approach. Reading online requires an evaluation of authority first. 
  • Does the way students access prior knowledge in print reading translate to the same behavior in evaluating search results or other online reading? (hint: no)
  • New, technological literacies  are essential in an online, global marketplace.

After the keynote I went to a breakout session on Creative Teaching Strategies. The session itself was creatively designed, with us participants moving around and visiting the four different teachers. The one that was the most applicable involved how to move from a simple scaffolded, show-and-tell, one-shot session to a more constructivist approach. The librarian employed hardly any demonstration and really handed control of the classroom over to the students. She said that's been the scariest part of engaging in this kind of activity, but in her immediate assessment of the session, students are more engaged and remember more of the searching process because they search AND think in order to solve a problem, not just as abstract "research time" in the library computer lab. It was an excellent mix of skills teaching and source evaluation. 

A fantastic lunch and walk outside had me ready for the afternoon. My session was about Embedded Librarianship: Faculty and Librarian Collaborations, which was also excellent. Two teaching faculty presented, which is always helpful. I really enjoyed hearing the perspectives of the faculty members' regarding how much their students improved over time and with their exposure to library resources. One faculty member was an English professor who teaches in the freshman writing program. As she and the librarian developed learning outcomes for the course and folded the library instruction goals into the syllabus, they discovered an overlap between the ALA Frameworks and the learning outcomes for Writing and Composition. They have started some research of their own regarding this connection between ideas and will continue to work on a shared vocabulary for what freshmen need to know. With overlapping goals, it became an even more natural collaboration for teaching and for research. 


Our afternoon session was a wrap up to give us an opportunity to cement what we had learned. After making our magic wands, sharing our Top Threes with our table, and participating in some power poses, we left ready to take on any info lit challenge!


I am grateful to my institution for funding this learning opportunity for my colleague and me. Spending a day with like-minded individuals can be so helpful for morale, networking, and new ideas to apply to one's situations. I will be keeping this conference on the radar. 





No comments:

Post a Comment