Choose your own adventure is an engaging and practical instructional method that can be mapped to learning outcomes in a variety of settings. This teaching tool uses active learning techniques and a creative writing narrative to increase and maintain student engagement. The problem-solving adventure format gives choice to students and emphasizes their agency, embracing elements of critical theory.
Librarians at California State University, Chico created choose your own adventure flip-books for use in teaching information literacy. The flip-books encourage students to think critically about research scenarios, make decisions during the research process, and evaluate informational choices. Using an iterative design process, the presenters have honed these tools to suit the educational and informational needs of students and are using them to teach the knowledge practices and skills put forth by the ACRL Framework.
This presentation will give attendees examples of how to implement this tool in the classroom, and will provide attendees with the opportunity to create a choose your own adventure flip-book based on one of the Frames. Attendees will leave this session with an understanding of how to design an adventure flip-book and how these can be used to support teaching information literacy.
Jodi Shepherd is the Head of Acquisitions, Collection Development, and Evaluation Unit at the Meriam Library. She has been at Chico State since 2008 where she has held positions in public services and technical services. She has a B.A. in Political Science from Oregon State University... Read More →
When asked what makes an information source such as a book or an article, credible, college students often suggest statistics or data. However librarians know, from being critical users of information, that the data itself can be false, ambiguous, disorganized or used in incorrect or intentionally misleading ways. Hence data literacy should be an integral part of information literacy education.
But how do you start a data literacy instruction program with no data librarian? This presentation will describe how to introduce data literacy into an established information literacy instruction program using liaison librarians. The presentation will detail the three-pronged approach we took at Eastern Michigan University to: 1) get liaison librarians interested in data literacy, 2) engage with faculty about data literacy and 3) deliver self-service and in-class data literacy instruction to students.
I am a Library liaison to the College of Business and the department of Economics, and a self-designated champion of Data Literacy at Eastern Michigan University.
Information literacy instruction is an essential duty for many academic librarians. Although we may enjoy the challenge of teaching and feel inspired as we plan our lessons, there are those of us who routinely experience anxiety as part of this work. As teachers in a world of one-shots, librarians are uniquely positioned. Faculty come to us with expectations and assumptions about what we do. They share their assignment, talk with us about their students’ research needs, and give us an hour or two to meet with their class. Often we have only a developing knowledge of the course topic, have never met the students, and feel pressure to exceed the expectations of the instructor so that we can work with them again.
In this presentation, participants will consider how developing authenticity in teaching may help to combat teaching anxiety, improve student outcomes, and challenge us to develop a growth mindset and find adventure in our work. Participants will be introduced to the concept of authenticity, which has its roots in philosophy but has been used in the scholarship of teaching and learning to describe reflective teaching practices that center on being “true to oneself” and focusing on student needs. Through conversation and activities, we will explore the challenges and possibilities afforded by authentic information literacy instruction, discovering how we can best “be ourselves” as teachers even as a guest in another instructor’s classroom.
533 students. 32 class sections. 32 different topics, assignments, syllabi, and instructors. 8 instruction librarians. 1 assessment. How do you make sense of this much variety in a first year experience course?
The presenters, librarians at a small liberal arts college, chose to focus on first-year students’ ability to select appropriate resources for research. They launched a pilot program with only a few weeks’ notice, driven by a university assessment mandate, department goals, and librarian curiosity. Using a three-pronged approach, they juggled data from each class section to investigate the correlative effect of library exposure on first year experience student success across these sometimes dramatically different class landscapes (from “writing for social justice” to “fear” to “superheroes” to “digital stories”). The librarians administered a baseline survey during fall library instruction and assessed student research assignments, then collected student and faculty feedback in the spring semester.
Join us for discussion of preliminary results and insight into moving a research project from concept to action to refinement; we will also discuss organizing, question creation, beta testing, IRB process, requesting student assignments and papers from faculty, and the many other variables that found their way into the research process.
Data Librarian, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
I'm a former Research and Instruction Librarian and Associate Professor at Regis University. I was a liaison to Education, Math, Psychology, and Chemistry and worked with students in the First Year Experience. My research interests are parental leave in academic libraries, data management... Read More →
UNM librarians consider a source evaluation method that shifts the focus from truth to trust and from content to context, thereby centering the Authority is Constructed and Contextual and Information Creation as a Process frames from the ACRL Framework. The recent proliferation of “fake news” and misinformation prompts us to ask: Can the Framework help us develop a straightforward and substantive approach to source evaluation?
Data collected through UNM’s first year instruction program indicates that students often struggle to make judgments about information content, including language, argument, accuracy, and purpose, which can hinder students’ attempts to determine a source’s relevance and value. Student evaluation of information can also be influenced by emotional predispositions and biases that may lead to less objective source evaluations. Instead of focusing our efforts on the content of a source and attempting to determine whether or not it represents “the truth,” we help students evaluate a source’s context to assess whether to trust the information a source conveys. We concentrate on:
• concrete fact-checking techniques—e.g. lateral and upstream reading/research—to assess authority, and • a new conceptualization of format, informed by genre theory, to help students assess the purpose of a source and the underlying processes that result in its creation.
Focusing evaluative efforts on the “container” also offers students some distance from potentially inflammatory content. As students adapt fact-checking techniques to quickly scan multiple sources and become more familiar with various information formats, they will be able to more readily understand and effectively use sources.
In 2011, the Walker Library at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) coordinated with a nearby magnet high school intending to introduce 200 gifted high school seniors to a collegiate research experience. These students had a capstone thesis project requiring access to resources not available at the high school library. Walker Library provided library instruction showcasing basic collegiate level research skills. The high school students had the opportunity to utilize a wide variety of resources for their research, and they were exposed to an important cornerstone of the MTSU campus. The students benefited from academic librarians, high school librarians, and high school teachers working together to deliver vital research assistance in the classroom setting. The 2011 collaboration developed into a formal partnership and now serves as the model for other Walker Library/high school partnerships. As of 2017, Walker Library collaborates with seven high schools, and more are joining. The success of these partnerships has gained the attention of numerous MTSU campus officials and is now becoming a part of the MTSU student recruitment process. This presentation will describe the structure of the Walker Library/high school partnerships. It will detail how the partnerships were originally set up as well as how they have evolved. The presentation will conclude with a summary of lessons learned, assessment of the partnerships, and details regarding future directions.
Department Chair, User Services, Middle Tennessee State University
Hi everyone! I am looking forward to meeting you at LIW! I have been collaborating with librarians and helping library users for many years, and I still find librarianship and library instruction as rewarding now as I did when I first became a librarian. I have a background in... Read More →
Information literacy education has long included developing skills in evaluating information. Librarians have designed checklists, dichotomized scholarly and popular sources, and created lessons centered around fact checking in an effort to encourage responsible information habits. While these skills are important, traditional methods of information evaluation do not account for the impact that emotions and internal biases have on human judgement processes.
Research shows that humans are more likely to dismiss information that does not confirm previous thinking in favor of information that does regardless of source reliability. It follows that even if students are given a tool to determine reliability such as a checklist, they may not accept the outcomes if it doesn’t align with pre-existing beliefs. Highlighting the importance of checking emotional reactions to information has perhaps never been more relevant than now, when much of our information comes to us via proprietary algorithms that encourage confirmation bias. The platforms we frequent create echo chambers overrun with misleading and inflammatory information. We must teach students that checking in with our emotions and internal biases is an integral part of evaluating information in their academic lives and beyond.
Drawing from Social Psychology and Communications literature, I will explore the significant impact emotional reactions have on whether we internalize information as true or dismiss it. I will then discuss implications of this for information literacy education and offer practical methods for addressing these concerns.
Teaching and Learning Librarian, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Chelsea Heinbach is an Assistant Professor and Teaching and Learning Librarian at the Lied Library at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is interested in in critical pedagogy, the affective nature of information behavior, and the intersection between civic engagement and information... Read More →
What are we asking of students when we challenge them to create digital projects from archival or special collections? This paper investigates the rewards reaped and lessons learned from a semester-long course asking students to create a public-facing digital project around an under-researched and underrepresented archive or collection in order to confront issues of power and privilege. The course made use of hands on activities in collections, exposed students to issues of copyright and the postcustodial responsibilities collections have, as well as the biases we can pass along through metadata creation. The practical outcome of this intensive partnership between faculty and librarian was the collection of deliberate approaches to teaching students in special collections, the incorporation of librarian and archivist expertise when partnering with faculty, and the purposeful approach taken when choosing and teaching a digital tool in the humanities.
In late 2017, an instruction librarian and a student accessibility specialist teamed up to survey academic librarians about their knowledge and experience teaching students with Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD, the group of “disabilities” commonly known as autism. While public libraries have been creating supportive, inclusive, safe, and targeted programs and spaces for autistic children and their families for many years, academic libraries have been slow to prepare their environments and staff for the growing population of undergraduate students with ASD. In a one-shot information literacy session or one-time research consultation, librarians often do not have the relationships, awareness, or tools with which to effectively teach an autistic student. What do librarians currently know about working with students on the spectrum? How can we better prepare our instruction to help these students succeed? In this energetic presentation, we will briefly explain the debate over autism as disability or identity, present the results of our study of academic librarians’ perceptions of and experiences with students with ASD in the library, and provide attendees with tangible tips on how to navigate the adventures in autism and work productively with autistic students.
At the library, I'm meeting with students in sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and urban studies as well as serving as an academic advisor for undeclared majors as well as faculty advisor for the "football fraternity." I am also trying to keep equity alive on... Read More →
The Collins Dictionary named fake news the 2017 word of the year, describing the real problem of misinformation spread widely “under the guise of news reporting.” The phrase fake news has also been used as a rhetorical tool in public discourse to undermine opposing views. In a climate of abundant information and misinformation, concern has grown on campuses about college students’ abilities to contextualize and think critically about information sources. To provide meaningful practice in recognizing markers of context and credibility, we collaborated to develop a series of sessions for students in a first-year composition class. Held over two weeks, the sessions were designed to engage, and sometimes provoke, students in critical analysis and reflection about source types, bias and credibility. Through discussion, readings, group work, and free writing, we considered some challenges for thinking critically about information, addressing both conditions of our current information climate as well as common cognitive fallacies. The last sessions in the series focused on the development of strategies and discerning habits of mind. By the end of these sessions, students demonstrated thoughtful awareness in the creation of their own lists of source evaluation criteria and in an essay describing the learning process.
In describing the choices experts make to align themselves with disciplinary conventions and expectations, each of the Framework for Information Literacy six frames situates IL’s value within a single, broad context: Academia. But does academic expertise easily transfer to the personal, professional, and civic contexts students also inhabit? Is it useful for addressing all the situations encountered in those contexts? To become information literate in all contexts, a critical awareness of how ideologies condition participation is necessary. Informed by rhetoric--which recognizes how social contexts constrain available means of persuasion--this awareness can help students read and adapt to the demands of any context. In its turn towards social constructionist philosophies, the field recognizes that a discourse, lay or academic, “can never be innocent, can never be a disinterested arbiter of the ideological claims of others because it is always already serving certain ideological claims.”1 Every practice, from selecting search strategies to choosing appropriate evidence to integrating source material, is situated. Nothing is universal; a practice’s value and meaning must be understood in context. A critical awareness of any rhetoric’s situated nature can act as a schema for learning context-specific expectations and practices when the need arises. This presentation will demonstrate the essential elements of a critical awareness based on rhetoric. It will also analyze how the existing Frames limit the development of a transferable awareness. Finally, it will propose conceptual and semantic changes to the Frames that will accommodate a more expansive approach to information literacy.
1. Berlin, J. (1988). Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class. College English, 50, 477- 494.
Librarians from four universities in Utah sought to modify instruction to baccalaureate nursing students based on information needs and behaviors of their recent nursing alumni. We surveyed hundreds of alumni across the state about topics related to information environment, information access, and specific resources used. We’re now using the evidence collected to inform our teaching. This session will describe our survey process, results, and plans for implementation of recommendations for authentic information literacy instruction. In addition, we will address how our results fit with current information literacy standards for nursing. We will suggest future directions for authentic nursing information literacy instruction and ways this research can be adapted to other disciplines.
Part of this session will be dedicated to a discussion with the group about improving information literacy instruction based on evidence. We will open up the conversation about the challenges and benefits of evidence-based library instruction. We’ll also discuss student-centered learning and discipline-specific literacy instruction and ways to implement them at your library.
Assoc. Professor/Dept. Chair, Southern Utah University
Anne Diekema is Department Chair of the Library & Information Science department at Southern Utah University's Sherratt Library. Anne teaches information literacy and library research skills and studies how to best prepare students for information problem solving in school, profession... Read More →
Betsy Hopkins is the Nursing Librarian at Brigham Young University. She is interested in the use of metrics in research evaluation and preparing students to succeed in today's complex information environment.
Our institution created an event series where students and faculty share and learn about various cultures around the world. The concept and spirit of the event came from a shared vision of our new Vice President of Academic Affairs, the Library Director, and the Director of International Programs to expose our students to peoples around the globe. With the tagline “All are welcome”, we have established a highly successful campus outreach series that manages to be instructive without feeling like instruction and to build community through food, celebration, and information-sharing. Presenters have been international students studying in the U.S., American faculty who’ve worked and/or lived in other countries, and faculty from other countries working in the U.S. Photos are a popular way of sharing cultures; presenters show videos of musical events, dancing, and their community. Authentic cuisine and relevant displays of books and artifacts make this a robust, multi-sensory experience. By summer 2018, we will have had 8 Cultural Cafes with country spotlights ranging from Japan to the Middle East and Jordan, from India to Nepal and Venezuela. The series has also provided an opportunity to exhibit and communicate opportunities such as the Peace Corp and Fulbright service learning experiences. For our 45-minute presentation, you’ll experience a mini Cultural Café as well as engage in discussion about how they came to be, valuable takeaways regarding best practices for such outreach events at your own campus, buy-in and budgeting strategies, event planning needs, and participant recruitment and audience engagement.
Game based learning, although not new to higher education, has become increasingly more prevalent in recent years. Research has show that the millennial generation responds well to the type of active learning involved in educational gaming, and that it can increase student engagement, collaboration, and practical application of conceptual skills such as problem solving and critical thinking. Over the past decade, academic libraries have also incorporated games into information literacy instruction. Principles of well designed games lend itself to learning outcomes for information literacy such as developing research strategies and evaluating information. The Scottsdale Community College (SCC) Library Faculty have created and implemented several learning games within their instruction program ranging from simple question based activities to more in-depth scenario based competitions.
In this session, SCC Library Faculty will outline the process of creating a successful scenario based learning game and the benefits to students. They will showcase the learning game they created for BIO181, a biology for majors course. The team based game incorporates specific information literacy learning outcomes relevant to biology course competencies. It challenges students to use their research and information skills to save the college from an impending viral epidemic and escape certain doom.
The session will conclude with small group brainstorming, so that participants can begin developing ideas for learning games for their own classes.
Drawing on Piaget’s developmental psychology (1970) and Vygotsky’s sociocultural learning theories (1978), peer teaching has been shown to be successful not only for the peer teacher, but for the peer student as well (Howard, 2001; Soven, 2001). Nevertheless, implementing peer-to-peer (P2P) strategies at many institutions presents challenges of time, resources, and institutional support. To illustrate a variety of options for fostering P2P learning, this panel will share a range of experiences from both LIS and Writing across the Curriculum pedagogy. We will talk about a ready-to-launch, for-credit course designed to train undergraduates to become peer teachers at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis) as well as a Writing Fellows program involving students who assist with disciplinary courses at UCCS (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. In addition, we will share strategies that any librarian can bring into the classroom to harness the power and benefits of peer learning. We will discuss the challenges, constraints, and outcomes of P2P approaches across institutions and contexts.
Romance Languages Librarian, University of Colorado Boulder
Bronwen K. Maxson received a Master in Library and Information Science in 2013 from the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. She worked for three years at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) as a Humanities Librarian and is currently the Romance Languages... Read More →
Transfer learning is a critical concern within the library instruction classroom. As librarians, we want to do everything we can to make sure our students are taking something away from our learning environment, but what are some strategies that we can use to accomplish this? Taczak and Robertson (2016) suggest students can engage in transfer learning through reiterative reflection, stating “reflection encourages students to put what they are learning into practice while also serving as a way to set goals and move forward in their writing ability.” Librarians have the opportunity to practice reiterative reflection within their classrooms by adapting Writing Across Contexts practices (Yancey, Robertson, Taczak 2014). When implemented within the library instruction classroom, this pedagogical approach engages students in reflectively describing the process or skill they have learned, and then extending that skill into a new context. In this session the presenters will demonstrate the correlation between Writing Across Contexts and the library instruction classroom, specifically engaging with the idea of “teaching for transfer.” We will briefly discuss the theoretical implications of reflection and its interaction with metacognition and then offer some pragmatic examples of applying these concepts within the library instruction classroom. Session participants will have the opportunity to interactively practice reflection towards transfer through a short writing prompt, and discuss its application and implications in their own teaching contexts.
Digital Humanities Librarian, University of Alabama
Sara Maurice Whitver is the Digital Humanities Librarian at The University of Alabama Libraries and liaison librarian for the Departments of English and Philosophy. She joined the faculty at University of Alabama Libraries in 2012. Her academic background is in Digital Rhetoric and... Read More →
Teaching students to understand different perspectives and be able to (and see the importance of) checking facts and corroborating viewpoints a, especially when dealing with controversial issues, including those centered around the environment and sustainable living, has never been so important. With an administration constantly butting heads with scientists on such basic issues as climate change and the desirable direction of energy production, students need to feel empowered to analyze, and understand conflict and sort through facts and opinions in order to form their own ideas. In this inter-active presentation, the audience will discover some ways of integrating instruction in bias, (word connotations), structure of argument, and perspective into information literacy lesson or course, focusing discussion around recent environmental conflicts including the Dakota pipeline, the Mauna Kea telescope project, and the Flint Water crisis.
Techniques for having students work in groups analyzing documents, media, and articles relating to an environmental conflict will be discussed, along with readings related to bias in news. The group approach fits with both a social constructivist and critical pedagogy approach to teaching. A list of sources relating to news bias will be provided, along with articles to read for background on environmental issues, including cultural perspectives. Connections between bias and language will be discussed; including how to derive clues form the authors author’s tone, to infer purpose. How to teach students the importance of finding corroborating evidence will also be discussed. The audience will be able to brainstorm their own ideas on information literacy, evaluating news, and environmental/sustainability topics.
Librarians at Oklahoma State University have developed a three-credit course titled, “They Wouldn’t Put it on the Internet if It’s Not True: Information Literacy in a Post-truth Society.” This course, first offered during the fall 2017 semester as an elective Honors Seminar, covers traditional information literacy concepts, such as search skills, citations, source evaluation, etc., but also seeks to provide a critical lens through which students can examine information structures.
Intentionally incorporating issues of race, class, orientation, and privilege encourages students to develop a critical understanding of how awareness of, and access to, and the quality of information have demonstrable impacts on social, economic, and political well-being of individuals, especially those within marginalized populations. Students are provided with the space to grapple with these concepts, as well as opportunities to interact with real-life applications of information literacy beyond the classroom.
This presentation will detail the development of the course, highlighting areas where critical pedagogy was incorporated into readings and class activities. It will also include librarian and student reflections on successes and failures, and student reactions to the course and individual topics. Presenters will also share examples of student work. Attendees will gain insight in to practical application of critical librarianship in information literacy instruction.
Director, Library Undergraduate Instruction & Outreach, Oklahoma State University Libraries
Matt Upson is the Director of Undergraduate Instruction and Outreach Services at Oklahoma State University’s Edmon Low Library. He enjoys finding opportunities for innovative instruction and interaction with students, and has co-authored a comic book guide to basic library research... Read More →
Assessment: Necessary evil? The solution to prove libraries’ value? Tool of institutional oppression? In this session, two information literacy coordinators attempt to answer the question: How do we as critical educators approach student learning outcomes assessment in our daily practice? Assessment is an institutional reality for most of us, though we might be in tension with our institutions’ approaches and top-down mandates. We will provide background on critical pedagogy’s relationships to assessment and the neoliberalization of higher education. From there we will shift to how we can push back against compliance and embrace ownership of understanding how students learn. One presenter will describe an approach to building a culture of critical assessment at a liberal arts college, another will take us through a learning outcomes assessment project where librarians scored student work at a public comprehensive university, and ultimately both will reflect on the assessment process from a critical perspective. We will spend time in the presentation engaging participants in reflecting on their own experiences with assessment and what might be possible. How do we challenge our own expectations for information literacy instruction and student expectations of librarians while remaining critical practitioners? How do we also, somehow meet the mandates of the institution?
Many librarians offer drop-in workshops and are looking for scalable ways to increase their library instruction and learning opportunities for students. We will share our experience developing a highly successful campus-wide co-curricular drop-in workshop series called SkillShops. In three years, our workshop program grew from a two-person team with a yearly attendance of 155 to more than 50 facilitators from over 20 departments across campus reaching 900 learners (and annual attendance over 1600).
Learn how we developed methods for creating and maintaining cross-campus relationships that meet the needs of the library, our partners and, most importantly, our students. One method is using Keller’s ARCS Model of Motivation (attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction) as an instructional design tool that is simple yet effective in training facilitators with little to no previous instruction experience. With these methods the SkillShops facilitators (faculty, staff and students) have become an active collaborative team developing and modeling the creation of supportive learning environments.
With this session we will examine a case study of Instruction Librarians collaborating with the Director of the Writing Studio to train students as workshop peer-facilitators. We will also share training strategies and materials including lesson plan templates and the ARCS model and how it is used to coordinate and facilitate the campus-wide program. Participants will have the opportunity to critically analyze a workshop lesson plan in order to identify ways in which the model can be used to improve student motivation and learning.
Digital Media & Learning Librarian, Cal Poly Humboldt University
Tim Miller is the Digital Media & Learning Librarian at the Humboldt State University Library where he focuses on inclusive pedagogy to teach digital and information literacy using interest-driven methods in which students have the agency and confidence to design their learning experience... Read More →
Sarah Fay Philips is passionate about connecting people to ideas, resources, information, and experts that will challenge, surprise, and inspire them. Starting this Fall she will be the librarian at Oregon State University – Cascades in Bend, Oregon. From 2012-2018 she was the... Read More →
This presentation will highlight a mid-size land-grant university’s process for assessing changes made to their instruction program. Presenters will share their assessment process for a mixed methods exploration of students’ research skills with a focus on synthesis. This authentic assessment was designed in response to a previous large-scale rubric study that indicated a need for changes in the instruction program.
The presenters will discuss how 10 librarians and staff collaborated to score 79 student papers with two rubrics in addition to a citation analysis that included 678 citations. This involved learning to use a rubric, reaching inter-rater reliability, collaborative analysis, and working with IRB to ethically collect and use student works. Part of sharing the process will include giving participants the opportunity to engage with assessment tools and think about how to use findings to re-think, revise, or just better understand student research behaviors.
Participants will also gain ideas and resources for conducting a rubric analysis of student works at their own institutions. More generally, they will leave with an understanding of how collaborative assessment can build community, serve as a professional development opportunity, and provide a mechanism for understanding how and when student learning is occurring, including the nuances of how learning and its barriers reveal themselves during authentic assessment. This deep immersion into student work, especially as an instructional team, provides valuable insight for changing practice, challenging our own teaching assumptions, and contributing to a culture of assessment.
Teagan is Utah State University’s Online Learning Librarian where she focuses on creating online learning materials, instructional design and technologies, user experience, and supporting USU’s large distance education program.
"Bias" is often invoked in the context of information literacy, namely that something is or is not "biased". This approach does little to communicate to students that bias is a complicated concept and that the factors that determine bias are varied and contextual.
With reference to the ACRL frame "Authority is Constructed and Contextual" this presentation will describe ways in which the common understanding and use of the term bias is problematic and limiting for our students as they seek to navigate a complex information landscape. In particular it will highlight work related to the study of bias from fields beyond librarianship such as philosophy and psychology in order to provide attendees with insight into how other areas of academia have worked to expand our collective understanding of the different dimensions of this topic. In doing so, attendees will have the opportunity to think critically about the ways in which their conceptions of bias compare and contrast with common modes of understanding bias as articulated in other areas of academia.
In this session attendees will consider how a broader, more nuanced approach to teaching the concept of bias could be applied in their instruction sessions. The presentation will include specific strategies for advancing students understanding of various types of bias relevant to information literacy, which include anchoring bias and confirmation bias. This presentation will focus on bias as it applies not just to information sources but also as it relates to the disposition within the "Authority is Constructed and Contextual" frame that references the responsibility that librarians have to support students in gaining "a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview".
Have you ever been curious about critical reflection or wondered what it was? Critical reflection is a process designed to promote the examination and interpretation of experience and the promotion of cognitive learning. It requires us to consider our practices, methods and selves. Research has shown how deliberate and critical reflection on teaching practices contributes to excellence in teaching, and improved educational outcomes for students. Critically reflective teaching practices encourage teaching librarians to regularly evaluate our approaches to teaching and learning and provides a place to improve and evaluate our practice. Through a deep examination of how our personal assumptions, values, beliefs, and biases may affect decisions we make inside, and outside, the classroom, critical reflection involves teachers making observations, asking questions, and putting facts, ideas, and experiences together to derive new meaning. Becoming a critically reflective teacher will allow you the opportunity to improve your teaching and promotes a deeper understanding of teaching and learning. This session will allow participants to practice hunting assumptions, spend time engaging in critically reflective practices through looking at ourselves, our colleagues and our students, and provide you with an opportunity to get on the road to being a critically reflective teacher.
Student learning assessment in library instruction has taken many as many forms as teaching itself in academic libraries. Library instructional services staff and faculty at one public four-year university had experienced top-down assessment approaches, including evaluations based on peer observations, summative quizzes testing students’ skills, and mandated universal tools for measuring student learning. When a new-to-academia librarian joined this team, tasked with a new position coordinating instructional assessment, they jumped at the opportunity to revamp colleagues’ perceptions of assessment and integrate evidence-based decision-making into their instruction. This presentation will outline the two-year project during which the reference department took a deep dive into assessment and instructional techniques to refresh and renew each instructor’s approaches to their teaching. Content will include updated findings from the project, including assessment results from instruction sessions, assessment techniques shared during mini-workshops, and insights shared by library faculty and staff about the process. Asking instructors to shift from an output to outcomes-focused approach to their instruction was a challenge, and the project included a mix of successes and failures. The presenter will highlight meaningful aha moments shared by library instructors as well as those efforts that were most definitely duds. Attendees will learn techniques and strategies for coaching colleagues, encouraging growth, and fostering an atmosphere of experimentation—all from a position without organizational authority. Along the way, attendees will gain insight into their own instructional assessment approaches and take away new ideas for how to integrate those efforts intentionally and meaningfully into their lesson plans.
In an ever-evolving information ecosystem, the majority of students are saying that research is more difficult for them than ever before (Project Information Literacy). At Sonoma State University, we believed that students’ struggle came from assigning a “research paper.” A research paper frequently teaches students to find the right answer, rather than asking the right questions. This session will detail how, in collaboration with first-year composition instructors, the library is moving away from teaching one-shot sessions for the “research paper” and towards participatory and collaborative instruction surrounding the frame Research as Inquiry. The session will highlight how a research paper assignment departs from the information literacy framework, and the means one library took to teach the frames.
