Information Literacy: A Gate or a Window?

By Jo Angela Oehrli

A collection of reflections about information and digital literacy practice in schools, libraries, museums, and informal learning settings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jo Angela Oehrli
• Release date: Dec 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310409172

Book preview

Information Literacy: A Gate or a Window?

Edited by Jo Angela Oehrli

Each essay in this collection is copyright 2013 by the individual author and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Cover Image: Information Overload by Peter Asqith on Flickr. Used with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License. http://www.flickr.com/photos/wasabicube/4588137886/in/photostream/ Cropping and lettering by Melissa Gomis and re-released under the same license.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Jo Angela Oehrli

INFORMATION WHAT? THE DILEMMA OF DEFINITIONS

Many Lightbulbs: Teaching the Deductive Research Process

Alix Keener

Unpacking Information Literacy

Alyssa Pisarski

A Literacy for the Information Lifecycle: Personal Digital Archiving and Preservation

Jessica Venlet

Google Knows All...Right?

Alicia Bashawaty

What Counts as Information Literacy?

Ellen Gustafson

WHO WE TEACH MATTERS: HOW CONTEXT SHAPES INFORMATION LITERACY

Inclusive Information Literacy

Claire Abraham

Juice Boxes for All! Even Graduate Students Deserve Engaging Workshops.

Lydia Howes

Information Literacy for Dual Settings in Health Sciences Instruction

Caitlin Kelley

Making up for Lost Time: Introducing At-Risk Students to Information Literacy.

Walter J. Power VIII

BRINGING IT TOGETHER: INFORMATION LITERACY IN PRACTICE

Building Bridges with Information Literacy

Kelsey Airgood Forester

Fun and Games: Engaging Kids in Information Literacy Outside the Classroom

Sarah Cramer

Best Practices for Screencasting as an Information Literacy Learning Tool

Andrea E. Cluck

Making Our Hard Work Count: Assessment in the Public Library

Jessica Schmidt

Safety in Numbers: How Information Literacy Instruction Benefits from Cooperation and Collaboration

Grace Allbaugh

ABOUT THE CLASS

INTRODUCTION

How We Got From There to Here: SI 641 in the Fall of 2013

Jo Angela Oehrli

In late July of 2013, I received the opportunity to interview for an adjunct position at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, my alma mater. The class was SI 641: Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning. I was intrigued. But could I teach graduate students? Was there anything in my own experience that could translate into an upper level class? Could I continue to balance my Learning Librarian duties and my Digital Research teaching position at UM’s College for Literature, Science and the Arts? How would it all work?

I had spent several years as a public school teacher before becoming a librarian. I most often worked with that hard-to-define group called at-risk students. It’s hard to categorize these students. Many were bright. They just struggled for one or more reasons that are hard to label. Sometimes there was a combination of a learning disability and difficulties at home. Or Mom and Dad were very supportive, but they just got mixed up into the wrong crowd. There are many reasons I had worked with them. In any case, this work challenged me as a teacher. I sometimes found it difficult to feel impactful in regular classrooms. It’s hard to feel like you’re making a difference in the run-of-the-mill classroom when you’ve seen students recover from huge setbacks to become mature adults. I worked hard to engage these students and felt like I used a lot of teaching strategies like active learning and reflective practice to provide a great learning environment for these students.

What does this have to do with information literacy and SI? I wondered if SI 641 students would even need guidance. When I was at SI, I was very impressed with the breadth of experience and knowledge that my fellow students shared. Wouldn’t these students be the same?

And so they were. And they were so much more. As I prepared for the class throughout August 2013, I realized that the class was so well set up by previous instructor Kristin Fontichiaro that I just needed to tweak it to fit my teaching style and background. I decided to try to create experiences for them and see what they learned. They continued to participate in a practicum and they wrote book chapters about their experiences like last year, but I also added an annotated bibliography, reflective experience so that they could see what traditional information literacy in practice feels like. I exposed them to many theories of information literacy and watched how they struggled with what teaching this concept looks like – a feeling that many information literacy instructors experience.

In fact, in the end they became a classroom of colleagues to me. In the last month of class, I would set them up in groups to tackle info lit problems, and I could see that they had become librarians working in committees (a true-to-life experience as many of you out there know. Librarians love committees!). They wrote weekly reflective pieces, and I could see light bulbs turn on when they would see an idea explored in class play out in a classroom. I feel like I gave them a strong sense of both educational learning theory and the theoretical ideas behind information literacy instruction.

Their thoughts and questions challenged my own view of information literacy. Did I have a good overall definition of information literacy or was I just using one that applied to my current teaching as a librarian? I began to take this into account in my own Learning Librarian experience teaching undergraduates. Was I providing the freshmen I taught with time to be reflective? Was what I was teaching reflecting the best practices that I was teaching to the 641 students?

I believe that my own instruction improved through teaching SI 641 students to become instruction librarians. In the end, I learned from them just as much as they learned from me.