Librarians and Teachers Co-designing for IL Creating Informed Learners in the Classroom
Abstract
Academic librarians possess the necessary expertise to teach students disciplinary information practices, but typically have limited access to students in the classroom. To leverage librarian expertise and bring information literacy into the disciplinary classroom, academic libraries have created development programs that prepare classroom teachers to teach about information literacy (Hammonds, 2022; Wishkoski, Lundstrom, & Davis, 2018).
The Creating Informed Learners in the Classroom program takes this idea a step further by bringing librarians and teachers together as partners to co-design information-rich student projects. An educational design model called ‘informed learning design’ (Maybee, Bruce, Lupton, and Pang, 2019) guided the collaborative design work. Grounded in an approach to information literacy called informed learning (Bruce, 2008), informed learning design guides the creation of learning activities that enable students to use information while simultaneously learning about disciplinary content. Participant materials created during the program were analyzed to examine the capability of informed learning design in supporting librarian and teacher partners in a co-design process.
Partially funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Service (IMLS), the program was implemented at three research universities in the United States. Of the 15 librarians and 16 teachers who joined the program, 8 librarians and 9 teachers (8 teams) completed the ethics forms consenting to participate in the study. In late 2020, four Zoom sessions were conducted in which the teams applied informed learning design to create student projects in which students engage with information within a disciplinary learning context. Examples of student projects created by the participating teams include creating local public health campaigns to share COVID-related health information, analyzing forensic data, and extracting information from scholarly articles in chemistry.Data were analyzed by thematic analysis. Data included: 1) worksheets completed during the program, 2) a report summarizing student achievement and experiences completing the projects, and 3) reflections from the librarians.
Initial findings suggest that librarians perceive that informed learning design provides a useful structure and shared language with which to discuss how students use information in disciplinary settings. While challenging to learn, the librarians conveyed that this created a more equitable environment for both librarians and teachers to participate because neither were drawing solely from their own backgrounds.The findings also show that using the informed learning design model made teachers more aware of how students may struggle to use information. Librarians indicated that they felt empowered by applying their expertise to impact important, but often implicit, student learning goals related to using information.
The findings from the study will inform attendees interested in creating educational development opportunities for integrating information literacy into disciplinary learning at their institutions.
Keywords
informed learning, faculty development, information literacy
Date of this Version
3-2024
Recommended Citation
Maybee, C., Fundator, R., Flierl, M. (2024, May). Librarians and Teachers Co-designing for Information Literacy: Creating Informed Learners in the Classroom. LILAC: Information Literacy Conference, Leeds, United Kingdom.