Step 1: Declare your intention to teach information literacy.
Step 2: ?
Step 3: PROFIT! (Paid in the form of smart people instead of money.)
The trick is narrowing the focus to something manageable. I was struck by what Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe said in Understanding by Design about the need for creating essential questions. What are the questions that boil down the essence of the field? What are the questions that even experienced practitioners struggle with? Creating a learning design around questions seems to be the best way to avoid an undue number of assumptions.
With that in mind, here are my candidates for key essential questions in the field of information studies:
- What is information?
- Where does information come from?
- Why is information important?
- Is some information more important? If so, when and why? Who decides what information is most important? Why?
- How do you know when you need information? How can you figure out what information you need?
- What are sources of information? Are some sources better than others? If so, when and why? Who decides what sources are best? Why?
- Who decides what information should be kept? Why?
- How is information stored and organized?
- What are useful strategies for interacting with sources of information and information retrieval systems? What should you do if there are barriers to the information or it cannot be located?
- What makes information correct? What makes information meaningful? Are these always the same? Why or why not?
- What happens when pieces of information conflict? Why might different sources conflict?
- Who uses information, and how? How should information be used (or not used)?
- When and how should information be shared? Is it always right to share information, or are there times it should be contained? Who should decide this? Why?
I LOVE the comic you linked to--too funny!
ReplyDeleteThat's quite a list of essential questions. Could you narrow it down to three if you had to? I'm not saying you have to, but, as you pointed out, there is a lot to cover for this topic. So, where do we start?
I suppose it has to do with the context in which we're presenting the lesson/unit. There's no way we can cover all of these points in one lesson (it's daunting even for a semester long course). So we probably do need to narrow it down to 1-3 essential questions per lesson.
Let's see, if I were teaching a lesson to my husband's Reading/Writing class, I think I would focus on one of the following:
1. What are useful strategies for interacting with sources of information and information retrieval systems? What should you do if there are barriers to the information or it cannot be located?
2. What makes information correct? What makes information meaningful? Are these always the same? Why or why not?
Rationale: He teaches at the university level and his students are reading somewhat obscure Germanic texts (though translated into English). They may have a difficult time finding information on their topics, so number 1 would be useful. Number 2 fits with the theme of his class and the texts they are reading, so it might resonate.
Oh yeah, I agree with you that it's a long list. I was sort of trying to give an overview of the whole field. Obviously, not every lesson would address everything, and even just one question might take several lessons.
ReplyDeleteThe context would obviously dictate what questions to focus on. If it were a bibliographic instruction session, we would probably focus on the following:
1. How do you know what information you need?
2. What are sources of information? Are some sources better than others? If so, when and why?
3. How is information stored and organized?
4. What are useful strategies for interacting with information and information retrieval systems? What should you do if there are barriers to information or it cannot be located?
I apologize in advance that this post is probably kind of hard to respond to. I didn't really feel like I had anything terribly useful to say this week. :-P
I found this statement really provocative:
ReplyDelete"Saying you want to teach information literacy is a little bit like saying you want to major in the universe. You're trying to teach people how to find, interpret, understand, and use information (a.k.a., pretty much everything)."
My take-away from Bruce is that information literacy cannot be separated from content learning. There's got to be a simultaneous, synchronistic relationship between the two. Students who are researching a case study subject for a bio-medical ethics course should be learning the content of that class, but at the same time, they should explicitly be learning information literacy skills. For example, to study perspective, they might look at three different web-sites that address the same subject but have a different audience, purpose, perhaps funding source. To pull off this lesson, the librarian is collaborating in lesson design with the bio-medical ethics instructors, perhaps teaching as well. This librarian needs to be flexible, socially gifted, and intellectually curious because, yes, in a sense, she is majoring in the universe--she may also collaborating with a Physics instructor, and tomorrow it's Romantic Lit!
I definitely see Bruce as advocating a teaching role for librarians--there's nothing revolutionary about that for school librarians on the K-12 level, but this stance is (I think?!!) more remarkable because her research focus is on university level librarians who have traditionally been less engaged with pedagogy.
They are genius because they are dipping into the universe, but I think they are even more genius when they can pull off effective collaboration with all different kinds of instructors in a wide range of disciplines.
I totally agree with Kathleen, that the context is so important. In most of my experience with university librarians, a great deal of actual teaching is one on one. Students come ask the reference librarian for help, and she guides them through the research they have to do. At CSUSB, where my husband teaches, more than half of the students are first-generation college students. They need a lot of guidance. It's important that as the librarians are helping these kids out, they are also pointing out the principles and skills that they are learning along the way so they'll be better able to do it on their own next time.
ReplyDeleteIn a lot of ways, one could almost say the content is the context--what you're trying to find or learn will affect how you search. For instance, scientists rely a lot on current journal articles, while those in the humanities use books more often. Furthermore, real-life information seeking (e.g., "I need a plumber" or "How do I know if my significant other is cheating on me?") requires different skills than those for academic contexts. Teaching can help people determine when different search techniques might be appropriate.
ReplyDelete