The Framework for Information Literacy & its Impact on Student Learning: March 27

For me, the most important sessions at ACRL were those dealing with the new Framework for Information Literacy. A presentation by librarians from four different institutions highlighted the ways in which the framework is beginning to be implemented.

The four institutions represented were The Ohio State University, Champlain College, Michigan State University, and Eckerd College. Although this limited the examples to large state universities and small liberal arts colleges, there were a variety of perspectives and approaches among them, which made for useful comparisons. I will only discuss some of them here, though.

At Ohio State, they built on previous collaborations with their Teaching and Learning Center, which offers teaching workshops, training and consultations. In 2014, they held a new workshop focused on threshold concepts. Their workshop focused, among other things, on the tension between faculty’s tacit disciplinary knowledge and the essential understandings needed by students in order to do research. They also explored Project Information Literacy (PIL) findings to identify student behaviors that hinder research, and introduced the threshold concepts as a way to revise assignments to foster better research practices by students.

The upshot of these workshops was that the PIL research resonated with their faculty, and opened the way for discussions about the Framework as a whole. They focused on using one threshold concept and associated practices and dispositions - first for revising one assignment, and then for revising a course. Based on this experience, they look forward to further collaboration with the Teaching and Learning Center, focusing on curriculum mapping, forming communities of practice using the Framework,  and developing Framework-based research projects with faculty cohorts.

At Michigan State University, librarians took advantage of their liaison relationship to their Integrative Studies (IAH) course - a gen. ed. requirement for the humanities, sciences, and social sciences - to integrate Framework concepts into the IAH program goals. They raised awareness of the Framework through information literacy workshops for TAs and faculty, and some librarians also co-taught IAH classes. In these classes, they were able to map the Frames to the learning objectives for the IAH courses.  This, they believe allowed them to start the conversation about the Framework through practice, rather than trying to impose a new set of standards.

At Eckerd College, a small liberal arts college with about 1800 students, the focus for library instruction has always been an individual course model, with faculty partnerships by collegium (the college’s interdisciplinary divisional structure, grouped according to teaching and research methods). The librarians’ goals for implementing the Framework are to take the approach of direct collaboration with faculty on mapping to the curriculum.

In their plan, they are now targeting up to three academic departments, in order to start discussions about the Framework, and map the curriculum. It is their hope that this will create new departmental partnerships. Building on existing partnerships through college committee assignments, librarians have been able to get positive feedback from key faculty members - especially as concerns the rigor of the Framework, i.e. that is is “higher up the (Bloom’s) taxonomy.”

The takeaway from this session, certainly, is that there are many ways to approach integration of the Framework, But the thing that joins all of these approaches, I think, is that the road to integrating the Framework, whether for instruction purposes, or general education assessment, it through collaboration with key college or university stakeholders.