Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Young children's information Literacy

Christine Irving came to talk to my Information Literacy Research students last Thursday (she is pictured here with this Masters-level class: she is in the middle of the front row). She has been working with the Scottish Information Literacy Project, which sadly has now come to a close at Glasgow Caledonian University after five years.
One of the projects which she talked about was one she has just been finishing up, sponsored by Learning and Teaching Scotland, called Real and Relevant: Information and Critical Literacy Skills for the 21st Century Learner (Early and First Level). The Project’s aims are "to create a quality CPD Information Literacy resource pack whose target audience will be Early Years (primary 1-2)." This means young children just entering school, who therefore at the start mostly cannot read. It was fascinating to hear about how the teachers worked with the children to get them to question and to think about information and meaning.
Christine has a blog entry in which she links to descriptions of some of the activities she observed. One notable thing is that you could say the children are engaging in more rounded sort of way than older people, just because they are not just focused on text (e.g. they will be conveying their understanding by making pictures, or through physical action). http://caledonianblogs.net/information-literacy/
2010/03/25/information-and-critical-literacy-visits-curriculum-for-excellence-early-and-first-level
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