#LIRG member's day: information literacy featured

The Library Information Research Group Member’s Day & AGM is taking place on 1 July, 3pm-6.30pm, in Liverpool, UK. It includes talks from LIRG prize winner (and one of my current PhD students) Jess Elmore on An exploration of the information literacy experiences of home educating families and Emily Wheeler (who was a Masters student here last year) on Teaching or training? Academic librarians’ conceptions of their IL activities. There is also a talk from Miggie Pickton on Developing a research culture in the workplace: top down and bottom up approaches
This event is free to CILIP and/or LIRG members, £21 to non-members. It says there is a limit of 15 participants, which seemes extremely small, but if this is true it is important to book at once!
Registration form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1amM4x0l6vIiUg4G0OpU3nZK3aDmJQyu9jIIeL4hKnEE/viewform
Jess Elmore's abstract: The presenter will discuss her dissertation, which explored the information literacy experiences of five home educating families. The research was constructivist with a grounded approach to data analysis and involved in-depth interviews with family groups (parents and children were interviewed together). The children in the study were aged between eight and seventeen. The presentation will include a summary of the context of home education in the UK and highlight the lack of information literacy research in this area. It will involve a brief discussion of the research methods and findings. The focus will be on how these findings relate to existing models of information literacy, with particular reference to the importance of reflection; the significance of communities of practice and the potential challenge to the orthodoxy of formal educational models.
Emily Wheeler's abstract: Despite much research into where and how librarians acquire their teaching skills and how much importance they place on teaching, not much is known about how they conceive of their teaching, their skills or themselves as teachers. This MA dissertation investigated the variation in conceptions of their own teaching skills among academic librarians who teach information literacy in higher education. The project used a qualitative phenomenographic interview approach with a sample of six academic librarians. This presentation will discuss the results of the research, presented as four categories of description, which vary according to interviewees’ conceptions of themselves, their teaching skills, IL, and other teachers. The research revealed how librarians conceive of themselves and their roles within the institution, as well as highlighting a lack of confidence among some participants.
Photo by Sheila Webber: horse chestnut blossom, May 2015