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Thursday, April 20, 2023

Supporting Faculty to Decode Information Literacy #LILAC23

Sheila Webber, liveblogging at LILAC. In this workshop Amanda Folk, Katie Blocksidge and Jane Hammons (Ohio State University Libraries, USA) were introducing a workshop for academics that uses Decoding the Disciplines and Writing to Learn. They have made material available online at https://go.osu.edu/lilacIL which you could also use to develop academics' ability to teach information literacy, in your own institution. It is well worth investigating this.

They ran through some key stages of the workshop that they run for academics, for example starting by asking us to identify information literacy problems that we encounter with students, sharing our thoughts on a jamboard. I put "Finding words and phrases (on search engines, databases) that will bring up the articles they want (especially when English is not their first language)" as I know this can be really challenging for learners who haven't had to search for much literature before and aren't very familiar with their subject yet.

The workshop leaders then introduced the ACRL Framework and the definition of IL that it uses. They talked about threshold concepts and ways of thinking and practising in the discipline, and how academics will have internalised the values and norms of their discipline, and not explicitly teach the students about issues (such as how to cite and write) that are familiar to the academic but not to the student. "Bringing these expectations to the surface is a driver of the work we do with faculty". They emphasised that working through academics was scalable, sustainable and enabled the librarians to expand their research (as there weren't enough librarians to reach all students directly).

After this the team introduced Decoding the disciplines (the wheel is shown above, from the Decoding the Disciplines website (linked above). We were asked to work through some of the steps, based on the problem we had thought about for the jamboard exercise. Step 2 "Uncover the mental tasks" included identifying a relevant ACRL frame and the dispositions and knowledge that need to be taught more explicitly (e.g. I think "Searching as Strategic exploration - understand that first attempts at searching do not always produce adequate results" is relevant although I couldn't really find a disposition or knowledge practice that corresponded to the very basic linguistic problem).  

The team then introduced the idea of writing to learn ("short, impromptu or otherwise informal and low-stakes writing tasks that help students think through key concepts or ideas presented in a course.") for steps 3 and 4 from the Wheel - there is a booklet on this as part of the material at https://go.osu.edu/lilacIL. I selected "Writing definitions"  (to help understand what words to use and what concepts they are searching for).

The team have written articles about these programmes e.g. Folk, A. & Hammons, J. (2021). Expanding Our Reach: Implementing Instructor Development Programming, International Information & Library Review, 53(1), 69-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2021.1869451

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