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Friday, October 13, 2023

#ECIL2023 Building knowledge across the curriculum

Photo by Sheila Webber cafe window in Krakow

Pam McKinney live blogging from the ECIL conference. This is a panel session led by Emily Zeken Brown and Susan Souza-Mort, with the directive energy of Laura Hogan who could not be here today. They started off by asking the audience about the flavour of their information literacy training, and how it is delivered e.g. as a one shot session, or a multi-session format, or as a credit bearing course. There is a lack of time for librarians to deliver comprehensive information literacy education for community college students. The presenters work at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts in the US. Students are often 1st generation, non-traditional and working full time, and 68% graduate without debt. A recent law has made it possible for any 1 year resident without a degree can go to community college for free, which has massively improved access to education in the state. Many learners need a lot of support with digital and information literacy, the college is open for everyone, including students who really struggle with formal learning. This affects the library IL offer, as it has to be tailored for a large range of abilities. 

There is a first year seminar course in study skills a college success seminar, and this seemed like an ideal place to develop information literacy. The class can be attached to any research heavy course, and the library team offered to tailor it to different subject contexts. The focus was on scaffolding the research process, and also promoting  academic writing support. Research help, writing help and academic support is provided in the library. Many students think these services have to be paid for, but in fact they are free. The ACRL framework was used as a guiding principle for the course. There was a lengthy administrative process to go through to create this as a credit bearing course in the college, which involved getting feedback from a variety of teachers and administrators in the institution. The way that courses are designed at community colleges in the US seems quite different from the way that courses are designed at British universities!

There was a remuneration issue in that if librarians are going to lead a credit bearing course they should be paid as adjunct teaching staff, and these librarians requested this increase in pay for this course. In order to be a librarian in the US, you are required to have a masters qualification in library and information science. This course was positioned as not needing students to buy text books, so all the resources were open educational resources. The course will hopefully  run for the first time in spring 2024, but there seem to be some issues with the placing of the course, and proposed changes to how it is positioned in the context of other courses at the college. The abstract of the panel is here.

Photo by Sheila Webber: cafe window in Krakow

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