This is Pam McKinney continuing to liveblog from LILAC. Laura Wood from Leeds Arts University and my @infoschoolsheff colleague Leo Appleton presented about an action research project that took place in Leeds as dissertation research that Laura conducted as part of her MA in Librarianship. Leo has worked in Arts Libraries, has chaired ARLIS conferences, and has an interest in metaliteracy in the context of Art and Design students. There are a number of Arts education-focused institutions in Higher Education in the UK, and arts departments based in traditional universities. There is recognition that students studying art and design have particular styles of learning, that are different to students studying other subjects, and this is extended to their use of libraries, for example a need and desire for print-based resources. Arts students use information in different ways, to stimulate imaginations and creativity, which is a different way of making sense of meaning. The concept of metaliteracy comes out of the work of Jacobsen and Mackey (2011), which unifies multiple literacies, for example, visual literacy, and object literacy. Metaliteracy includes the idea that one should understand their multiple literacies. In the arts library, many resources are physical that require students to approach them with metaliteracy.
Laura spoke about Leeds Arts University which is the only specialist arts university in the North of England. There are about 2500 students taking a range of Further and Higher education courses. Laura hadn't worked with Arts students before so there was a big learning curve for her in understanding how students engaged with resources. Sessions where students have the ability to interact with the resources are more popular than "traditional" IL teaching. Laura's research focused on student understanding of their existing learning styles and IL development, and chose to undertake an action research methodology, as this would closely connect with her own teaching. Laura adapted a teaching session to focus on interactions with special collections and zines. She has only done one cycle of the action research cycle. The teaching intervention was split into 3 sections: teaching, handling and making. The teaching aspect focused on systems of power that shape the creation of information and having a go at some traditional searching. In the handling phase the students were introduced to collections, students could handle them, look through them, and a search exercise was repeated. In the making phase, students were invited to create a zine in response to something they had looked at from the collection. This positioned the students as creators of information and encouraged them to reflect on their role as creators and communicators.
Laura distributed a questionnaire at the start of the session, to understand students' understanding of different literacy types. Media literacy was understood, but students didn't really have a good understanding of information literacy or search skills. Visual literacy was understood as being explicitly related to art and design. Then Laura hosted a focus group which aimed to discuss what students understood "literacy" to mean and how that related to art and design. There was recognition that students needed a range of skills and abilities including media and computer literacy. They also discussed learning styles, which students were relatively familiar with, but they were dismissive of these labels and preferred to identify their learning as flexible and multifaceted. They spoke about the supportive nature of art school and the importance of communication and sharing ideas. Then there was a discussion about the material in special collections, which raised issues of terminology. After the intervention, they had another focus group, and the students were a little bit more positive about understanding their own abilities and skills. They enjoyed interacting with the special collections and the blurring of boundaries between form and content. A second questionnaire revealed that students did have a better understanding of metaliteracy, and their confidence about literacy skills was increased.
Art and design students are aware of the differences in their learning styles, but they don't want to be pigeonholed into one learning style. Awareness of metaliteracy and multiliteracies means that art and design students can navigate their learning more effectively. Art librarians could do more to promote understanding of metaliteracy. Students primarily saw the library as a place to support their academic skills development, rather than as a place that occupies a blurred space between the library and the studio, which is a prevalent view in the literature. Library interventions like Laura's can help students join up their literacies. Art library special collections are a great vehicle for developing understanding of metaliteracies, they can support creative practice and collaboration.
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