On February 2, 2015, the ACRL Board filed the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, a document presenting six frames or core concepts central to information literacy, after months of passionate discussion and debate among librarians across the country and beyond. This summer, Purdue librarians enjoyed learning from and engaging in conversation with visiting colleagues from the University of Illinois and Indiana University about the new Framework and ways in which we might integrate it into our practices.
On April 28, Merinda Hensley, Assistant Professor and Instructional Services Librarian from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led an informal conversation about the Framework over lunch with a group of about 10 librarians from across Purdue Libraries. Merinda, who served on the task force that developed the Framework, shared insights and answered questions about the process the group underwent, including gathering and integrating feedback, to develop the Framework.
On June 9, Carrie Donovan, Head of Teaching and Learning for IU Libraries, and Andrea Baer, Undergraduate Education Librarian at IU Libraries, presented a workshop with an interesting perspective to approaching thinking and operationalizing the new framework. In the presentation, they submitted that thinking of threshold concepts as a bottleneck through which students move from novice to mastery. The presenters did not define the threshold concepts, as perhaps expected, but described the concepts in a way that meant something to attendees without the associated jargon. In the post-workshop assessment, attendees were overall quite pleased with the workshop, and began to consider their own instruction through different lenses.
As we prepare for the beginning of a brand new academic year, consider some of the IL conversations that we had over the summer, and how your work as library faculty could be enhanced. But, more importantly, think about how our collective work of positively impacting student success could be enriched with a renewed consciousness of our instruction and its outcomes. |