Joanna M. Burkhardt - Teaching Information Literacy Reframed: 50+ Framework-Based Exercises for Creating Information-Literate Learners

One focus of this book is on understanding the six threshold concepts outlined in the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and on imagining how instructors might help students cross those thresholds. Another focus is on discovering how memory and transfer of learning apply to the teaching of information literacy. This book also offers some advice about how to design information literacy instruction that will be effective for both instructor and student.

The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (Framework) is a new document. Although its creation took quite some time, its actual usefulness to the instruction of information literacy has yet to be tested. Because the Framework is conceptual in nature, there is very little practical information for instructors to apply in their classrooms. Because the document is a framework, there are many gaps that must be filled in by individual instructors. The skin that will cover the Framework must be homegrown. The means by which this will happen is left to the individual institutions to determine. The Framework document urges librarians to work with faculty and administrators across their campuses to create a program of information literacy that will be incorporated into the curriculum in every subject on every level.

The Framework offers a description of the expert in information literacy but does not provide a roadmap to show how that person became an expert. The Framework describes what someone who is becoming information literate might think or do. It does not describe how to provide instruction for the beginner in information literacy, nor does it provide any guidance about instruction that will propel students over the six thresholds identified.

The six threshold concepts themselves are not easy to interpret. In some ways they mirror the learning objectives of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (Standards). In striving to conceptualize the mechanics of the Standards, the clarity of language and the concrete nature of the examples in the Standards have been lost. The Frameworks threshold concepts seem both hard to understand and hard to teach to.

This book offers a starting point for instructors of information literacy in understanding and teaching the six threshold concepts listed in the Framework document. The looks at learning, memory, and transfer of learning and provides some advice about how to design classroom exercises that will best help students master basic skills and concepts.

It is my hope that this book will help instructors create a local program of instruction for information literacy. Many of the exercises are designed for beginning students of information literacy. Others will be more useful for intermediate students. Some exercises can be used in the one-shot time frame whereas others are designed for longer class sessions and semester-long courses. Librarians have long been experts in adapting instruction ideas to fit their local need. I hope readers of this book will find some ideas they can work with to further the creation of information literate students.