Adventures in Teaching with the ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework: Preface

Oh, the lengths to which one goes…

 

Once upon a time in my life as a philosophy-prof-on-the-way-to-librarianship, I decided that I was going to commit to using the ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework in my philosophy class designs. I created what I found to be a useful and engaging model for an intermediate or advanced philosophy class designed specifically to integrate the Framework into the course as a whole, one that I felt could easily be scaled down in principle for much shorter one-shot library instruction sessions or individual course units.

Unfortunately, every time I’ve tried to explain what I’ve done with the Framework, the folks to whom I’ve been speaking have had a hard time seeing what I’ve been up to and how my particular approach could be scaled for different instructional applications. This sad state of affairs seems to call for a much better explanation on my part!

So: In the next four posts, I’m going to do the following:

1. Briefly describe the method I’ve used to understand and apply the guidance contained in the ACRL’s Toolkit for applying the Framework. This will be a sketch of my particular approach to what the Toolkit (drawing on the work of  McTighe & Wiggins) refers to as “backward design”).
2. Present an example of a whole course designed in this way — my recent PHIL 230 (Studies in Philosophy) model, which I’ve used to teach Information and Computer Ethics, the Philosophy of Music, and Philosophy and Comedy
3. Present a lesson plan for a one-shot library session or single information literacy unit for an intermediate philosophy class in which students are expected to do research work
4. Offer an afterword in which I attempt to answer a few questions about how this all works (and sometimes doesn’t), with a hint or two about adapting it to different disciplines or courses and assessing outcomes.
   

Before I move on to methods and examples, a bit of context:

• I’ve spent most of my teaching career as a philosopher at a regional private university, serving small classes of undergraduate students in a combined philosophy and religion program. The bulk of the work done by the program was service courses aimed at general education students, even at the upper levels — our 200 and 300-level gen-eds had no prerequisites, although smart advising pretty reliably steered first-year students away from them most of the time. In any given class I taught, there were always more non-majors than majors present.
• I prefer active learning to pure lecture (although I do lecture when it seems to be helpful to do so). This is reflected in my course designs.
• In most of my classes I expect students to do a fair amount of writing, but it isn’t always in the shape of the tried-and-true long-form research paper requiring x number of sources (a model I have come to dislike).
• My approach to whole-class incorporation of the Framework may be a bit more of an adventure than other folks are willing to try; it deliberately hands a certain amount of control over course content to students, which is pretty risky. As one of my Information and Computer Ethics students said in the evaluations for that course, it is really easy to tell who did the reading and who didn’t in this model, and if a critical mass of participants aren’t reading, things have the potential to get a bit dodgy in ways that put a lot of extra labor on the instructor’s plate to remedy the investment shortfall on the part of the students. It also has the effect of shrinking or narrowing the scope of content in ways that are not always predictable, which may make it less than ideal for a course in which quite a lot of specific material must be covered.

 

Next week: Designing backward, in heels

 

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Photo of a frighteningly brave attempt to get a good shot of the Grand Canyon (c. 1908) courtesy of the Library of Congress Flickr Stream.