Keywords
ACRL Framework; Learning
literacies; Graduate attributes; Embedding information literacy;
Multiliteracies
Introduction
Reports of
frustrations in working within the limitations of the “one shot” information
literacy training session are legion, both locally and abroad. Like many other academic libraries, UWC
Library has been attempting for some time to interest lecturers in partnering
to embed information literacy within academic curricula in order to position
students for ongoing lifelong learning.
In
recent times, we have been aided in this endeavour through an institutional
push towards development of generic graduate attributes. These are the overarching “qualities, skills
and understandings…that go beyond the disciplinary expertise or technical
knowledge” (Bowden et al, 2000). In summary form, the author’s institution
challenges itself to produce graduates that are inquiry focused, critically and
relevantly literate, autonomous and independent thinkers capable of working
collaboratively and communicating across difference, with ethical and social
consciousness (UWC , 2010). Information literacy provides the bedrock for
independent, critical thinking and is referenced directly or indirectly within
several clusters of graduate attributes (De Jager & Nassimbeni, 2005;
Barrie, 2012; Salisbury, 2012). Despite
this important relationship, librarians can find it difficult to engage
academics on the precise ways in which ongoing exposure to and assessment of
information literacy is crucial for attaining these core institutional values,
whether viewed as attributes or learning literacies.
This article
presents preliminary findings from a project funded through an institutional
Teaching and Learning research grant. The
end goal of the project is to develop a short course for lecturers to help them
to embed literacies within their curricula in order to cultivate the graduate attributes
desired by the University. Such an
outcome implies collaboration with faculty librarians and the library initiated
the project with a view towards cementing its role in improving student
learning. In all universities,
but particularly at a South African institution that predominantly serves first
generation students, librarians experience considerable demand from individual
students who are encountering new subjects with arcane terminology in tandem
with distinct knowledge practices. This
is the “daily struggle of translation between the organized conceptions of
knowledge and the efforts of all students to engage that knowledge” (Elmborg,
2006: 198). The term academic
literacies refers to the meaning making processes that are summonsed for the myriad
of cognitive learning tasks and proficiences that are necessary to produce
knowledge. These include all forms of
reading, writing and working with diverse kinds of texts in social settings to
accomplish a specific purpose (Lea and Street, 2006). It has been noted that subject matter teachers
“fail to make explicit the complex inquiry and literacy practices in which
disciplinary experts engage” (Goldman,
& Scardamalia, 2013: 261; Jacobs, 2005)
Literacy,
or literacies?
Academic, information, critical
and digital literacies tend to be separately conceptualised, researched and
developed with libraries of literature devoted to each. The emergence of such terms as transliteracy, metaliteracy, and
multiliteracies indicates a recognition of the convergence of literacies to
address the blurring boundaries of real and virtual, public and private, work
and leisure in the 21st century (Andretta, 2012; Mackey and Jacobson, 2011;
Kalantzis and Cope, 2012). Such terms suggest both an expanded
range of literacies needed for managing life in the 21st century and also that
there are linkages and relationships amongst these literacies. As Coiro et al assert, “(n)ew literacies are
multiple, multimodal and multifaceted. It becomes increasingly difficult to
think of literacy as a singular construct that applies across all contexts.”
(2008:p.14). A plurality of literacies is essential for meaning making
within the context of global citizenship and the
celebration of social and cultural difference and available technology (Galloway, n.d).
The JISC funded Learning
Literacies for a Digital Age project has been influential in providing the
concept of “learning literacies” taken as a cluster of inter-related
capabilities. The researchers took a
wide scope of literacies, including digital, information and media literacies
within their review over 30 different competency frameworks and also audited
literacies education provision in UK higher and further education institutions
(Beetham, 2009; Littlejohn, 2012; Littlejohn, 2014). The project explored the
question of how tertiary institutions are preparing their students with skills
and capabilities that are most needed for their future lives. A key finding
from their examination of existing UK practices and frameworks was poor
embedding of literacies into the curriculum and weak integration of information
and digital literacies with academic literacy. Littlejohn (2012) reports that even the “exemplary” SCONUL framework has
not been effectively integrated into curricular programmes. Reports
from South African surveys indicate that many of the library-initiated
information literacy programmes are generic or stand alone, and that meaningful
partnership is difficult to attain (De Jager and Nassimbeni, 2002 and 2005;
Jiyane and Onyancha, 2010).
Literacies for learning
Many South African undergraduate
students need explicit guidance and periods of ongoing engagement to develop
their capabilities to accomplish academic tasks (Boughey, 2005; Leibowitz,
2004). Especially through use of student-centred pedagogies such as inquiry
focused learning and resource based learning, lecturers expect their students
to gather, evaluate and synthesise information from diverse sources
independently, but might underplay the skills required to accomplish this
(McGuinness, 2006; Saunders, 2012). The
one-shot information literacy lecture-demonstration does not begin to breach
this gap.
A
perennial problem is that, despite the evolving literacies scholarship, the notion
of literacy as a technical skill residing in individuals is not easily shifted
and in some measure accounts for the lasting perception amongst lecturers that
literacy development belongs outside of the curriculum. Until literacies are understood as situated,
socio-cultural systems of meaning-making and a means of identity formation
within disciplinary contexts (Lea and Street, 2006; Ivanic, et al, 2009; Lloyd,2012), lecturers might discount literacies as the primary means to
achieve deep learning and transformative educational experiences for students.
The educational rationale
for embedding literacies within academic curricula is well established (Baik
& Greig, 2009; Jacobs, 2005; Bundy, 2004; Gunn et al, 2011; Wingate, 2006;
Salisbury et al, 2012). Information and
knowledge are produced, encoded, distributed and valued in different ways
according to disciplinary community practice. The behaviour, explicit guidance
and expectations of lecturers are the primary shapers for development of
student literacies. Accordingly,
lecturers are key actors and enablers (Grafstein, 2002; Gunn et al, 2011). Littlejohn (2014) makes the same claim for
digital literacies: “We can draw a key principle from this evidence that
emergent digital practices could be influenced by academic as subject experts …
How can academics model the identities, stances, strategies and capabilities
that learners require for effective knowledge practice?” (p132).
The primary channel for literacies education in South Africa
is expressed either through the mandate for ‘critical cross-field outcomes’ defined
as “generic
outcomes that inform all teaching and learning” (SAQA, 2000), or through the
discourse of graduate attributes which speak to the goals of higher
learning. At UWC, the majority of
lecturers acknowledge information literacy by listing it as a generic outcome
of their modules but have not yet collaboratively engaged with teaching
strategies to develop and assess graduate attributes across an academic
programme. Reports from local experience, coupled by accounts in the literature (UWC,
2016: 16-17; Salisbury 2012; Speight, 2013; Barrie, 2007), indicate that
lecturers find it difficult to create and implement coherent programmes for the
development of graduate attributes. The aim of the above-mentioned research project aims is to design material that will form part of a broader short course on teaching and learning
that is mandatory for all new lecturer during their two year probation period.
Within the present turbulence caused
by student protests and calls for the decolonization of higher education, it is
likely that departments will be reviewing academic programmes with a view
towards renewal of the curriculum and refinement of pedagogical approaches. Empowering
students for epistemological access also implies expanding literacies which enable meaning
making and capacity for learning. Cope and Kalantzis write of the potential of multiliteracies to
empower individuals who “can navigate
change, and make and lead change rather than be knocked about by it” (2010:100). This calls to mind Paolo Freire’s emancipatory
vision of literacies (1984).
The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education
At the same time, the digital age is
transforming the fundamental nature, dimensions and roles of information
practices (Lankshear, 2007; Kress, 2010). The Framework for Information
Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL, 2015), subsequently referred to as the
Framework, was formally adopted by the Association of College and Research Libraries in
2015 as a response to the dynamic changes in the information ecosphere. It represents a firm grasp of the inclusive, participatory
ethos that now informs communication and social discourse in academia. The threshold concepts lend themselves to
the notion of plural literacies and also towards transformational learning
experiences for lifelong learning.
The Framework has re-envisioned the
goals of information literacy and fundamentally seeks to help students to
understand the knowledge making process and to strengthen their own facility
with using and creating diverse information or knowledge products.
The six concepts that comprise the
Framework act as lenses
through which to understand the work that is being done by students when they
tackle study tasks. In this way the concepts help to
foreground some of the conceptual
understandings that tend to be implicit for lecturers who are academically expert. Each concept is represented
by a set of associated knowledge practices and dispositions that characterise
the exercise of each concept, as a student moves from novice to expert.
Many articles focussing on the impact of the
Framework on library practices have appeared in predominantly North American
LIS journals (Beilin, 2015; Foasberg, 2015; Dempsey, 2016; Swanson, 2017). The remainder of this article focuses
on the individual concepts from the Framework and illustrates their relevance
for literacies for higher learning. This
is accomplished by showcasing selected quotes from a series of interviews with
lecturers from different faculties. The
interviews formed an important data gathering component of the above-mentioned
research project. The analysis is also
supported with ideas from the LIS and educational research literature.
Method
With a view to designing the short
course it was important to investigate how innovative lecturers are already addressing
the teaching and assessment of graduate attributes that have been identified as
learning outcomes for [university name withheld]. These attributes speak to the
ideals of information literacy programmes, specifically in relation to lifelong
learning and the notion of graduates as critical, autonomous thinkers (Bundy,
2004). The intention was to discover how such learning literacies are
developed.
With guidance from the Director for Teaching and Learning at UWC, a set of interview
questions was prepared for a semi-structured free flowing discussion (see Appendix). The Director also invited selected individuals to be interviewed
by one or both of us for the literacies project. Twelve of these consented and ethical
clearance was secured.
The
twelve participants are drawn from six faculties and the Writing Centre and
were specifically identified as distinguished teachers. Their expertise was
indicated in one of four ways: the participants have won prestigious
Higher Education Learning & Teaching Association of South Africa (HELTASA) national
teaching and learning awards; teach in regional professionalisation of teaching
and learning courses; are known on campus for innovative teaching practices; or
for their work on developing students’ literacies and graduate attributes.
Only one invited lecturer did not agree to be interviewed.
The interview questions aimed to stimulate
discussion on their teaching approaches and experiences in order to distil some insights into how disciplinary
literacies were taught and assessed. In effect, over an hour long discussion
about literacies, the author was
looking for linkages with the UWC
graduate attributes. Table 1 below
indicates the academic departments in which the interviewees were based and
shows the broad linkage between the individual Graduate Attributes and the
interview questions .
Table 1: Mapping the interview questions to the Graduate Attributes (GA)
GA1:
Critically and relevantly literate; (Seek, discern, use and apply
information) | *What
changes in reading, writing, presenting information? * How
are students socialised into the discipline? |
GA2:
Autonomous, independent thinkers | *Can
students discern authoritative voices? *How
may students critique knowledge or take a position? |
GA3:
Inquiry focussed; Knowledge producers | *How
do you use inquiry focused learning? *Do
you think it’s important for students to be able to produce knowledge? |
GA4:
Skilled communicators; Engaging across difference | *How
do you use social media in your teaching and learning? *Do
you think learning should be collaborative? |
After the interviews were transcribed, Atlas.ti was used to help organise the coding process
for qualitative analysis. Topical codes
were deductively applied to the transcripts based on key concepts from the
literature related to graduate attributes, new literacy studies and authentic
learning. At the same time codes derived
from the Framework concepts were also inductively applied. In this way it became possible to determine whether
the concepts presented in the Framework might speak both to the UWC graduate
attributes and also to the specific challenges that the lecturers were
reporting. Table 2 below provides a
broad overview of the mapping. It is
important to stress that although the Framework concepts are expressed as
distinct, in practice they are overlapping, layered, and integrate with one
another.
Table 2: Mapping of Framework concepts to Graduate Attributes (GA)
| GA1: Critically and relevantly literate | Scholarship as a Conversation |
| GA2: Autonomous, independent thinkers | Authority is Contextual and Contested |
| GA3: Inquiry focussed; Knowledge producers | Research as Inquiry |
| GA4: Skilled communicators; Engaging across difference | Information Creation as a ProcessInformation has Value |
At the time
of the interviews at the end of 2013, none of the participants had previously
read or heard about the ACRL Framework. The author’s own engagement with
draft versions of the emerging Framework was at an early stage. None of the
questions anticipated or prompted connections with the ACRL threshold concepts.
The intersections between these accomplished lecturers’ strategies to develop
graduate attributes and the ACRL concepts only became apparent after
greater acquaintance with the Framework.
The
following section presents each of the six Framework concepts, illustrated with
quotes from the interview transcripts. The
quotes were selected to indicate the links with the concepts and knowledge
practices of the Framework, thereby highlighting the relevance of these for
developing learning literacies comprising information, academic, critical and
digital dimensions.
Scholarship as a Conversation
New
students may arrive at with fixed ideas about knowledge which has to be
unsettled. Dede (2008) speaks of a
“seismic shift in epistemology” while Elmborg states “(u)ndergraduates rarely understand that
knowledge is dialogic, that it is negotiated in the discussions, disputes and
disagreements of specialists” (2003:74). Student view knowledge as “something monologic - even monolithic,
a thing that can be learned whole”. This is reflected in the
lecturers’ comments.
Quotes: Scholarship as a Conversation
Once students understand that everything is open for debate – and that the relationship between facts is
open for discussion - it opens their mind to the possibility that we can have a
critical conversation about anything. (Physiotherapy) Conversations are imperative for learning.. You can't really know
without being in collaboration with someone, whether with texts or your peers.
I don't think that we model that - abut learning through conversations (Dentistry) [Hypothetically addressed to students]You're entitled to have a
viewpoint...you know quite a lot about it; develop a little bit of confidence
and try to express that and just use those authors to support you because
you've actually come up with something here (History) And now I think that the idea is more that we ask students: “Well, what
do you think about this?” And so it becomes more of a conversation than a
one-way flow of information (Business and Finance) |
Scholarship as a Conversation essentially
refers to the dialogic nature of knowledge: As time passes, ideas are formulated, weighed and debated against each
other. This critical consciousness is something that the Physiotherapy lecturer
is trying to awaken within his class. He
works from the stance that all ideas are eminently improvable.
The Dentistry lecturer is conscious of the importance of dialogue for learning.
The dialogue may be external with others or internal with authors while
reading. Such dialogues force one to
interrogate what one already knows and
have experienced.
The history lecturer is attempting to coax the students’ authentic
voices. It is important to prepare them to be conversants in the discipline by
decoding the discipline. Showing how an
expert does these things, by explicitly modelling them and giving students
practice and feedback.
The Business and Finance lecturer is also wanting her students to engage
in discussion. She poses a question on
the e-learning platform and permits two days for students to discuss the
question virtually and then prepares a lecture based on the students'
responses. In this way she is recruiting what they already know and helping the
class to become conversant with associated ideas before the lecture supplies
the theory. Other lecturers report using
social media to get their students to write to communicate ideas, not necessarily
in academic vein, so that they articulate their understanding.
Several of the threshold concepts
invite opportunities for deepening students’ cultural appreciation for the
purposes of attribution and referencing which is far more meaningful than the
plagiarism detection systems in force in many institutions.
“Citing the source of ideas is a deeply
embedded 'given’ within academic culture, and as such, may not be critically
deconstructed for students. Consequently, many students have only a surface
(quasi-legal interpretation) understanding of what plagiarism involves. Coming
to an awareness of information as a cultural product and positioning their
information engagement within this context allows students to develop a deeper
understanding of academic requirements” (Blackmore 2010: 7).
Librarians
and lecturers may use this concept to teach attribution of source so that the
underlying purpose of referencing sources is understood.
Authority is Contextual and Constructed
Are all voices
in the conversation equal? The second concept is more critically nuanced as it
deals with power. How do we bring students to become autonomous, independent
thinkers capable of discernment? Mezirow (1997:7) claims that “thinking as an autonomous and responsible agent is essential for full
citizenship in democracy and for moral decision making in situations of rapid change”, rather than acting uncritically on the received ideas and
judgements of others.
Quotes: Authority is Contextual and Constructed
I think you have to show them who the authorities are, you can't just
assume that they'll know who the chiefs of the tribe are” (Writing Centre) All texts arise out of social, political, economic circumstances – so
they’re all context bound, culturally bound and originated (Education) Because thinking is socially constructed, it can change, that we're not
stuck with ideas because, parsimoniously and in a principled way, theory is
reconstructed and developed through research (Linguistics) It's about learning to understand the other person's belief system
before you criticise it; and
I suppose learning to feel some discomfort with challenges to your own belief
system. (Natural Sciences) It’s important that you’re able to defend why you think some piece of
information is better than another and that you can explain that both to a
colleague and to a patient (Dentistry) The focus on themselves in context makes them think a little bit more
carefully about their own biases, assumptions and prejudices (Gender Studies) |
Each discipline is framed by powerful discourse with recognised
figureheads and systems of thought. The head of the
writing centre is an academic development specialist and she feels that
students need to know who the chiefs of that tribe are, the giants who
have gone before and shaped the contours of the discipline. If one doesn't know the terrain and who the
chiefs are, can one participate in the
discourse or create knowledge that is valued by a community?
However, it’s also true that our own knowledge is partial and
incomplete, based on asymmetrical power relations. Economic barriers have served to
restrict participation in the established canon and ongoing scholarly debates. This space is also
being claimed by the call for decolonising of higher education as the students demand
that knowledge domains are recognisable to them and speak to their experiences.
While the canonical voices might be deafening, Ian Scott suggests there
is space for teachers to adjust their practices, from curriculum design
to pedagogical arrangements in the classroom – in order to “affirm the
presence of a growing, changing and increasingly diverse student body. “ (2009:4)
The Linguistics lecturer emphasises that the
dominant voices or ways of thinking are not fixed. One of the the critical things one does at university is to
get students to understand that thinking is constructed and that because its socially constructed, it can change,
that we're not stuck with ideas - We can think our way through problems.
The lecturer in
the Natural sciences implies that one
must have knowledge before one can critique, while the Dentistry academic
maintains that one should also be in a position to defend one’s stance.
The Women and
Gender lecturer is at pains to help
students recognise their own assumptions and bias. As Swanson asks,
“How do we know what we know?” (2010).
The frame Authority is Constructed and Contextual seems already to be part and parcel of the
academics’ thinking.
Research as Inquiry
This concept feeds well into the current trend
towards undergraduate research and inquiry focused pedagogies. Lecturers and librarians have a role in
developing students’ familiarity with sources of evidence, methods and modes of
discourse so that they can “contribute to the conversation at an appropriate
level” (ACRL, 2015: 8). There are different
stages in development of students’ expertise in inquiry, beginning with
synthesis and recapitulation of available information.
Quotes: Research as Inquiry
The problem of a stuffed curriculum is that students don’t learn the
principles that shape the knowledge. They aren’t shown how to select, re-contextualise, move around the
stuff, and make something new of it – they don’t see the system of meaning. (Writing Centre) It's a first year course….I believe in starting to put the testable
questions, the idea of a hypothesis, putting the research method in, and the
fact that the information is there but you have the right to test its
authenticity (UG
research) (Biodiversity and Conservation Biology) It’s going and saying, well, now you have this theory, now you have this
case and scenario – how are you going to apply that theory to the case
scenario, and what is your opinion or reflection from that experience? (Physiotherapy) And that’s what I loved about this was trusting the students to do their
own discovery – and they ran with it, they loved it. ‘Thank you for putting
your trust in us to do self-learning’ (History) If one of my ideal graduate attributes is an ability to do independent
research, what do I need to be doing in first year, second year, third year so
they can do that? Is my curriculum helping
the students to produce knowledge? (Business) |
The Director of the Writing Centre
complains that too often the focus is on the content rather than on the principles
that shape the knowledge and how it is made, so that students “end up just
trying to learn all the stuff”. Others complained that colleagues
are sticking to traditional frameworks, setting very bounded tasks of
responding to prescribed readings, performing highly structured tasks done by
generations of students. The excuses given include that there is too much to
cover, the limitations of first years, and the difficulty for students to
generate their own questions.
The antidote is authentic education, when
learners are immersed in new experiences, connect knowledge with personal
experience, and are asked to apply their learning in real-world contexts (Herrington, 2000). The Biodiversity and Conservation
Biology lecturer accomplishes this with first years by asking them to look after a goldfish for the year. In this way
students negotiate their own understanding by applying theories to problems
they encounter in this experience.
The Physiotherapy lecturer is also trying to make theory purposeful and
transferable in new contexts. He is looking for analytical, logical reasoning
in difficult clinical cases. This
application of reasoning helps them to understand the nature of the
disciplinary problems and which knowledge is applicable.
Inquiry focused or discovery based learning implies trust; the History
lecturer also said “I want to reach the students; I
want them to enjoy themselves. I want to spark their interest and I want them
to get a sense of capacity. That’s all I want.“ She understands that when
students create something new they are producing knowledge and she considers
herself changed as a result of conversations with students.
The comment by the Business Studies lecturer is important as one of the
aims of the forthcoming short course is to embed literacies and GAs throughout
the academic programme.
Information Creation as a Process
This threshold concept offers
wide variation of learning opportunities for students at various stages of
academic development, in terms of their evaluation and creation of information
products. Students should understand that the
quality and usefulness of a particular piece of information is determined by
the processes that went into making it. Librarians are well-placed to make visible some of the elements in the
value chain of information that influence the reception and effectiveness of
such products (Swanson, 2017).
When students
are fully aware of options for producing and sharing information, they may make
more informed decisions regarding the suitability of the information they use
in different contexts. As producers of information they understand that the
creation process will determine the ways in which their work is used and
valued. The purpose of the communication
should match the desired audience. Kress (2010) calls this process “design”. We construct texts of various kinds on the
basis of decisions on the arrangement of available words, images, expressions
and grammars and shape these according to our need and social context.
Quotes: Information Creation as a Process
We use a process approach to writing, so tutors will respond to a minimum
of one draft, but often 2 or 3 (English for Educ. Dev.) I reconsider and say, “OK, well, now that you’ve done this and you
haven’t done very well, you can rewrite it” (Gender Studies) Whether they do it through WhatsApp, Google docs, or through a blog –
they are encouraging each other. And the
motivation component is very important in collaboration. (Business and Finance) I think we’ve got to be more open and more flexible with what resources
they do bring into their studies and try to find ways of doing that (Linguistics) I've started thinking about assignments now as conversations and as
public performances, rather than this thing that you do and you give to a
lecturer and he marks it and gives it back to you. (Physiotherapy) They create notes ahead of time to go into the Second Life so we can
deal with it there as avatars in a virtual discussion (Biodiversity) |
This concept is
related to the educational idea of writing as a process, in the sense of refining
a piece of writing by drafting and shaping it through a number of iterations. In
so doing one crafts texts to convey information appropriately for a particular
audience.
The Business
Studies lecturer expands that writing process into a collaborative process as
she finds this improves student motivation. Several of the interviewees are using platforms that facilitate
collaborative input and that enable interactive feedback and comments,
encouraging dynamic exchanges for increased levels of participation and
inclusion, vital for 21st century literacies.
In the context
of the use of appropriate register in specific contexts, the Linguistics
lecturer remarked that she thinks students
understand those principles and have a natural feel for it because they are
constantly switching and mixing languages.. Her classes are also shown how to adapt to
the demands and expectations of different contexts and audiences.
One of the
characteristics of authentic learning is the opportunity to perform or make
public the learning that has been achieved. The Physiotherapy lecturer encourages
knowledge sharing.
Finally, the seismic shift in ICTs enables powerful ways of presenting
information. The biodiversity lecturer
uses Second Life platforms to immerse his students virtually within remote
ecologies. The class meets in virtual
reality. At the end of the course they
are required to produce a digital story that integrates tables and graphs and
data models and share this on YouTube. He
insists that all re-purposed images and sounds are correctly acknowledged and
appropriately licensed to public sharing.
Information has Value
What understandings of value are
uppermost in students’ minds? The ethical dimensions of authorship that
are traditionally understood within society are experiencing pressures arising
from changing social practices. Students’ experience of file sharing and creatively remixing digital
material for new purposes will shape their ideas about ownership of content.
The fluid nature of digital texts means that they are inherently mutable, and
transferable and this unsettles notions of authorship (Kress, 2010:
21-22). Digital media is
reconstructing the relative positions of authors and readers, as a result of
options for collective authoring, annotation, tagging and remixing.
Students
should understand that they have responsibilities as both consumers and
creators of information based on the work of others. They respect the
obligation to cite and acknowledge words, ideas and products of others, valuing
the skills, time, and effort needed to produce knowledge.
Quotes: Information has Value
All
assignments that they do should be designed to be shared with other citizens.
So the idea of citizenship is brought in and you are contributing to a
knowledge commons and that’s fundamental to this. We do
the creative commons [licencing in] second and third year. And they have to put
the creative commons licence into the images and they have to give the full
trackback attribution, because this is really, really important. (Biodiversity
and Conservation Biology) If you have a problem and you solve that
problem you have an ethical obligation to share your solution with the rest of
the world. Other people have the same problem. You would have been able to
solve that problem if you had found someone’s solution. I think that is also
part of knowledge production. It’s that sense that you make a difference by
what you share [Dentistry] We encourage students to engage with NGOs and scientific activism
which requires research or participation in extramural activities, protest
marches or creating websites to promote critical engagement, such as
anti-fracking or anti-nuclear events. They are expected to develop ideas from
this and promote the NGO or a blog they have created. They maintain them and they retain their interest….they
remain involved. And their big push is to get this
knowledge to the community (Science) One
day people are going to be searching for your name when you apply for a job –
what do you want them to find?. And a lot of the students were coming up to me
and saying I really need to change how I behave online – because they’re
starting to think about these issues very much. (Physiotherapy) |
The norms of science require that
research results are disseminated. As mentioned above, the Biodiversity and
Conservation Biology course convenor acquaints 2nd and 3rd year students with
Creative Commons licences and emphasises that all images, ideas and music in
their digital stories are correctly licensed and attributed before being
uploaded to YouTube.
The
enormous disparities within the global economy are mirrored in highly unequal
access to scholarly information. The sharing of knowledge is highlighted by the
Dentistry lecturer. Librarians can sensitise students to the strong
possibility that their research strategy may be
affected by restricted access as a result of unaffordable database costs. They can
teach students how to find open access or freely licensed content and how to
re-use this material ethically.
Students need to know that own information behaviour carries value.
All online activity is subject to forms of tracking. The data trail generated
by individuals’ search queries and navigation is automatically captured.
Consequently, this influences the information that is delivered, shared and presented
to them. Because it is difficult to remain anonymous online, students should be
sensitive to the implications of their online communications and how this
affects their online profile.
Searching as Strategic Exploration
This final concept is quite
sophisticated since there is crossover with most of the other concepts.
Within the scope of their exploration, students have to remain critically
conscious of the authority lenses at work within different contexts. They
should come to understand the processes through which information is created,
produced and distributed. They will also be aware that scholarly conversations
take place in a number of unlikely places. Assessing the strengths and
shortcomings of genres, forms and modes of textual and multimodal information
may be tied to their reception in different contexts. Once these
dimensions are well understood, discernment may be an easier task.
Nevertheless, the norms within academia are slow to change, as pointed
out by the Physiotherapy lecturer below.
Quotes: Searching as Strategic Exploration
I've got some colleagues who will say you shouldn’t look at a blog. But
if that blog is written by a clinician who developed specific interventions,
like this particular technique carries this blogger’s name, I think we should
pay attention to their blog. When I talk to students, I let them know this.
“This person, she’s very influential in physiotherapy, her opinion is worth
considering. When you know that she’s written these books and she’s written all
of these papers– and we see that she has a blog. Just because it’s a
blog... the medium doesn’t determine the authority”. (Physiotherapy) They’ve got to show the reasoning
process…So if they type in a search query I want to know why did you choose
that search query? Why did you choose those words rather than these other
words? (Business) Well, we teach them how to use the
internet, so we have workshops where we say this is how you develop a research question, this is how you use Boolean operators in a search query, this is how you look at search results to look at, so something with an .edu extension is possibly going to be a better source than something with a .com. (Physiotherapy) |
There were
noticeably fewer quotes coded with this Framework concept which is
traditionally taught by librarians. This Lecturers do not readily associate with this aspect, a feature also noted in a recent article (Swanson, 2017). As scholars, lecturers have derived their own
methods of sourcing relevant material, for example, through serendipity, networking
and active collaboration in the field. It is also likely that their
evaluative “nose” has been developed through years of scrutinising footnotes
and references. Such methods are refined over years. As novices, students benefit from a series of
learning opportunities with subject librarians to develop their familiarity
with the chief sources of information in the field, search tools and methods. Students may also be exposed to citation management tools while searching so
that they are able to organised and manage the sources that want to keep track
of.
Conclusion
The focus of this
paper has been on the ways in which the Framework might assist in surfacing and
consolidating the capabilities implied by converging literacies or graduate
attributes. This is salient for librarians
charged with working toward embedding information literacy within academic
curricula. Developing librarian-lecturer
partnerships implies a common understanding of the challenges and shared points
of reference. In the context of
partnerships between social workers with teachers, Edwards terms this
“relational agency that is mediated by common knowledge built in interactions
at the points where the boundaries of practices intersect” (2001:33). The
Framework can work to establish some of this meeting ground. The concepts and knowledge practices serve as a form of shorthand to
reference what can be quite abstract territory in higher learning. That landscape encompasses the long-term
educational goals for graduates, and the development of literacies that remain
a latent power for interpreting, producing and communicating meaning in all
manner of environments.
It is difficult for teachers, experienced and
expert within the discipline, who “long since travelled similar ground in their
own disciplinary excursions, to gaze backwards across thresholds and understand
the conceptual difficulty or obstacles that a student is currently
experiencing” (Land, et al, 2006: 199). Without reifying the ACRL
threshold concepts as distinct outcomes, this study illustrates their potential
value to help lecturers and librarians to pinpoint the modes of thinking and
being that are helpful for engaging in disciplinary knowledge practices.
On the other hand, limited
exposure to concepts in educational theory and literacies scholarship might
handicap librarians in their attempts to engage productively with faculty
concerning information literacy (De Jager and Nassimbeni, 2005; Simmons, 2005;
Elmborg, 2006). The language and
concepts presented in the ACRL Framework can serve as pivots or common meeting
points around which the specific knowledge practices or dispositions desired by
a lecturer and librarian might be more precisely evoked and discussed.
The basis for this assertion is the resonance between the ACRL
concepts and the pedagogical concerns of lecturers described above. The
excerpts from interview transcripts point to areas of intersection and
collaboration.
Encouraged
by these findings which were reinforced through a series of workshops with
individual academic departments, a group within the author’s library has
developed an online tutorial, Exploring 21
st Century Literacies
(available at
http://literacies4learning.uwc.ac.za). This tutorial is to be used within a
short course, Professionalising Teaching and Learning, which is mandatory for
all new academic staff. It is anticipated
that the librarians’ role is one of partnering consultant
that assists in designing learning opportunities and assessments that incrementally
advance the
development of the knowledge practices
within a discipline. In this way, we may
be led to more active partnerships for embedding of information literacy
concepts within academic programmes.
Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Prof Vivienne Bozalek, Director of Teaching and Learning at UWC, for collaboration on shaping the interview questions, establishing contact with the interviewees and support in conducing the interviews, and for ongoing encouragement.
Appendix 1: Interview Questions
- What
does the term “Twenty-first century literacies” mean to you?
- How
do you respond to current practices such as the use of social media in
teaching and learning?
- What
sort of changes do you think there have been in reading, writing and
presenting information in higher education during the past five years?
- In
what ways do you socialize students into disciplinary ways of thinking,
reading and writing?
- What
types of scaffolding do you use to develop students’ literacies?
- What
sort of literacy tasks do lecturers struggle with?
- What
is your understanding of inquiry-focused learning?
- Have
you used inquiry-focused learning in your teaching practice, and if so,
how?
- Can
you relate some examples from your own practice where the learning
environment has brought about transformation in students thinking and
being? What do you ascribe this transformation to?
- In thinking
about the graduate attributes, students should be critically and
relevantly literate. How would you
go about moving students from a position of having knowledge of a field,
to critiquing this knowledge, to taking a position in the field?
- How
would you bring students to a position of being able to critically discern
authoritative views in the field that they are studying?
- Do
you think it is important for students to be able to produce knowledge? If
so, how do you incorporate this into your curriculum design?
- Do
you think that learning should be collaborative? If so, what opportunities
do you provide for students to co-construct knowledge collaboratively?
- Which
schools of thought inform your ideas and practices?
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