Collaboration Across Sectors
Critical thinking about not only the evaluation of information, but one's responsibility as a citizen to be ethical in the creation and dissemination of information, is now clearly an essential component of lifelong learning. As such, strategies for encouraging the creation, evaluation, and sharing of credible sources (in all media formats) must now be shared not only through the instructional programs of school libraries and public libraries, but also academic libraries and special libraries (and, I would argue, archives and museums). The librarian's role in this is not only in creating programs that promote critical thinking about sources, ethical creation and use of information, and an understanding of the role of accurate information in engaged citizenship, but in building substantive and sustainable partnerships with others in educational, community-based, and civic organizations that will weave this instruction and the application of the lessons embedded in that instruction into broader work. This sort of community engagement is increasingly recognized as part of the core mission for academic institutions (including where I work) and the challenges of the present moment provide an opportunity to place them at the center of the academic library mission and to see this instructional mission as a thread that binds all members of the cultural heritage community together in teaching, learning, engagement, and community impact.
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Comments (3)
I love rolling media literacy into the idea of lifelong learning!
I am all in on everything you've written here. As a school librarian, I believe that partnerships are essential. Information and media literacy need to be woven into the entire curriculum. Currently, I teach a digital literacy course to 8th graders, but my colleagues and I are working to create better ways to integrate the concepts we teach throughout the curriculum and into every grade. The final result may be dropping the course we currently teach and instead working with other departments (ultimately, ALL departments) to make curricular changes. Then, the librarians would be available to co-teach and/or "push in" to other content classes, as well as do some staff development to help our teachers become better consumers and creators (and critical thinkers!) themselves. I'm really excited to pursue ways that librarians can work outside of our silos to reach more people.
I was having the same discussion with my librarians this week in regard to how we scale up information literacy instruction across our General Education program; has to be a combination of direct instruction by librarians and collaboration with faculty development programs that allow the classroom faculty to employ well-design information literacy instruction and assessment within their own programs.