information literacy instruction for educators
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This article was downloaded by: [Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen]On: 16 December 2014, At: 05:11Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Behavioral & Social SciencesLibrarianPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wbss20
Information LiteracyInstruction for EducatorsScott Walter a & Dawn M. Shinew ba Washington State University , Pullman, WA, USAb K-8 Teacher Education Program in the College ofEducation , Washington State University , Pullman,WA, USAPublished online: 25 Sep 2008.
To cite this article: Scott Walter & Dawn M. Shinew (2003) Information LiteracyInstruction for Educators, Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 22:1, 1-5, DOI:10.1300/J103v22n01_01
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J103v22n01_01
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Information Literacy Instructionfor Educators:
A Global Perspective on Needsand Opportunities
Scott WalterDawn M. Shinew
At the start of the Fall 2002 semester, the co-editors of this volumestood before a new cohort of pre-service teachers attending the firstmeeting of their “Teaching Elementary Social Studies” course andasked three simple questions: does anyone remember what happened inNew York City on September 11, 2001?; what do you think became themost important, new part of every social studies curriculum in Americaon September 12th?; and, how do you think all those social studies (andother) teachers became more familiar with issues such as internationalterrorism, the history of the Middle East and U.S.-Arab relations, andthe religion of Islam? Suddenly recognizing the ongoing need that edu-cators have to be able to learn new things and to distinguish betweenfact, opinion, and rhetoric across a wide variety of topics, these pre-ser-
Scott Walter is Interim Assistant Director for Public Services and Outreach in theUniversity Libraries, Washington State University, Pullman, WA (E-mail: [email protected]).
Dawn M. Shinew is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the K-8 Teacher EducationProgram in the College of Education, Washington State University, Pullman, WA (E-mail:[email protected]).
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Information Literacy Instruction for Educators: A Global Perspectiveon Needs and Opportunities.” Walter, Scott, and Dawn M. Shinew. Co-published simultaneously in Behav-ioral & Social Sciences Librarian (The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.)Vol. 22, No. 1, 2003, pp. 1-5; and: Information Literacy Instruction for Educators: Professional Knowledgefor an Information Age (ed: Dawn M. Shinew, and Scott Walter) The Haworth Information Press, an imprintof The Haworth Press, Inc., 2003, pp. 1-5. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee fromThe Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address:[email protected]].
http://www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sku=J103 2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J103v22n01_01 1
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vice teachers were now ready to learn about how they could becomemore information literate.
The journey to this moment had begun almost a year earlier. In 1999,Washington State University (WSU) was awarded $9.67 million througha U.S. Department of Education Teacher Quality Enhancement grant.The project, Collaboration for Teacher Education Accountable to Childrenwith High-needs (CO-TEACH), provided support for the co-editors’ ef-forts in infusing information literacy throughout WSU’s elementaryteacher education program. The co-editors worked in collaboration withfive additional faculty members who teach methods courses to reviseexisting assignments and focus pre-service teachers’ attention to acquir-ing information literacy skills and applying these skills to instructionalplans. These efforts reflected a shared determination that information lit-eracy, if it is to be a meaningful part of teacher education, cannot be an“add on” to the established curriculum. Instead, information literacy mustbe fully integrated, and effectively modeled, throughout pre-service teach-ers’ coursework. In developing a model to achieve this within WSU’s pro-gram, the co-editors became increasingly interested in how other educationprograms were achieving similar objectives. This collection provides in-sights into journeys on which others have embarked in an effort to re-spond to the challenges we faced.1
Teacher educators and librarians have noted for decades the need formore effective information literacy instruction for our K-12 educatorsof tomorrow (O’Hanlon, 1988), but there have been few models of ef-fective and programmatic approaches to information literacy instruc-tion for educators (Carr, 1998). It has only been in recent years that arich body of examples has arisen to guide us toward integrated, authen-tic information literacy instruction in schools and colleges of education.The approach to addressing this issue taken by the co-editors is rootedin the idea of “instructional outreach,” i.e., a model in which academiclibrarians and classroom faculty collaborate to infuse information liter-acy instruction throughout an academic program by facilitating com-munication between their units and fostering faculty development in thearea of information literacy instruction and assessment (Johnson,McCord, & Walter, 2003), but the essays collected in this volume bringtogether a wide variety of approaches to providing information literacyinstruction to distinct groups of faculty and students in education pro-grams, including pre-service teachers and teacher educators, pre-ser-vice administrators, and doctoral students preparing to become the nextgeneration of educational leaders.
2 INFORMATION LITERACY INSTRUCTION FOR EDUCATORS
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Each essay documents the need for focused attention to what theco-editors have referred to as the three dimensions of information liter-acy instruction for educators:
1. developing information literacy skills related to one’s work as astudent and as a lifelong learner (i.e., the ability to locate, evaluate,manage, and present information on a variety of topics, as needed);
2. integrating information literacy instruction into the professionalskills expected of future teachers (i.e., the ability to integrate in-structional objectives associated with information literacy intocontent-area instruction in fields such as social studies or scienceso that each future teacher will be able to provide information lit-eracy instruction for his or her future students); and,
3. introducing the role of the school library as a site-based informa-tion resource, and the school librarian as a potential collaboratorin the development of information skills instruction for one’s fu-ture students (e.g., through integration of the school library intothe round of instructional arenas commonly encountered duringfield experiences).
While the authors whose work is collected in this volume have takendifferent approaches either to articulating the need for information liter-acy instruction in schools and colleges of education, or to developingmodels for integrating information literacy instruction into the pre-ser-vice teacher and administrator education curriculum, there are severaloverlapping themes that are reinforced in a number of these programs.
First, there is a recognition that existing teacher and administrator ed-ucation programs continue to neglect information literacy instruction asa programmatic element of the curriculum despite the attention paid tothis very issue in national reports such as the Association of College &Research Libraries’ Progress Report on Information Literacy (1998),and the final report of the American Association of School Librar-ians/Association of College & Research Libraries Task Force on theEducational Role of Libraries, Blueprint for Collaboration (2000). Thisissue has been addressed in earlier works, including that of Carr (1998),Wilson and Blake (1993), Wilson and McNeill (1998), and Asselin andLee (2002), but it is powerfully reinforced by Asselin and Doiron,whose study of Canadian teacher education faculty members’ percep-tion of the profession’s neglect of information literacy instruction is in-cluded in this collection.
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Also evident in this collection is the importance of information literacyinstruction across all of the programs offered to pre-service educators.Hinchliffe establishes the context for developing a concept of informationliteracy in light of technological developments. Johnson and O’Englishprovide an annotated bibliography for this collection that identifies severalstudies of information literacy instruction for pre-service teachers, but arti-cles by Roberson, Schweinle, and Applin on pre-service administrators,and by Grant and Berg on doctoral students, reflect a broader focus. The in-formation literacy instruction that one offers to a pre-service teacher willshare certain elements with that offered to a pre-service administrator, butthere are also distinctions that are derived from the different roles that thesefuture educators will play in our school system. Each article in this collec-tion provides practical ideas for identifying instructional needs among anidentifiable group of learners in a school or college of education; together,they provide an effective framework for working across the diversifiedcurriculum of pre-service education.
Finally, this collection demonstrates the universal nature of the needto provide more effective information literacy instruction for pre-ser-vice educators. The case studies of teacher education programs in theUnited States (Witt and Dickinson), Canada (Branch), and Australia(Lipu) represent a unique attempt to illustrate effective practices in in-formation literacy instruction for educators from around the world. Asimportantly, the contributors are almost evenly divided between infor-mation professionals and teacher and administrator educators. Informa-tion literacy instruction is, thus, no longer seen as a “library” issue, butas an issue of significance to anyone interested in preparing educators tobe reflective practitioners in an Information Age.
No collection of this size could hope to fully represent the range ofactivities currently being undertaken by our colleagues from around theworld, but it provides a global perspective on an increasingly significantissue, i.e., how to assure that pre-service educators are provided with anauthentic and effective introduction to information literacy skills thataddresses their future needs not only as students, but as teachers, admin-istrators, and lifelong learners? A future collection might address themany ways in which in-service educators are being introduced to theidea of information literacy and to the instructional methods best suitedto fostering information literacy among the rising generation (e.g.,Nichols, 1999). We hope that an introduction to the issues addressed inthis collection and to the exemplary programs described herein in briefwill provide you with a road-map for facilitating similar activities onyour own campuses, or in your own communities and schools.
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NOTE
1. For more information in the CO-TEACH project, please visit the project Website at <http://www.educ.wsu.edu/coe/coteach/newsite/index.html>.
REFERENCES
AASL/ACRL Task Force on the Educational Role of Libraries. 2000. Blueprint forcollaboration [online]. Chicago: Association of College & Research Libraries[cited 5 March 2003]. Available World Wide Web <http://www.ala.org/acrl/blueprint.html>.
Asselin, Marlene, and Elizabeth A. Lee. 2002. “I wish someone had taught me”: Infor-mation literacy in a teacher education program. Teacher Librarian 30: 10-17.
Association of College & Research Libraries. 1998. A progress report on informationliteracy: An update on the American Library Association Presidential Committeeon Information Literacy: Final report [online]. Chicago: The Author [cited 5 March2003]. Available World Wide Web <http://www.ala.org/acrl/nili/nili.html>.
Carr, Jo Ann. 1998. Information literacy and teacher education [online]. Washington,DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education. (ERIC DocumentReproduction Service No. ED 424231) [cited 5 March 2003]. Available WorldWide Web <http://www.ericfacility.net/ericdigests/ed424231.html>.
Johnson, Corey M., Sarah K. McCord, and Scott Walter. 2003. Instructional outreachacross the curriculum: Enhancing the liaison role at a research university. The Ref-erence Librarian 82: 19-37.
Nichols, Janet. 1999. Building bridges: High school and university partnerships for in-formation literacy. NASSP Bulletin 83 (no. 605): 75-81.
O’Hanlon, Nancy. 1988. Up the down staircase: Establishing library instruction pro-grams for teachers. RQ 27: 528-34.
Wilson, Patricia, and Martha Blake. 1993. The missing piece: A school library mediacenter component in principal preparation programs. Record in Educational Ad-ministration and Supervision 13 (2): 65-68.
Wilson, Patricia, and Angus McNeill. 1998. In the dark: What’s keeping principalsfrom understanding libraries? School Library Journal 44 (9): 114-116.
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