The Significance of Information Literacy
The second pivotal concept that shaped my development as a teacher librarian was the introduction to the concept of information literacy, firstly in ETL401, then developed in ETL501 – Information Environment and further expanded upon in INF506 – Social Networking for Information Professionals. The blog post "Information Literacy – a skill set, or something much more?" (MacDonald, 2012d) is still, 7 subjects later, an accurate representation of my views on Information Literacy being a process, rather than simply a set of skills to be learnt – a process where students learn:
“to engage in the information learning activities (Herring, 2011a), reflect upon the way they apply these skills (Herring, 2007), and recognise the process they used to apply these skills”
MacDonald, 2012d |
Why is it significant that I understand it as a process? It is significant because future employers of our students are no longer looking for employees with information skills – they are looking for employees with information skills and the ability to use these skills to effectively and proactively solve information-based problems (Wolf, Brush, & Sate, 2003, para.6) and self-evaluate themselves as information practitioners (Herring, 2011a, p. 36). It is up to myself, as the school’s information specialist, to actively teach students these vital foundations, and also guide their classroom teachers in information literacy instruction, to ensure they graduate as successful information literate students.
Conceptually I have learnt the importance of teaching information literacy, and practically I have been inspired by 3 models that will help me teach the information process to my students, and colleagues - Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process (ISP) (2012), Eisenberg and Berkovitz’s Big 6 model (1990), and Herring’s PLUS model (2004).
Consisting of six stages, Kuhlthau’s ISP is a model to explain the thoughts, feelings, and actions an information user experiences from the beginning initiation stage through to the final presentation stage (Kuhlthau, 2012) of an information search. I see this model is significant to myself as teacher librarian as both an active and passive teaching tool. I have the option to actively teach the model’s thoughts, feeling, and actions to students and have students use it as a scaffold for information searches; or passively, as a way for myself as teacher to recognise the common thoughts, feeling, and actions of students going through the information search process and coach them through the stages without directly teaching the model, as I came to realise in the blog post “Kuhlthau’s ISP – not just a model but a dead on play-by-play for a struggling uni student” (MacDonald, 2012c). I believe I will use this model in this passive way in my teaching with students and also inform other teachers through professional development opportunities so that they too can recognise what the students are experiencing and successfully guide them through the search process, especially when to recognise when students are “in the dip” (Kuhlthau, 2012, para. 4) – the stage where students’ confidence is at its lowest and students are most discouraged.
Using Kuhlthau’s ISP passively, I will use both the Big 6 model (Eisenberg & Berkovitz, 1990), and the PLUS model (Herring, 2004) as active scaffolds with my students during the information search process. I believe the Big 6 model to be more suited in my role as secondary school teacher librarian and the PLUS model for use with elementary-aged students due to the vocabulary used in the models. I chose the Big 6 for this reason in my ETL 501 pathfinder (MacDonald, 2012e) as it was created for use by secondary students.
No matter the model chosen to represent the process, the important knowledge I am taking away from this Masters course is the significance of teaching information literacy as a 21st century teacher librarian. Not only the models mentioned above, but also the numerous Web 2.0 tools explored throughout ETL401 and INF506 for harnessing the powerful information available to us and our students. From these studies, I have already begun to put my newly learnt knowledge into producing a learning commons resources page to update teachers and students on popular or new trends and resources that help create successful information literate citizens.