Teaching Students, Not Standards: The New ACRL Information Literacy Framework and Threshold Crossings for Instructors
Colleen Burgess
Research and Instruction Services Librarian Western Libraries
Western University
caburges@uwo.ca
Abstract
The new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education is an opportunity for IL instructors to ask themselves whether their current approaches to instruction are meeting the higher goals of IL education. Instructors might re-examine their pedagogical approaches by considering their own knowledge practices and dispositions in teaching IL. How might we best create a space in which the desired student knowledge practices and dispositions flourish? How can we approach IL education as fellow students – ones who just happen to be at a different point on the same path of lifelong learning?
Keywords
ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education; information literacy; threshold concepts; pedagogy
Following years of growing sentiment among instructional librarians that the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (2000) contained outdated notions of both student learning and the information landscape in higher education, the ACRL Board of Directors in June of 2012 unanimously decided that the Standards should be revised, and authorized the creation of a Task Force charged with drafting a new information literacy framework (Boylston 1). Over several revision projects, webinars, and conference presentations, librarians were invited to weigh in on the shape that the new document would take and the Task Force responded to their suggestions and concerns. The result of those revision efforts is the newly published ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL 2015).