and or not near

"While recruiting initiatives and fellowships are reasonable starting points, they become meaningless gestures for institutions which screen on performing whiteness. These actions are further undermined by framing diversity as a problem to be solved rather than engaging in reflective work to dismantle institutional bias. Framing diversity as the problem implicitly suggests a final outcome, locating responsibility and discomfort away from white librarians while marginalizing colleagues who do not perform whiteness to the satisfaction of gatekeepers."

A few weeks before the ACRL conference in Portland, I learned about a “critlib” sphere on social media. I immediately became engaged by the conversations of critical theory, pedagogy, and information literacy instruction. I started thinking about how information literacy entailed more than just standards and even skills. Information literacy entails critical thinking—which is more of a way of thinking than a skill, just as how information literate behavior is more of a state of mind than a skill. As educators we cannot simply aim to teach a skill; we should be striving to engage our students into understanding the why it is vital to practice the skills of information literacy. Our students will understand if we can personalize the content of our instruction to their identities and contexts, if we can engage them to learn, if we can motivate them to think critically, if we can teach them to empower themselves with their education. “I have never let schooling interfere with my education,” said Mark Twain. To teach critical information literacy is to teach our students to think against the structures that oppress them. As librarians, we are the ones that can integrate information, metacognitive, digital – whatever you want to call them – literacies into critical literacy education. The act of teaching is a political act; the act of learning is a political act. Our students – especially those from historically underrepresented backgrounds – need this type of educational empowerment. As an instructional librarian, I strive to kindle this type of student empowerment. Critical pedagogy is vital to my education in order for me to deliver quality and personalized IL instruction to all my students.

Not about the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, but this video helped me think more broadly about “threshold concepts” in education.

The Texas Information Literacy Tutorial (TILT) developed by the University of Texas at Austin from 1996-1999. Probably the first digital learning object for information literacy instruction.

Found this in the New Media Consortium Horizon 2015 Report

Sometimes I show this journal article to students during info lit workshops to talk about how it’s important to evaluate sources found on the web (instead of starting from the library website) even if they seemed to be academic sources.

Dane Ward

Much of the rhetoric of information literacy, including that of the Framework, represents the world of information (the Framework refers to it as the “information ecosystem”) as something that must be mastered by individual students making their own ways through an educational institution out into the world. Information literacy instruction is intended, positively and even progressively, to empower those individuals to succeed on their own terms to the greatest extent possible. It does this by inculcating habits of thinking and working that are most often described under the heading ‘critical thinking.’ But the problem with even some progressive information literacy rhetoric is that it does not question the fundamental units with which it is working: the individual information consumer/producer on the one hand, and the system of information on the other hand."

What a great guide on Open Educational Resources!

My most favorite epigraph, so far, is a sentence by MLK which goes “if a man is to be called a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Beethoven composed music . . .” or something along those lines. Serendipity is as noble as Martin Luther King, Jr.  And, now, I stuff and unpack like the Bard.

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