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Companion Document to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Instruction for Educators

Use of this Companion Document

This Companion Document is designed to be implemented in the collaborative spaces created by librarians, education faculty, teacher education students, and practicing PK-12 teachers. The document can provide guideposts for librarians and inform their information literacy practices. It may serve to inspire library instruction in school of education classrooms as well as reference services for teacher education students. 

Audience

Librarians who work with teacher education faculty and students are the primary audience for this guide. A secondary audience are the school of education faculty members who collaborate with librarians and integrate information literacy into their courses. 

Teacher education students impacted by this guide may be preservice or inservice teachers and may be undergraduate or graduate students. These teacher education students are learning to be teachers in early childhood, elementary, middle school, and high school settings.

Aim

One charge of the Education and Behavioral Sciences Section's Instruction for Education Committee (IFE Committee) is to develop approaches and solutions to the information literacy and instruction challenges faced by librarians who serve schools, colleges, and departments of education. In pursuit of that mission, the IFE Committee produced this document to model on a national level what academic librarians are striving to do at a local level: to provide effective instructional approaches for educators and teacher education faculty in an academic context that supports the overarching information literacy concepts shared across the profession. This interpretation of the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL Framework) is designed to help facilitate that goal for librarians who collaborate and work with teacher education faculty and students. Each academic discipline needs to interpret how the ACRL Framework works best in their context. This document does that for the field of teacher education.

Scope

The Companion Document addresses three roles that information literacy plays in teacher education:

  • supporting teacher education students' classroom work in their teacher education program;
  • preparing teachers for research skills needed in their career; and
  • preparing teachers to support the information needs and practices of their students.

Learning outcomes and teaching activities are also part of this Companion Document. Three sample objectives are provided for each frame. These examples do not represent all possible or recommended objectives for the frame, but provide a sample of the types of objectives that may be relevant for teacher education students. This section includes information on how the objective is related to the frame, to the field of teacher education, and to teacher education standards (InTASC and ISTE). For each objective, one sample activity/lesson is provided. 

Assessment helps librarians understand the extent to which teacher education students are able to meet information literacy learning outcomes. While some formative assessments have been included within the sample activity/lessons, assessment strategies and designs will differ according to instructional context. Therefore, we have provided links to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy Sandbox and the Community of Online Research Assignments as a means to find additional activities, objectives, and assessments.

Knowledge practices and dispositions are included to support social justice, technology, and reflection. Social justice is a part of the ALA Code of Ethics, Principle 9 and also an Equity Diversity and Inclusion/ACRL Plan of Excellence. In this Companion Document to the ACRL Framework, social justice knowledge practices and dispositions are articulated in the numerous ways that they play out in information literacy practices for teachers.

Resources include articles about the ACRL Framework, information literacy, and those that offer connections to knowledge practices and dispositions in specific frames, as they relate to teacher education.