SLILC (Student Learning and Information Literacy Committee)

This article describes how pairing texts with podcasts helped students in my first-year seminar to enter into scholarly conversations. The experience was noteworthy because, prior to bringing podcasts into the class, my fall 2022 cohort of first-year students went silent during discussions of the assigned readings. Where my usual instructional techniques, such as small group analysis of the text, failed, podcasts succeeded in leading students into lively discussions that contextualized, expanded, and challenged ideas that they had encountered in the academic literature. While this report may be limited to my experience using podcasts in a credit-bearing course to develop understandings of Scholarship as Conversation, I believe that the strategy can be adapted for different scenarios and to advance other information-literacy concepts laid out in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

The ACRL Education and Behavioral Sciences Section (EBSS) Instruction for Educators Committee (IFE Committee) is charged “to make distinctive contributions as education library specialists to the field of bibliographic instruction.” Beginning in fall 2020, members of the IFE Committee worked to create an ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (Framework) companion document for the field of teacher education. The Companion Document to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Instruction for Educators (Companion Document), approved by the ACRL Board of Directors in June 2023, is designed to provide support for teacher preparation programs to develop educator research skills and pedagogical praxis in the realm of information literacy. The EBSS IFE Committee examined key literature and professional standards and created a draft document within ACRL’s LibGuides, which was revised after receiving many rounds of feedback from librarians and educators in the field. This article shares the process involved in creating the Companion Document, a theoretical overview within a disciplinary context, practical ways to teach the content, and an exploration of next steps for the implementation of the Companion Document.

Faculty expect students to integrate appropriate sources for their assignments with a research component and rely on collaborations with library subject specialists to support student needs. Teaching students to build their information literacy skills by using the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education contributes to increasing their proficiency for college-level research. Aspects important to this endeavor are learning about academic literature, choosing topics and learning background information, and finding and evaluating sources. Students learn how to construct their own academic authority, how to insert themselves into the ongoing scholarly conversation, and that searching can be nonlinear and iterative. Collaboration with course faculty encourages students who tend to shy away from the library. Avoiding the library is not uncommon for students, who then struggle alone with elements of their assignment that require research help. Hence the classroom visibility of subject specialist work builds student awareness of the library and prompts them to be proactive when doing library research.

Librarians with instructional duties, particularly information literacy instructors or subject specialists, often rely on the “one-shot” format of instruction as a primary method for information literacy skills training and development. While not the only method of instruction, one-shots remain a foundational tool in information literacy instruction, although instructors are exploring other instructional formats. As a result, one-shots are regularly critiqued by librarians, who cite difficulties with the transactional nature and questionable effectiveness of the format. Many librarians cite concerns with the one-shot format based on time constraints, institutional culture, and discipline faculty discomfort with library instruction that is not directly and perceptibly tied to their own assignment requirements. More recently, conversations have highlighted the problematic nature of one-shots by uncovering the link between library instruction and faux neutrality, feminized labor, and campus power dynamics.

In many of my regular one-shot instruction sessions, I often ask students why we cite in our work. The responses are typically the same: to avoid an Honor Code violation, because plagiarism is wrong, to give credit. Sometimes I’ll hear “to find other articles.” All these responses are correct and valid reasons to cite. But I often feel like the idea of “credit” feels vague to students and that the consequences of not giving credit affect the person who should be citing, rather than the person not being cited.

So often students, especially undergraduates, are taught citations with the message: if you do not cite, you will be penalized. Students are threatened with punitive measures from their professors or the honor council should they mis-cite or plagiarize. I often have students schedule reference consultations with me seeking help to fix their citations to make up points lost—and for some, those technical errors were the only major concerns with the paper. We have been teaching from a place of compliance and fear—fear of plagiarizing, fear of losing points on technicalities. It’s no wonder they don’t engage when we teach how to correctly craft an article citation in their discipline’s style.

The research process and the writing process are intertwined, but academic libraries and writing centers can too often be siloed campus resources working alongside but apart from one another. The Towson University (TU) Library was beginning a renovation to build a one-stop academic support center on our main floor that would include a dedicated TU Writing Center satellite location. The Writing Center employs a peer tutoring model that supports both undergraduate and graduate students. This opened the doors for some more intentional collaboration between our two units. After some cross-departmental visits, we identified a need for research-related training sessions for peer writing tutors in the upcoming fall semester. During hybrid asynchronous and live sessions, we introduced the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and invited writing tutors to consider how each frame relates to the writing process. By sharing the Framework directly with tutors through self-paced activities and group discussion, we uncovered that there were more similarities in our work than we assumed.

Figure 1 was what was generated when we asked ChatGPT, the generative AI system that has been the subject of a thousand hot takes about how it’s disrupting academia-as-we-know-it, to describe itself for an academic librarian audience. Perhaps it’s learning a bit too much from the public relations documents that were a part of the vast amounts of data it was trained on, when it describes itself as “highly relevant,” “invaluable,” and “accurate.” It did not, however, bring up the caveat that greets you when you open up ChatGPT itself: that it “may occasionally generate incorrect information,” that it “may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content,” or that it has “limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021.” In addition, it doesn’t bring up the reddest of academic red flags—that ChatGPT provides an easy way for students to cheat and plagiarize. The Atlantic has claimed that because of ChatGPT and other AI, “the undergraduate essay [which] has been at the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations . . . is about to be disrupted from the ground up.” A writer at Times Higher Education has suggested that allowing AI to replace a student’s creative voice means “abandoning our responsibilities as educators.”

The SIFT method of source evaluation, proposed in 2017 by educational technologist Mike Caulfield, was designed as a “practical approach to quick source and claim investigation.” At this time, academic librarians (including us) had already been questioning the effectiveness of popular source evaluation methods, especially checklist-based ones. Checklists seem too cursory and lack the flexibility and nuance needed to fully address the complex nature of internet sources. The number of librarian-proposed updates to checklist methods of source evaluation has accelerated in recent years, while SIFT has also emerged as a popular evaluation method with librarians.

Because of SIFT’s popularity, and because we ourselves are using SIFT, we wanted to look closely at SIFT through the lens of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy. We believe there is value in using concepts from the entire Framework to best teach source evaluation. It is important to identify overlap and gaps between the SIFT method and the ACRL Framework. Where does SIFT align with the evaluation expectations expressed within the Framework? What may academic librarians need to pair with SIFT lessons to better teach source evaluation? To answer our questions, we mapped the six frames of the ACRL Framework to the four moves and one habit of SIFT. Here, we introduce each move of SIFT, then connect it with relevant parts of the Framework. We also note where the Framework addresses source evaluation differently or in a more extended way than SIFT does, and what that might mean for librarians using SIFT in their classrooms.