For most of the history of education, the idea of developing literate and educated individuals revolved around developing competencies in the various content areas of the curriculum such as math and language arts. The recognition that some skills spread across all of the content areas–as in the exigency to recognize the need for information, to search for and access information, to use information, and to evaluate information–led to the development of the new literacy known as information literacy.
Information literacy (encompassing within its wide expanse critical thinking and technological competencies) as a movement began burgeoning in the 1980s when the idea that some skills were valid across all subjects in a curriculum. At this point, the process approach to research began to be proffered by sundry educators and inquiry and information skills across the curriculum became vogue as a topic. While it was (and is) easy to discuss information literacy as a topic, what was (and is) more unclear is how to implement information literacy effectively across the curriculum.
To this end, many organizations and educators have jumped on board with definitions, models, and standards. While definitions of information literacy proliferate, these definitions all retain affinity with the definition proffered by the American Library Association (ALA) Presidential Committee on Information Literacy. Final Report. (1989). The ALA Final Report defined information literacy in the following way:
To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the needed information.
This definition contains the essential elements upon which models and standards have been built: recognition of an information need, ability to search for and locate information, and ability to evaluate and use that information effectively. Since all disciplines and all knowledge are built on information, it then makes sense, particularly in today’s information replete world, to garner the power of information literacy to improve students’ performance, create lifelong learners, and produce active citizens. Information literacy viewed this way has been and will continue to be an integral aspect of the changing educational emphases.
Changing Educational Emphases:
From Library Skills to Information Literacy: New Approaches |
|
Past Emphases |
Current Emphases |
| Teacher-identified research topics or projects | Evaluating and using/applying information |
| Activities/information/resources available in English | Activities/information/resources available in many languages |
| Printed material | All sources of information (e.g., people technology, artifacts, print) |
| Secondary sources | Primary sources |
| Established authority of reference sources | Questioning and identifying point of view |
| Single perspective | Multiple perspectives |
| Product, usually a paper | Thinking and problem-solving of the search process and the application of information |
| Presenting results in written or oral language always in English | Presenting results in a variety of formats and in many languages |
| California School Library Association. From Library Skills to Information Literacy: a Handbook for the 21st Century 2nd ed. Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Research and Publishing, 1997.p. 15. | |
Shifts in Learning:
Learning in the Past |
Learning Today |
| Students bored | Students motivated |
| Teacher-controlled classrooms | Collaborative environment |
| Teachers provide information | Teacher is facilitator |
| Culturally exclusive | Multicultural |
| Rigid structure | Creativity encouraged |
| Memorization | Hands-on |
| Departmentalized | Interdisciplinary |
| Low student participation | Diversity valued |
| Milam, Peggy. InfoQuest A New Twist on Information Literacy. Worthington, OH: Linworth Publishing, 2002. p.18. | |
The shifting educational emphases are inevitably producing a concurrent shift across the whole school environment. Still, why must school library media centers change? Is it not enough to remain a passive collection of books? Perhaps in the past, that was enough, but in the current environment the rise of educational standards at all levels, the explosion of information brought about by technological revolution, the past and potential future funding cuts, and the rising constructivist student-centered learning movement create an exigency for restructuring the role and emphases of school library media centers.
As part of the changing school environment, the school library media center emphases must change to remain relevant. Indeed, in an environment requiring navigation through an increasingly complex information society, school library media centers have the opportunity to not only remain relevant but also to become school leaders and central locales of student learning.
Thus, the current focal emphasis of the school library media center is to be the dynamic center of a school developing a lifelong community of learners. Instead of teaching the unintegrated library lesson (i.e., library skills instruction), the focus has shifted to integrating information literacy skills directly when students will need them and therefore will be motivated to learn and to use them (i.e., information literacy instruction).
Inquiry-based, problem-based, and project-based units are being developed that require utilization of information literacy skills. Information literacy skills are beginning to be taught from the earliest levels of education to provide the scaffolding for success when students later encounter the entire research process. Instead of teaching facts and parts, teacher-librarians and classroom teachers are collaborating to teach concepts and wholes. It’s a whole new wonderful world out there and school library media centers must position themselves as relevant and central institutions of that world!
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