Digital Commons Network^™

This 2017 guest lecture for the UCLA Information Studies graduate course "Information Literacy Instruction" provided an overview of the types of information literacy instruction offered by the LMU Library. A 20-minute presentation to future librarians on May 1, 2017. The course "IS 448: Information Literacy Instruction: Theory & Technique" was taught by Professor Esther Grassian.

Social justice is a critical component of information literacy (IL). As librarians we have an obligation to critique the power structures that control information. Instruction librarians at four medium to large, private, Catholic institutions; collaborated to develop IL instruction grounded in social justice. The project involved applying a social justice construct to IL; creating lesson plans and instructional strategies; assessment; and sharing lessons in an open access database.

This activity was created to introduce first-year students to library resources they can use for their annotated bibliography assignment. In pairs, students are assigned a task card that requires them to find an information source. After finding a source meeting the criteria of their task card, the student teams input their answers into a Google Form. Formative assessment takes place during class, allowing the librarian to modify instruction on-the-spot based on the responses from the form.

Summative assessment takes place at the end of the semester, when a rubric is applied to a sample of student responses from the activity. …