Katie Blocksidge, library director, Ohio State University Newark, Amanda Folk, Drake Institute Affiliate and associate professor and head, Teaching & Learning, University Libraries, Jane Hammons, Drake Institute Affiliate and assistant professor, and teaching and learning engagement librarian, University Libraries, and Hanna Primeau, instructional designer, University Libraries will lead two workshops related to the Meaningful Inquiry endorsement will be presented by Ohio State faculty at the LILAC Conference in Cambridge, England in April.
TILTing Research Assignments: Supporting Instructors to Develop Transparent and Equitable Assignments Workshop
Research assignments are common across disciplines in higher education and often require students to demonstrate their information literacy development. However, instructors often take for granted that students have developed their information literacy to meet performance expectations or feel constrained to teach core academic skills like information literacy at the expense of disciplinary content. Because of this, the ways of thinking and knowing related to information literacy can form a hidden curriculum for some students, resulting in lower grades, frustration, and decreased motivation (e.g. Collier & Morgan, 2008). In this workshop, we will introduce an assignment design approach called Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) and model activities that a library and writing staff team uses to help instructors develop transparent and equitable assignments. The TILT approach requires instructors to think carefully about the purpose of any research assignment, identify the kinds of information-literacy-related tasks students will need to do to be successful, and intentionally articulate the criteria by which student work will be evaluated. Research has indicated that using TILT has positive results on students' academic confidence, sense of belonging, and awareness of skills mastery (Winkelmes et al., 2016).
Supporting Faculty to Decode Information Literacy
Many faculty expect that students will develop and demonstrate their information literacy through course-based assignments. However, they are often frustrated with the results because students (as novices) and faculty (as disciplinary experts) seemingly speak two different languages. In this session, we share a workshop that we, a team of academic librarians, have delivered for several cohorts of teaching faculty centered on using Decoding the Disciplines (Pace & Middendorf, 2004) and Writing to Learn (WAC Clearinghouse, n.d.) to help them identify ways in which they can intentionally and transparently develop their students' information literacy while also learning disciplinary ways of thinking. We believe this is a scalable and sustainable strategy for incorporating information literacy into programs and curricula, as working with a single faculty member could benefit multiple courses. This strategy provides librarians the hands-on opportunity to be intimately involved with integrating information literacy into students' academic experiences but does not require librarians to plan and deliver multiple workshops.