Designing an inclusive information literacy practice is a commitment to shift your instructional mindset.
As librarians and instructors, we are responsible for developing curriculum that will be inclusive and effective for each student. The demographic shifts in higher education and the universal use of the library well position librarians to experiment and model inclusive teaching practices.
But how does one go about customizing curriculum to become more inclusive?
The suggested readings have been provided for your consideration when designing library instructional sessions.
Is there an additional resource that you feel should be added to one of these suggest reading lists?
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Despite increasingly diverse classrooms, librarians may teach to the middle without considering the divergent experiences of the actual students in the class. Additionally, the centrality of whiteness in academia and librarianship may contribute to a lack of inclusivity in the library instruction classroom. Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) provides a framework for realizing inclusivity for culturally diverse students. This article presents theoretically grounded, practical applications of CRT for the library instruction classroom within three suggested areas for improvement: preparation, communication, and facilitation.
The Framework remains situated within an existing culture of Western, neoliberal, post-secondary education, and calls for an examination of that context, while spurring inquiry regarding all realms of knowledge creation and acquisition, and their corresponding embedded power structures. Librarians are well positioned to initiate a collaborative community of inquiry within their institutional contexts using the Framework to elicit a broader understanding of the information ecosystem through a lens of DEI and social justice.
"Let’s be intentional about creating cultural shifts in our work and our libraries to choose healing. Part of trauma-informed librarianship is unlearning ableism to shift our thinking. We need to move from thinking “What’s wrong with you?” when we encounter a “difficult” patron or even, a difficult coworker, to asking “What do you need?”"
"One of the challenges for us is to transition these pedagogical practices and theories to our particular areas in university and college libraries. That takes time, energy, labor, both emotional and physical, and, perhaps most importantly, community. However, we recognize that if we do not question how we have been taught and how we teach, we risk recreating the cycle of oppression that purposefully tried to keep us out because it did not allow for different types of knowledge, expertise, or ways of being. We understand, on a fundamental level, libraries as learning spaces and as reproducing White Supremacy, and so we see them as critically important sites of radical possibility that can disrupt that reproduction"
"A pedagogy of kindness asks us to apply compassion in every situation we can, and not to default to suspicion or anger. When suspicion or anger is our first response, a pedagogy of kindness asks us to step back and do the reflective work of asking why we’re reacting in that manner and what other instances of disappointment or mistrust are coming to bear on a particular moment in a particular student-teacher interaction. This can transform the student-teacher relationship — but it’s not only on an individual-to-individual level that it can alter our working world. To extend kindness means recognizing that our students possess innate humanity, which directly undermines the transactional educational model to which too many of our institutions lean, if not cleave."
"This article examines how information literacy is situated in a history of white supremacy in academia and academic libraries and provides an overview of some of the historical critiques of information literacy, to which the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education is ostensibly responding. Using Critical Race Theory, I provide a close reading of the Framework, highlighting the ways in which issues of race and racism are elided and white academia is centered. This article also examines critiques of information literacy and how critical information literacy has responded to the Framework. I then propose some ways to emphasize antiracist pedagogy in the information literacy classroom."
"implementing information privilege as an element of library discourse can be as simple as examining how you understand and approach information literacy, and identifying ways to explore underlying assumptions in dialogue with learners and/or colleagues in order to encourage this process of questioning more broadly."
In this book, the author shares her philosophy of the classroom, offering ideas about teaching that fundamentally rethink democratic participation. She writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. She advocates the process of teaching students to think critically and raises many concerns central to the field of critical pedagogy, linking them to feminist thought. In the process, these essays face squarely the problems of teachers who do not want to teach, of students who do not want to learn, of racism and sexism in the classroom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for the author, the teacher's most important goal.
Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.
Bringing together the voices of a range of practicing librarians, this collection illuminates theories and methods of critical pedagogy and library instruction. Chapters address critical approaches to standards and assessment practices, links between queer, anti-racist and feminist pedagogies and the library classroom, intersections of critical theories of power and knowledge and the library, and the promise and peril of reflective instruction practices. Rooted in theoretical work both from within the profession (James Elmborg, Cushla Kapitzke) and without (Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, Deborah Britzman), contributions are complemented by stories of critical approaches put into practice in institutional settings ranging from the community college classroom to large urban research universities to virtual worlds. The intention is to begin a conversation among librarians who teach, library instruction program coordinators, faculty and instructors interested in bringing librarians into the classroom, and librarians interested in developing liberatory and anti-oppressive professional practices.
Too many approaches to teaching with technology are instrumental at best, devoid of heart and soul at worst. The role of the teacher is made impersonal and mechanistic by a desire for learning to be efficient and standardized. Solutionist approaches like the learning management system, the rubric, quality assurance, all but remove the will of the teacher to be compassionate, curious, and to be a learner alongside their students.As the authors write in their introduction: "It is urgent that we have teachers. In a political climate increasingly defined by obstinacy, lack of criticality, and deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across lines of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and privilege; in a digital culture shaped by algorithms that neither know nor accurately portray truth, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play."This collection of essays explores the authors' work in, inquiry into, and critique of online learning, educational technology, and the trends, techniques, hopes, fears, and possibilities of digital pedagogy. The ideas of this volume span almost two decades of pedagogical thinking, practice, outreach, community development, and activism.
Through their affiliation with an institution of higher education, undergraduate students are able to access a range of research materials and, as a result, enter the scholarly conversation and build upon existing research. This ability to access information that others cannot is called information privilege. This article builds upon Char Booth’s work on information privilege to present library outreach as a way to raise awareness about the disparity in information access and to encourage students to consider how their own scholarship and sharing practices impact others. The article presents one approach for facilitating information privilege outreach with undergraduate students.
The cultural assets and lived experiences of communities of color are surfaced through asset-based informed autoethnographic counter-stories of students and teacher. These counter-stories often refute external narratives and provide an academic space for students to articulate their lived experiences. The curricula combine autoethnographic methods, hip-hop, and asset-based pedagogy that centers students' explicit racial, cultural context, lived experiences, and cultural wealth as foundational to student learning. Teacher and students express how they use their cultural assets to drive academic literacy and engagement.
Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros & Meris Mandernach Longmeier (2022) Developing Globally Inclusive Practices for Library Instruction Sessions, New Review of Academic Librarianship, DOI: 10.1080/13614533.2022.2095289
Cooke, N. A. (2020). Critical Library Instruction as a Pedagogical Tool. Communications in Information Literacy, 14 (1), 86-96. Retrieved from https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/comminfolit/vol14/iss1/7