Collaborating with Faculty: Give Them What They Want or Give Them What They Need?

Michele Santamaría, Delaware County Community Despite greater academic commitment to information literacy, professors frequently request content in an information literacy session without fully understanding the types of skills librarians are trying to teach. Should librarians use the customer service model and teach what professors want or should they teach the information literacy skills which they know students need? This paper will not argue for a simple solution to this question, but instead explore the underlying variables and assumptions influencing this dilemma. As such, this paper will address how both parties are operating under different pedagogical models, with librarians frequently prioritizing research as a process while professors predominantly focus on research as content or tool-driven. Along with this discrepancy in teaching models, the effectiveness of communication between the two parties can play a major role in the effectiveness of information literacy instruction. Furthermore, because community college librarians tend to generalists, rather than specialists, they may feel less empowered to challenge what the professor wants out of the session. Community college librarians may think they lack the authority to question the effectiveness of a lesson plan because they lack the professor\u27s authority over content. Even if content is best left to the professors, librarians, at every academic level, should assert themselves more strongly when it comes to information literacy, negotiating outcomes with academic equals rather than serving professorial customer needs. Using qualitative data gathered from faculty and librarians, this paper will explore the variables underlying this pedagogical dichotomy and offer some possible solutions to resolve this issue