Sustainable Partners: Librarians and Instructors Using Threshold Concepts to Reinforce Information Literacy

Our panel presentation describes how an Instructional Designer and Director of First-Year Writing developed a sustainable partnership around the shared threshold concepts of our disciplines. As an instructional designer for the library, Speaker 1 wants to develop a four-year curriculum to support students’ research-based writing across general education and disciplinary courses; as a writing program administrator, Speaker 2 wants to develop a partnership between the first-year writing program and instructional designers and librarians that reinforces the writing concepts supporting the writing curriculum. Using the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and recent research in transfer and first-year writing, including the forthcoming Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, this back-and-forth conversational panel offers a theoretical rationale for our sustainable partnership, which precedes a university-wide general education renewal process. A faculty survey focused on instructor goals and objectives for library sessions informed the design of a multi-phased, multi-session pilot for Spring 2015. With the intent to move library instructional sessions from skills-based sessions (“Search like this. Filter here.”) to conceptual-based sessions that enable students to apply information literacy concepts to mindfully engage with information ecosystems, the pilot model replaced the traditional one-shot library session with a series of sessions: a large, multi-course lecture followed by two individualized sessions for each writing class; the partnership concluded with a showcase of student research, co-sponsored by the library and writing program. We will conclude with a discussion of our shared assessment practices and preliminary findings, which will shape the Fall 2015 expanded sessions