Information Literacy in F.E. Chris Skerrow Hull College Group cskerrow@hull-college.ac.uk I’m Chris, I’m the eResources Librarian for Hull College Group and I’m going to talk a bit about what we’re in the middle of doing

What we do now ‘Non-traditional’ students Teaching 1:1 Support Online Support We’re a large FE College which also teaches HE courses. As well as an induction, our librarians are asked to deliver a session, typically called ‘research skills’, to all HE students and an increasing number of FE ones, These typically last an hour and take place in October/November though they can be at pretty much any time of year. In the time available, we’re obliged to concentrate on those aspects of IL which relate to what these students will need to get through their course, which is ‘finding stuff’ and ‘referencing’. We also offer a lot of 1:1 support where students can ‘book’ a librarian and we can go through the same sorts of topics. We can have several of these a day when deadlines are looming, and it’s usually ‘finding stuff’ and ‘referencing’ they want help with again. As a lot of our students are part-time, distance learners or have a work-life balance to maintain, we conduct some of our support via online chat and this too gets used quite a lot. It’s fine for some types of quick enquiry,

‘The problem’ Tutor feedback Student feedback ‘Leave it to the Librarians’ Student feedback ‘I want to get this out of the way’ Context and Relevance lacking So, there was a vague idea at the back of my mind that although what we were doing was good, we could do better and we could do more. By a lucky coincidence I was just entering the final year of my MSc in Technology-enhanced Learning, so I chose ‘information literacy in FE’ as my dissertation topic and got stuck into some action research.

Reading Pilerot (2016, p.315) Professional practice/Policy-making Research Normatively prescribed Analytically described   A rather fixed set of generic skills Situated, related to contexts Predominantly cognitive, emphasizing critical thinking Social, discursive, corporeal (and cognitive) Primarily related to digital and textual sources Related to a manifold of sources An individual and measurable competence A social, collective competence embedded in practices Transferable across practices Variational according to situations, activities and practices ‘Disconnection between research and practice’ Pilerot (2016, p.315)

More Reading “Without an understanding of broader information literacy concepts, and an ability to recognize non-academic information needs and transfer appropriate information skills to any context, students cannot be classified as “information literate”. Hoyer (2011, p.12) A lot of IL research is librarians talking to other librarians about what librarians do. And what those librarians do is brilliant – they have IL skills themselves of course and when given the opportunity are good at teaching those skills. However for a variety of reasons we can be a bit insular and not take the needs of teaching staff and students sufficiently into account. Time and again, in the literature the importance of tailoring IL teaching to the specific subject areas in order to improve student engagement was emphasised. The IL skills that are taught in academic environments are not really the ones that are needed in the workplace.

Student Perceptions of IL “Knowing when and why you need information, Limited where to find it, and how to evaluate, use Very limited and communicate it in an ethical manner” ???? Students tend to narrowly define information literacy in terms of the skills they think they require to complete their course assignments. They’re told that CILIP Information Literacy Group (n.d.)

What we’ll do next? Increase relevance IL strategy More research! To subject areas (mapping) Wider context IL strategy More research! Work to increase the relevance of IL to our FE and HE students and teaching staff. I’ve taken the learning outcomes for the Research Skills module of an Access to HE course and mapped them across to IL learning activities which relate to the subject area of that course. This not only helps the students to see the relevance of what you’re doing with them, but also the tutors. With action research being cyclical.

References CILIP Information Literacy Group. (n.d.). Definitions. Retrieved from http://www.informationliteracy.org.uk/definitions/definitions-of-il Hoyer, J. (2011). Information is social: information literacy in context. Reference Services Review, 39(1), 10-23. doi:10.1108/00907321111108088 Pilerot, O. (2016). Connections between research and practice in the information literacy narrative: A mapping of the literature and some propositions. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 48(4), 313- 321. doi:10.1177/0961000614559140

Information Literacy in F.E. Chris Skerrow Hull College Group cskerrow@hull-college.ac.uk I’m Chris, I’m the eResources Librarian for Hull College Group and I’m going to talk a bit about what we’re in the middle of doing