Information literacy accreditation mandates: what they mean for faculty and librarians

INTRODUCTION

   When I went to college I continued to work in the library. Because the
   stacks were closed, I also continued to help students, helping them to find
   things on their own. I questioned the reserve system: why should anyone
   want to be limited to just what was on reserve? I argued with faculty that
   if students were to really learn, they needed to go beyond the reserve
   system. A few were convinced. I guess I was interested in information
   literacy even then.... Most students never developed any strategies in
   using a library. It seemed strange that someone would think that bringing
   in an English class at the beginning of the semester for half an hour would
   allow the students to learn everything they needed to know about a library.
   Where were the connections to the undergraduate experience, the
   undergraduate curriculum? (Adams, 1992, p.442)

This quotation from an 1992 interview with Howard L. Simmons, executive director of the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, on the role of academic libraries in higher education, sums up the challenges that have faced academic librarians in the twentieth century: How do you change the pedagogy of higher education so that professors take advantage of the growing print, audiovisual, and electronic resources in college libraries to enhance learning and create excitement about scholarship and research? How do we get instructional librarians and teaching faculty to work as true partners in the development of a curriculum that motivates students to become more engaged with learning and to develop higher-level thinking skills?

In past decades, when librarians talked to faculty about teaching students "library skills," there was only lukewarm support. Many faculty saw "library skills" as an isolated set of skills that could be useful for students to know but that was not really central to the student's intellectual growth, academic success, or future careers. With little emphasis by teaching faculty, undergraduates realized that learning library skills would not get them many points in the classroom. More recent decades have witnessed reform in higher education with greater focus on active learning, lifelong learning, critical thinking, problem-solving, career preparation, undergraduate research, and assessment of learning outcomes. During the later decades of the twentieth century, an information explosion fueled in part by a revolution in information technology has deeply affected academic libraries and higher education. The confluence of these changes makes the time ripe for a transformation of the traditional mission for teaching "library skills" into a broader mandate for teaching "information literacy."

THE INFORMATION MANDATE

In 1987 the American Library Association formed the Presidential Committee on Information Literacy to explore the role of information in education, business, government, and everyday life and to put forth models for how information literacy could contribute to informal and formal learning at all levels. The final report in 1989 stated:

   Information literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They
   know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized, how to find
   information, and how to use information in such a way that others can learn
   from them. They are people prepared for lifelong learning, because they can
   always find the information needed for any task or decision at hand. (ALA,
   1989, p.1)

The report emphasizes the central importance of information for learning, careers, business, and citizenship. It shows how information literacy aligns with educational reforms to improve the quality of education in kindergarten through twelfth grade as well as in undergraduate institutions. Among its recommendations are: 1. That library associations must work more closely with other professional associations to promote information literacy; 2. that state departments of education and commissions on higher education must mandate the inclusion of information literacy in all curricula; and 3. that teacher education programs should introduce future teachers to the concepts of information literacy (ALA, 1989, pp. 11-13). By the time this final report was issued, all three of these efforts above were already underway. The Carnegie Foundation report by Ernest Boyer (1987) prominently mentioned the direct contribution of libraries to the community of learners. Educators went beyond simple proclamations of the importance of information to establish blueprints for integrating information literacy into school curricula. One clear sign was the publication in 1988 of Information Power: Guidelines for Media Programs, by the American Association of School Librarians and the Association for Educational Communication and Technology. This article focuses on the information literacy mandate for higher education and its effect upon undergraduate faculty and librarians. However, in many cases colleges are playing catch-up with the efforts of K-12 educators to make elementary and secondary students information literate. Undergraduate faculty and librarians would do well to take note of the methods and materials developed by schoolteachers and librarians.