Librarians provide instruction for students across disciplines, each with their own teaching and learning practices. An exploration of signature pedagogies will help librarians develop a deeper understanding of student learning. This article identifies reflective pedagogy as a teaching strategy librarians can use to expand upon this learning by…

With an awareness of growing issues in teaching source evaluation, the authors explored new methods to incorporate this skill into one-credit asynchronous information literacy courses. The authors discovered improvements in student performance when using SIFT and identified key strategies for its implementation to achieve best results.

As librarians' instructional roles continue to evolve, metaphor can be a powerful tool through which to reflect on and at times to reframe librarians' evolving educational roles and pedagogical approaches, as they consider beliefs and assumptions about teaching and learning and about their unfolding work and identities. This article explores this…

This essay explores the tension between pursuing meaningful work in instruction librarianship and the realities of working in a society in which many jobs provide little fulfillment or pleasure, or, as the journalist Sarah Jaffe puts it, "Work won't love you back." Drawing on a recent conference keynote by Anne Helen Petersen, C. Wright…

The COVID-19 pandemic peeled back long-held assumptions about what is wanted, needed, and possible within academia. Many academic libraries had failed to fully imagine the potential uses of online and, in short, missed many opportunities to engage and support users. From this oversight have sprung opportunities to better understand and respond to…

Digital badging has seen widespread adoption within the US higher education sector with continued growth predicted. Might digital badging present an underrealized opportunity for libraries seeking new vehicles through which to deliver information literacy instructional content? This paper offers an analysis of badging in higher education and…

Active learning forms a common teaching method within information literacy instruction. Commitment to participatory models of teaching and learning requires critical vigilance, however, particularly given changing information environments and broader educational priorities. This theoretical paper interrogates active learning and its prevalence…

Librarians play a key role in the understanding, retrieval, and assessment of gray literature (also spelled "grey literature") as it pertains to evidence-based clinical practice, particularly nursing. With the rise of evidence-based research and curriculum-specific requirements in advanced nursing programs, gray literature instruction…

To address the growing problem of misinformation, librarians often focus on approaches tied to the frame "Authority Is Constructed and Contextual" from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. The Framework, however, encompasses a much wider range of skills,…

This paper critiques deficit models of education, including popular educational movements such as grit and growth mind-set, and considers how they inform and underlie information literacy efforts, often without librarians' awareness. After a discussion of the problems that deficit thinking poses for students and educators, the author offers two…

The College Library Directors' Mentor Program has operated for more than 20 years, during which a substantial portion of the target audience of first-year library directors of small colleges has participated. Through this article, the authors identify the purpose of the program, describe its evolution and current status, and examine the nature of…

The developmentalist conception of information's value makes learning the central consideration for evaluating information. Following philosopher Richard Kraut, this article argues that developmentalism provides an important complement to prevalent methods of teaching the evaluation of information. These methods emphasize (a) trustworthiness--for…

Disability is a reality in the library instruction classroom, yet despite ratification of the American Library Association (ALA) policy on people with disabilities, librarians seldom take part in discourse about restructuring library instruction to ensure it is inclusive and accessible. This essay discusses the imperative to serve students with…

This paper considers library programming as a means of extending and enhancing the academic library's pedagogical mission and role in student success. Scholarly programming in the form of faculty speakers, film screenings, or other kinds of research-based events creates opportunities for students to join an academic community and to practice…

Every senior at Haverford College writes a thesis or its equivalent, conducting independent research with guidance from faculty and librarians. Students critically engage in investigative work in archives, field studies, and labs. In this article, librarians explore the way anthropology and history thesis writers do research to define paths toward…