Teaching Information Skills: Theory and Practice

Citation

Calvert, P. (2006), "Teaching Information Skills: Theory and Practice", The Electronic Library, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 277-277. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470610660413

Information skills, or information literacy (IL) has been one of the hottest topics in the LIS literature for several years. Mostly, authors concentrate on the actual literacies, whether this is modeling the framework of information literacy in a theoretical way or focusing on the separate skills of searching, analysing, evaluating, and so on. This is useful material, but what has been missing from the IL movement is attention to the key matter of how these skills will be taught, especially as librarians expected to do the teaching often have little experience or knowledge of teaching and pedagogy. Information literacy librarians are a knowledgeable group, but they often don't know how to write learning objectives, how to use different teaching styles appropriate to different learners, and how to assess the success or otherwise of their own efforts. That is why this book really ought to be on the purchase list of every library, school, or similar institution that expects its staff to teach information skills or literacy. Both the authors teach information skills courses, but critically they also have knowledge of the educational process, and that is the emphasis they apply here. The chapter headings tell the story: learners and learning styles; motivating learners; auditing – finding out what your learners need; planning a learning experience; delivery tools, techniques and approaches; assessment; feedback and evaluation; building a teaching team. These are enclosed by the bookends of an introduction that provides context, and a conclusion that looks to the future. In other words, you can't teach information skills unless you understand the principles and process of good teaching, and increasingly good teaching means understanding and working towards the needs of the learner.

This could almost have been a manual for teaching in higher education irrespective of the subject content, but there are several mentions of information skills used as examples. Being very critical, I would have liked even more examples of how to convert the teaching skills into actual teaching and lessons. Also being perhaps excessively critical, I saw no particular model of information skills or literacy being used here. Perhaps as a result, some of the aspects of the subject that can be hard to teach, e.g. how to help students recognise and understand the “information need”, are not here. Nevertheless, it is a very good book that I recommend with no hesitation.