Has the school in which you work (or know best) developed an information literacy policy?
How is information literacy approached in your school or experience?
How is digital citizenship approached in your school or experience?
How can a transliteracy approach expand the teaching role of the TL beyond the traditional information literacy paradigm?
Unfortunately if the school in which I work has developed an information literacy policy, it isn’t widely publicised (and I would assume is therefore making less impact than it otherwise could). Before starting this course I had heard about Inquiry Based Learning; for instance, PBL (Project Based Learning) is a popular phrase and process on the various English and History Teachers Facebook groups I follow and many staff at my school (myself included) have created units based around student inquiry. However, Information Literacy is a completely new term! Oh brave new world, that has such programmes in it!
In my school, we do have a STEM course for our Year 8 students called Project Innovate (PI) which is focused on Inquiry Based Learning. However, lack of time, training, and resources have led to poor student achievement and lack of engagement; there have never been enough students who choose to continue it as a Year 9 elective for it to run. The overall negative experience with PI has resulted in staff reluctance to take this course. It feels more like a punishment than a privilege to be given a PI class! This is a shame because student-led learning should be encouraged and not seen as a chore. Apart from this school-wide Stage 4 initiative, information literacy and digital citizenship are largely left up to individual faculties and teachers to plan for and implement.
Transliteracy is another term I hadn’t heard before starting this course. As a practising English and History teacher I can see great value in a transliteracy approach, since the way students are engaging with information is no longer limited to the printed page but expanded to included a variety of different multimodal texts that they need to navigate, understand and evaluate; the transfer of these skills across KLAs is also something that we should be encouraging! If our students are to succeed in an ever-changing employment market and to become responsible citizens, they need the skills encouraged by a transliteracy approach. As the glue which seeps into the cracks and holds all the other KLAs together, adding elements of transliteracy to an information literacy programme will give teacher librarians even more value within the school community.
On that point, I’ll leave you with a meme (since that’s how so many of our students now communicate!).
