At the school that I am currently working at, the teaching of information literacy is haphazard and lacks a coordinated whole-school approach. My school is a ECC-Year 12 school and the teaching of information literacy in the junior school takes place during their weekly library lesson. Students up to Year 8 have a scheduled weekly library lesson in which they learn key information literacy skills and our teacher librarian tries, where she can, to link the skill to what the students may currently be studying in their other subjects.

Unfortunately, beyond Year 8 there are no longer weekly visits to the library and it is simply “assumed” that the students possess strong literacy skills. Students who have always had technology in their lives are assumed to be “tech-savvy” and therefore the belief of their subject teachers is that they can solely focus on the content in their subject.

My school has set up a “Literacy Committe” in the attempt to develop a whole school approach to literacy. However, its scope is far too narrow. Its focus is primarily on ensuring that teachers are teaching their students to understand the NESA glossary terms and that teachers are explicitly teaching writing skills.

We need to expand our understanding of literacy if we are to successfully equip students with the necessary information skills to succeed in the information-rich world of the twentieth century. My school needs to consider the fact that literacy is multimodal in today’s learning environment and understand that our students, who admittedly are very at home with their technological devices and social media platforms, may not have the skills to critically analyse these sources of information for reliability and credibility.

At my school there is a stong focus on meeting the curriculum demands in regards to subject content but less so on skill development. Teachers, sadly myself included, often plough through the content at the expense of taking the time to develop key information literacy skills. So much so that most lessons are planned around the content and rarely delve into skills that will become important lifelong skills. Teachers do set research tasks but there is the expectation that they don’t need to explicitly teach students how to define what is being asked of them, how to employ successful search strategies to locate quality information or how to organise and present their information. Teachers are either unsure of how to perform these skills themselves or just assume that somewhere along the line (perhaps in their English classes) they have already been taught to do this.

A way to progess in the future would be to expand out the role of the whole-school “Literacy Committee”. It needs to plan beyond ensuring an understanding of glossary terms in the secondary school and go beyond the sole focus of writing skills. Our subjects need to be planned around the information literacy skill that we want to focus on and the content needs to be the vehicle for teaching this skill and not the driving force. We as teachers need to utilise our teacher librarian more and involve her in planning lessons and assessment tasks to ensure that we are explicitly teaching the information skills and that we are mapping these skills out year-by-year to ensure that there is a logical and developmentally-appropriate progression of skill acquisition.