Every year, with students from years 7 to 12, I find myself reteaching the same information literacy skills over and over again in my English and History classes – sometimes to the same students, sometimes to students who were demonstrating excellence in these skills in year prior, all of whom had “forgotten” what they had been taught. The ability to understand how to navigate the world through finding, identifying, accessing, evaluating, and creating, using a range of skills and processes to satisfy cognitive, physical and socio-cultural goals (Hepworth & Walton, 2009) is crucial for student success in learning – both in school and in the wider macro environments they will enter after their formal education. It’s embedded in the curriculum, and reflected in the emphasis on General Capabilities.

More and more frequently, however, students struggle, or even fail, to transfer these skills across learning contexts. Inquiry learning – and, more specifically, Guided Inquiry Process Design learning – offers a platform for teacher librarians to build transferable information literacy skills. By supporting student learning and movement through the information search process, it guides students to reflect not only on their learning, but also on how they have learned. Perhaps most prominently, however, is what Fitzgerald & Garrison’s research found (2017) – that the students became meta-cognitively aware as they learned how they learn, and that they transferred this knowledge into a range of learning contexts.

This has implications for the teacher librarian and their role as curriculum designer. If students are to successfully learn information literacy skills, implementing and integrating an information literacy model across the curriculum would only serve to benefit their skill development. Implementation across KLAs and faculties would, of course, be ideal, however there would be some challenges that the TL would need to take into consideration when seeking to implement an information literacy model in such a fashion.

 

 

Reference List

Fitzgerald, L. & Garrison, K. (2017) It Trains Your Brain: Student Reflections on Using the Guided Inquriy Design Process. Synergy, 15(2).

Hepworth, M., & Walton, G. (2009). Teaching information literacy for inquiry-based learning. Chandos Publishing.