Meeting the Challenge of Teaching Information Literacy

by Michelle Reale

While the profession has generated many books on information literacy, none to date have validated exactly why it is so difficult to teach. In her new book, Reale posits that examining and reflecting on the reality of those factors is what will enable practitioners to meet the challenge of their important mandate. Using the same warm and conversational tone as in her previous works, she

uses personal anecdotes to lay out the key reasons that teaching information literacy is so challenging, from the limited amount of time given to instructors and lack of collaboration with faculty to one’s own anxieties about the work;
examines how these factors are related and where librarians fit in;
validates readers’ struggles and frustrations through an honest discussion of the emotional labor of librarianship, including “imposter syndrome,” stress, and burnout;
offers a variety of approaches, strategies, and topics of focus that will assist readers in their daily practice;
looks at how a vibrant community of practice can foster positive change both personally and institutionally; and
presents “Points to Ponder” at the end of each chapter that encourage readers to self-reflect and then transform personal insights into action.

Reale’s book is a valuable springboard for reflection that will help academic librarians understand the complexity of the challenges they face and then forge a path forward.

Genres: Professional Development

128 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Carrie Scarr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear librarian, this book will frustrate you, and that’s a good thing! This book is written from a personal perspective and dear librarian, the issues will hit a little too close to your heart. While you’ll find many books on how to teach information literacy, but this book raises issues and questions for how librarians work in the academic setting. Librarians don’t just work with other librarians and students; they also work with faculty. Faculty spend their days teaching just as librarians do; however, they don’t understand what librarians do. Faculty may see librarians through the distorted lens of media stereotypes. In the movies, librarians are often seen stamping books for check-out, shelving books, or reading books to children. These images focus on a public librarian rather than an academic librarian, so the faculty may have no idea what academic librarians actually do. Reale advises: “we have to be vigilant and aware of the ways in which we ourselves speak about our profession and how we may be, in the most innocent of ways, contributing to the stereotypes that currently exist” (p. 37). Building relationships with faculty is an on-going struggle. Reale describes a scene in an information literary class, where a librarian encounters a faculty member in the back of the class with a baseball hat. While the librarian assumes this person is a disinterested student, the faculty member suddenly introduces herself and says, “Sorry! Don’t mind me. Do your thing” (p. 2). Librarians, at first you might feel frustrated then angry just reading this scene. But then what? Hopefully your frustration isn’t just fuel for venting with your friends after work. Hopefully your frustration prompts action. “Meeting the Challenge of Teaching Information Literacy” isn’t going to tell you how you should respond to these frustrations, but hopefully, it prompts you and your library to think about how to deal with the challenges of teaching information literacy in your organization. Highly recommended for new and seasoned academic librarians!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is more reflective than instructive, but it did give me some ideas for how to approach the classroom a little differently than I have in the past. It is encouraging to read about other people facing similar things to what I face. Even if the changes will happen gradually, I need to recognize that it isn’t my job to fix everything myself. I think there is something for every academic librarian in this book.