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What's Social Justice Got To Do With Information Literacy?

ACRL 2017

Learning Outcomes

  1. By the end of the session participants will be able to define social justice, recognize its significance as an integral component of information literacy in order to develop their professional practice to meet the needs of users to create a more democratic society.

  2. By the end of the session participants will identify 2-3 practical instruction strategies for replication in order to effectively engage and to teach power structures and privilege in multiple IL settings.

  3. By the end of the session participants will be able to identify the strengths and challenges of multi-institutional collaboration in order to determine potential partners for collaboration and best practices.

Short Abstract

Social justice is a critical component of information literacy (IL). As librarians we have an obligation to critique the power structures that control information. Instruction librarians at four medium to large, private, Catholic institutions; collaborated to develop IL instruction grounded in social justice. The project involved applying a social justice construct to IL; creating lesson plans and instructional strategies; assessment; and sharing lessons in an open access database.