The ACRL Standards and College Composition

One of the most enduring values librarians have held has been the transmission of research skills enabling individuals to become self-sufficient consumers of information or as it is known in its current iteration—lifelong learning. Lifelong learning is a fundamental precept common to all disciplines, learning environments, and levels of education, and it crosses the parameters of time, experience, and knowledge. Such skills enable learners to master content and extend their intellectual investigations, become more self-directed, and assume greater control over their own learning. With the development of information literacy standards, the ACRL has identified specific skills necessary for ensuring lifelong learning. Subsequently, an information literate student is able to do the following:

  • Determine the extent of information needed
  • Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
  • Evaluate information and its sources critically
  • Incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base
  • Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
  • Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally (Association of College and Research Libraries & American Library Association, 2000)

It is within this conceptual framework that information literacy is defined. Referencing and building upon the cornerstone of higher education to develop lifelong learners inextricably links the ACRL information literacy standards to the mission and goals of the academy.

However, creating opportunities for the acquisition and application of information literacy skills constitutes a formidable challenge for academic librarians who have yet to establish a clearly articulated role in the university curriculum. ACRL standards establish a means to align information literacy with discipline-based student learning outcomes and, as such, present librarians opportunities to explore various venues for working with faculty in implementing the curriculum. These efforts must also extend beyond implementation to encompass curriculum development. If information literacy is to become an inherent component of curricula, as suggested in the WPA outcomes, it then behooves academic librarians to seek out and cultivate opportunities to collaborate with faculty during the program or course design process. This was the overriding factor and motivation for this librarian to seek out and work with the writing program administrator. Fortuitously, as our collaborative efforts were moving forward, other librarians were also attempting to address this compelling need to establish working relationships with composition instructors (Sult & Mills, 2006; Reyes, 2006).

Key to our collaborative efforts has been the flexibility of the ACRL standards to readily address the educational objectives writing program administrators and English departments often discuss when developing or revising the “research” component of the curriculum. And from a student perspective, the standards provide a generic template for learning the explicit steps and processes associated with identifying, accessing, analyzing and communicating information. Further, the inherent universality of the ACRL standards accommodates any number of instructional and subject specific variables, therefore creating a platform to engage both librarians and composition faculty alike in a discussion of curriculum design, especially in the face of struggles common to both today and highlighted earlier, such as budgetary constraints, technology initiatives, digitalization of information and the increasing emphasis on transformative pedagogies (Sult & Mills, 2006; Reyes, 2006). Collaborative efforts permit librarians to progress beyond the limited scope of providing instruction in how to access, search, and evaluate information resources to encompass the development of learning activities for drafting research questions, analyzing and synthesizing information, as well as communicating and documenting results of the research process, therefore establishing a much more comprehensive, cohesive and effective pedagogy for research methodology that is applicable across the curriculum.

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