What We Do
The Education and Outreach Services Department at Auraria Library seeks to incorporate meaningful information literacy skills and concepts into the curriculum of all three schools on the Auraria Campus. Our program is built around our teaching team partnering with course instructors to improve information literacy in several ways, including leading classroom sessions, developing learning materials, and reviewing research projects before they’re assigned to students.
The planning and execution of this work is highly collaborative, and typically involves our department working with course instructors to review program goals, course outcomes, and individual assignments that address information literacy concepts. We also conduct assessments of student learning in consultation with our colleagues on campus to better inform our pedagogy and determine how our students interact with information.
Instruction will be primarily online for the Fall 2021 semester, with very limited in-person sessions. Please review our existing asynchronous modules and video tutorials before requesting an instruction session. If you have needs in your course that go beyond what we already have available, please fill out our online form to tell us more about your objectives and to schedule a time to meet with a member of our teaching team to discuss a potential session.
If you’d like for students to speak with a librarian one-on-one, please refer them to our Research Consultation request form.
Our Approach
Our teaching team consists of faculty librarians who engage in continuous professional development in the areas of teaching information literacy and student learning assessment. The team also includes graduate assistants who undergo extensive training and classroom observations prior to teaching independently.
After consulting with course instructors and reviewing the research requirements of their courses, our teaching team will develop a lesson plan and learning objects that address both student research needs and our departmental learning outcomes. The content of the sessions themselves will be determined by our teaching team, whose members hold faculty rank and enjoy academic freedom as defined by the American Association of University Professors.
Our Instructional Philosophy
In our teaching we aim to:
- Recognize and honor students’ lived experiences
- Explore the complex, iterative, and political nature of information and research
- Discuss information creation and use as they arise in different, situated contexts
- Emphasize the transferability of information literacy in- and outside academic contexts
Our Instructional Scope
Our instruction program includes discussions about:
How research is based in inquiry, including articulating and defining the scope and purpose of research. In practice, this includes:
- Creating research questions and topic development
- “Presearching” or surveying a topic
- Identifying and articulating research needs
Structures of information and searching. In practice, this includes:
- Crafting and refining search strategies
- Keyword searching
- Facet/advanced searching
- “Citation chaining”/Cited Reference Searching
- Discovery tools (e.g., Start My Research)
- Distinguishing between types of information sources to respond to research needs
- Search engine algorithms and bias
- Scholarly and popular resources
- Types of Information sources, including (but not limited to) journal articles, books, newspapers, magazines, trade publications, social media, and Wikipedia
Synthesizing and evaluating information. In practice, this includes:
- Creating research questions and topic development
- Reading and analyzing information and texts
- Evaluating for relevancy and/or credibility
- Exploring the nature of authority and expertise
- Choosing and defining ‘evidence’; using evidence to build arguments
