4th Annual LILi Conference
Learning Social Justice through
Critical Information Literacy
Monday, July 31, 2017, 9 am - 1:30 pm
Glendale Community College, Glendale, CA
Schedule of Events
9:00-9:30: Registration (FREE!) & Refreshments ($5 donation requested at the door)
9:30-9:40: LILi Conference Welcome
Susie Chin, LILi Chair and Esther Grassian, LILi Advisory Board Member
9:40-10:00: Teaching Authority Where Black Lives Matter (handout)
Presented by Faith Bradham (Bakersfield College)
"Attendees should expect to get their lesson-planning hands dirty as I share my experience teaching authority to an all-black learning community (part of the Umoja Community) on my campus during Spring 2017. Working with this community disrupted my ideas about evaluation skills, causing me to begin teaching about authority in a way that focuses less on evaluation tools and more on the critical thinking skills involved in the evaluation process.
By attending my presentation, attendees will discover how I actively incorporated black voices as well as issues in the black community into each of my lesson plans, examples, and in-class activities, and they will also gain insight into my newly-learned methods for teaching evaluation skills. The session will culminate with attendees creating brief lesson plans for teaching authority based on the strategies learned in this workshop.
This presentation will be a learning environment that allows for open and respectful dialogue on the missing voices within information sources and the inequality of information access. The Umoja Community’s practice of The Porch, which focuses on building a foundation of trust to create an environment for candid discussion where participants can safely communicate and advocate for themselves, will act as my guide in this endeavor."
10:00-10:20: Engage Your Cultural Side: Cultural Intelligence (handout)
Cultural Values (handout)
Presented by Dr. Michele Villagran (University of North Texas)
As our workforces become more diverse, we face a greater challenge and problem -- how to successfully manage increasingly diverse interactions. To address this concern, organizations and academic institutions are applying the framework of cultural intelligence (CQ). Cultural intelligence (CQ) is a person’s capability for successful adaptation to new cultural settings, that is, for unfamiliar settings attributable to cultural context (Earley & Ang). It is only recently that cultural intelligence has surfaced as an element that can increase job performance, personal well‐being, and profitability. Cultural intelligence isn’t specific to a particular culture – rather it focuses on the capability to function effectively in culturally diverse situations.
Cultural intelligence is a new concept, officially defined in 2003. It is a globally recognized way of assessing and improving effectiveness for culturally diverse situations. It’s rooted in rigorous, academic research conducted by scholars around the world. Leading organizations in business, education, government, and healthcare are adopting CQ as a key component of personnel development and competitive advantage. Research demonstrates several consistent results for individuals and organizations that improve CQ, including:
• More Effective Cross‐Cultural Adaptability and Decision‐Making
• Enhanced Job Performance
• Improved Creativity and Innovation
• Increased Profitability and Cost‐Savings
This concept allows individuals to reinvent themselves by understanding their own CQ, and applying differing techniques within the academic environment when involved with culturally diverse situations.
10:20-10:50: Table-Talks (for discussion, review of other flip charts, break)
An opportunity for participants to discuss ideas with colleagues, sparked by the presentations. Please select/identify volunteers at your table to record your ideas and post them on flip charts around the room.
10:50-11:10: Teaching Future Leaders about Authority
Presented by Charissa Jefferson (California State University Northridge)
This presentation shares a lesson for undergraduate, graduate and professional students, that incorporates the Frame “Authority is Constructed and Contextual” with the theory of Adult Learning and L. Dee Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning (Fink 2003). In addition to sharing the lesson the presentation offers learning activities and assessments that will stimulate participants to think about how they can enhance their own lessons to be significant for students’ learning.
I want my students to become inclusive leaders, responsive to those they engage. The inclusive leader’s “goal is to create a culture of consensuality needed for the effective functioning of teams and networks” (Buchen 2011, 4). In order to engage students in disciplinary thinking, teaching must begin with the students themselves (Bain 2014). Bain reminds us to focus is on the students themselves as human beings, including their life experiences, cultures, and perspectives.
A goal for students is to become successful leaders in their field. They will, undoubtedly, work with a diverse group of people and everyone with their own perspectives and experiences, in every situation. How then, can students learn to be open to multiple perspectives, and even shifting their perspectives, to find the best solution? The goal of this lesson is to facilitate student thinking of their own and other’s perspectives in order to find the best results for their clients and constituents. Students may use this lesson’s activities in their daily life as well as in their profession as they strive to become better and more inclusive leaders with those whom they interact.
References
Bain, Ken. 2014. What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Buchen, Irving H. 2011. Executive Intelligence: The Leader's Edge. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.
Fink, L. Dee. 2013. Creating Significant Learning Experiences. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
11:10-11:30: Hacking Research: Wikipedia, Trump and Information Literacy in the Escape Room
Presented by Raymond Pun (Fresno State University)
With the rise of fake news and more people becoming consumers of mass media and digital information,today, we are seeing the importance of information literacy in society. In this presentation, the speaker will share how first year students at Fresno State developed critical information literacy skills by participating in a series of “escape room” workshops in Fall 2016 -Spring 2017.
What is an escape room? Popular in Asia, an escape room is a physical-adventure game where participants are confined in a space to solve a series of puzzles within a set time limit in order complete the game. In this case, students were “locked” inside the library for a few hours, and required to test, develop and apply information literacy skills by solving a series of challenging research tasks: the themes of these activities involve reference sources, fake news, Wikipedia and Donald Trump.
From “hacking” into Wikipedia entries of Donald Trump to critically analyzing and comparing ""fake news"" with online databases to interpreting and debunking Trump's Tweets in the context of ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, first year students from various disciplines collaborated in teams throughout the “gamification” research process to discover evidence-based resources, develop information literacy skills, and understand how the research library can play an innovative role in creating, disseminating and preserving (accurate) information for social justice.
Attendees will hear about the challenges and opportunities of setting up an “escape room” workshop in the library, and about the key elements of designing an effective research program that will engage with students to think critically about information in media, politics and society.
11:30-11:50: Equity Through Transparency: Using Assignment Design to Promote Social Justice (handout)
Presented by Maya Hobscheid (Nevada State College)
At my institution, a small four year state school, the instructional design librarians are moving beyond one-shot instruction sessions and collaborating with faculty to integrate information literacy directly into their research assignments. In the summer of 2016, the library held a two-day faculty workshop during which the participants redesigned their research assignments using the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework. The TILT framework has been proven to raise student retention and graduation rates, particularly of underserved and first-generation college students. In addition, students who received transparent assignments reported gains in academic confidence, sense of belonging, and mastery of skills that employers value most when hiring. This is notable to my institution, as a large percentage of our student body are nontraditional students from underserved populations. Overall, the feedback for the workshop has been overwhelmingly positive; one faculty participant said, “This is one of the most worthwhile faculty enrichment activities I have taken part in during my 10 years at [this institution].” In this session, I will discuss the positive impact this workshop has had on the faculty perceptions of student research and future collaboration with the library.
11:50-12:20: Table-Talks (for discussion, review of other flip charts, break)
An opportunity for participants to discuss ideas with colleagues, sparked by the presentations. Please select/identify volunteers at your table to record your ideas and post them on flip charts around the room.
10-Minute Lightning Talks
12:20-12:30: Keepin’ It Real: Reflections on a Fake News Workshop
Presented by Aisha Conner-Gaten, Jennifer Masunaga, and Desirae Zingarelli-Sweet (Loyola Marymount University)
After an election fraught with misinformation, fake news, and hoaxes on all sides, students found it difficult to navigate digital media not only for scholarship but in their personal lives. Librarians at LMU conducted information literacy workshops to engage students with meaningful current news outlets and news stories from all political ideologies as a part of a campus-wide teach-in on Inauguration Day 2017. This presentation will provide an overview of these workshops and explain how librarians can implement similar programs while responding to a politically and emotionally-charged campus and public environment. This presentation will also discuss the workshop development process, which includes defining how information literacy may be applied to born-digital source material, possible learning outcomes for attendees, tools for managing misinformation, collaborating with pre-existing campus-wide programming, and examples of active learning opportunities for students to evaluate their own biases and perspectives both in and out of the session. Attendees will have the opportunity to perform activities from the workshop and discuss how these can be implemented for school and public libraries and for more general community-based learning. Additionally, the workshop will discuss the assessment process and the real-time feedback received in the workshops from members of the campus community. While these workshops occurred in an academic environment, the workshop materials can be tweaked for every library and audience. Librarians know that information literacy education has been done for a very long time, however, it must have real life applications in order for patrons to continue to critically engage with information and examine how they disseminate information to their personal networks.
RADAR framework adapted from:
Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal Of Information Science, 39, 470-478. doi:10.1177/0165551513478889.
Meriam Library at California State University, Chico. (2010, September 17). Evaluating information-Applying the CRAAP test. Retrieved from http://www.csuchico.edu/lins/handouts/eval_websites.pdf
12:30-12:40: Teaching Using Escape Rooms & Critical Information Literacy
Presented by Eva Rios-Alvarado (Mt. San Antonio College)
This ten minute lightning round will have a three to four minute presentation about using gaming, particularly escape room scenarios, which requires collaboration and critical thinking by the participant(s). In my teaching, I am exploring how to best use an escape room teaching method focused on information literacy concepts in the community college setting. The remaining six minutes would be used to crowd-source ideas for the teaching method. The activity would include an engaging method to aggregate ideas from colleagues and potentially find colleagues who are interested in similar teaching methods.
12:40-1:10: Table-Talks (for discussion, review of other flip charts, break)
An opportunity for participants to discuss ideas with colleagues, sparked by the presentations. Please select/identify volunteers at your table to record your ideas and post them on flip charts around the room.
1:10-1:20: Closing Remarks & Evaluation Form Completion
1:30: No-Host Lunch Off-Site (optional)
An opportunity for participants to continue discussing takeaways from the conference and network.