Faculty Workshops: Incorporating the Framework and Embedding Information Literacy in Undergraduate Courses

The Introduction of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education encourages teaching faculty to design “curricula and assignments that foster enhanced engagement with the core ideas about information and scholarship within their disciplines.” However, disciplinary faculty are often unsure how to facilitate student engagement with information literacy in an effective way and may not even be aware that they are communicating these concepts to their students. Librarians have an opportunity to help faculty understand that the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education can be a powerful tool when planning assignments, activities, and discussions and can assist faculty in surfacing information literacy concepts in their courses. To begin introducing the Framework to our campus and to embed some of these concepts in first-year courses, we—the Instructional Design Librarian and the First Year Experience Librarian—designed a workshop for disciplinary faculty scheduled to teach a university seminar. In this workshop, we use the Framework to explore the breadth and depth of information literacy and help faculty identify the ways in which they already incorporate information literacy instruction in their courses. In this chapter, we will review relevant literature on faculty and librarian partnerships as it relates to information literacy workshops and course design. We will describe the main elements of the workshop and the common questions, comments, and feedback we have received from faculty participants. We will close the chapter with strategies for implementing similar workshops at other campuses, including some of the challenges others might experience and ways to work around them.