The IU Libraries are pleased to announce the 2014-15 Information Literacy Grant recipients:

• Jeffrey Saletnik (History of Art) and Kristina Keogh (IU Libraries)
  FINA-A400: Senior Seminar
   
• César Félix-Brasdefer (Spanish & Portuguese) and Luis González (IU Libraries)
  HISP-S429: Spanish Sociolingiuistics and Pragmatics) 
   
• Ariann Stern-Gottschalk (Slavic) and Wookjin Cheun (IU Libraries)
  SLAV-R322: Linguistic Approaches to Literature

In its fourth year, this successful grant program is administered by the IU Libraries, with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the College of Arts & Sciences. The program awards instructional development grants of $1500 to instructors who would like to design or revise an undergraduate course, incorporating of information literacy concepts, which broadly understood involves accessing, evaluating, and using information critically in various contexts and for specific purposes. Through the course design process, the instructor collaborates closely with a librarian to integrate information literacy throughout the semester.

Over the years, Information Literacy Grant projects have taken many forms, including sequenced research and writing assignments, training in critical analysis and use of primary source materials, and student engagement with social media and blogs. All of these projects are the result of meaningful instructor-librarian collaborations and help students to develop skills, knowledge, and dispositions central to being a critical user and producer of information.

Throughout the development of these projects, the IUB Libraries’ Department of Teaching & Learning works closely with course instructors and librarians, organizing an orientation session; identifying information literacy learning outcomes and creating assessment plans that will guide course design; and convening grant recipients to share their experiences at the conclusion of their projects.  In these ways, Teaching & Learning partners with professors across campus and helps them to expand the impact of their information literacy projects to other courses they teach and ultimately to their departmental colleagues.

Learn more about the IU Libraries’ Information Literacy Grants or about the Teaching & Learning Department.

This year’s Information Literacy grant projects offer a sense of the diverse and creative ways in which grant recipients foster student learning.

Prof. Saletnik’s Senior Seminar (A400), an undergraduate capstone course in the Department of the History of Art, centers on the theme “Materiality and Meaning in Modern Art.” Professor Saletnik will be working with Fine Arts Librarian Kristina Keogh to redesign A400 in order to establish information literacy as an explicit, measurable course goal through assignments such as annotated bibliographies, oral presentations, and research prospectuses. Students will work through these assignments as they examine selected topics in the field of art history, gaining familiarity and experience with disciplinary research methods, scholarship, and criticism. To support students in their learning and research process, Kristina Keogh will offer a series of sessions on identifying, gathering, evaluating, and using relevant information and will meet individually with students to discuss their research questions. The resulting course framework will be shared with department faculty and will be applicable to future iterations of the class, regardless of the given course theme.

In Prof. Félix-Brasdefer’s Spanish Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics course (S429), an elective for Spanish majors and minors, students will explore specific issues in the field of linguistics as they work through a series of small assignments that lead to a longer final paper, in which they develop an academic argument on a chosen topic of interest. The smaller assignments, which will be developed through collaboration with Area Studies librarian Luis Gonzalez, will focus on processes such as developing an argument, compiling and condensing information in order to develop and articulate a theoretical framework, and evaluating previous research. Modeling research processes will also be key to helping students develop disciplinary understandings, as the instructor will demonstrate and discuss questions like what constitutes an empirical study, how data are collected and analyzed for linguistic purposes, and what ethical concerns must be considered for human subjects research.

Prof. Stern-Gottschalk’s Linguistic Approaches to Literature (R322), a new seminar in Russian poetics, will expand the course offerings in IU’s Slavic department, where dedicated courses on poetry have not been offered recently. R351 will also be unique in the structured guidance it provides to students on locating and evaluating information of potential value to their own research and learning. Prof. Stern-Gottschalk’s collaboration with Slavic and East European Studies Librarian Wookjin Cheun will include design and delivery of assignments and activities related to information literacy; an introduction to relevant Slavic print and online resources; and guidance in selecting, representing, and sharing relevant resources with a larger research community through online resources like IUB’s Library Guides.