Changing Lives, Changing the World: Information Literacy and Critical Pedagogy

Course Description

Instruction librarians interested in enriching their pedagogical practices in progressive, political, and innovative ways will be interested in this workshop on critical pedagogy and library instruction. Critical pedagogy is a theory and framework that envisions education as a site for social change. The ultimate goal of critical pedagogy is for students to achieve critical consciousness about societal oppression and then become equipped to change the world. Critical pedagogy has, in recent years, been brought into conversation with information literacy and library instruction theory and practice. Instruction librarians have been exploring how progressive pedagogical practices not only serve to teach students information literacy skills, but also to equip learners with an understanding of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression, and how they, as learners, can change the dominant culture that perpetuates these forms of oppression. This workshop continues and participates in this conversation by providing participants with an overview of critical pedagogy, contextualizing it in library instruction, and empowering participants how to enact it in their own educational settings.

Participants will engage with the workshop via assigned readings, homework, and online discussion. Homework assignments will include developing lesson plans and assessment tools designed in the critical pedagogical framework.

At the end of the workshop, students will be able to:

• Define critical pedagogy in order to identify implications for library instruction theory and practice
• Identify ways in which critical pedagogy might be employed in the library setting in order to enrich instructional practices
• Design critical pedagogical learning activities and assessment tools in order to deploy them in the library instruction classroom
• Describe the importance and significance of liberatory, progressive, and critical approaches to education in order to serve as an agent of change in the library instruction classroom.

Required text (provided free to participants): Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (ISBN: 978-1-936117-01-7)

This course can be taken as one of the courses in our eight-course Certificate in Library Instruction, but can be taken as a stand-alone course as well.