Constructing and revising a user-centered curricular toolkit: Supporting faculty with inclusive design

Abstract

July/August 2023 241 L at San Francisco State University (SF State) set out to create a curricular toolkit of research skills and information literacy learning activities that could easily be used by instructional faculty in their classrooms, in-person or online. The goal of undertaking this work was to provide accessible and inclusive resources for faculty to incorporate critical information literacy work into their classes beyond the traditional one-shot engagement with the library. William Badke discusses the common misconception that students learn research “by osmosis”—that when presented with research opportunities, they will do research (without instruction) and through doing research, they’ll get better at doing research.1 While that certainly can happen, it makes the process much harder than it needs to be and can set students up to fail. Then, when some students are not able to intuit college-level research skills, faculty are confused, or worse, disparaging. But because this is how many faculty learned to research, the practice is often perpetuated. Badke discusses a number of studies that suggest that faculty believe students develop information literacy throughout their undergraduate careers, without any conceptualization of how that happens, and in some instances without being able to articulate what information literacy is.2 Additionally, in a large university, there isn’t hope that the library can facilitate a one-shot library instruction session for every class to mitigate these systemic challenges. In addition to the limitations of scope, there is also a limit on how much content can be covered in a single session. Thus, one goal in creating a curricular toolkit was to avoid this common trap of information literacy learning and equip our faculty with accessible and adaptable tools for teaching it. In creating a toolkit of activities across the spectrum of research skills, we hoped that faculty would better be able to provide research instruction at the appropriate point of need and more effectively scaffold research learning throughout the class, rather than containing it to a single one-shot session. Instead of wondering at the quality of student work without any support, they would have some resources to address challenges and provide intentional instruction toward further developing students’ information literacy. Our toolkit was inspired by the Hunter College Libraries’ student-facing toolkit, created by Stephanie Margolin and Wendy Hayden.3 Their goal was “to help faculty and students see research as a process of inquiry and discovery, not a collection of information proving a narrow thesis,” which is a goal we shared, in addition to searching for sustainable and scalable ways