The power of solidarity: The effects of professor-librarian collaboration on students’ self-awareness of skill acquisition, pre-print and surveys

Abstract

The Association of College and Research Libraries’ adoption of the Framework for Information Literacy in 2016 formalized a sea change in information literacy instruction. It asks librarians to instill students with the skills needed for navigating the contemporary information landscape. One way to give students sufficient practice with these skills is for librarians to encourage faculty to cover them during normal instructional time, but this has its pitfalls due to power imbalances within the academy (Franklin, 2013; Julien & Given, 2002; Lechtenberg & Donovan, 2022; Perez-Stable et al., 2022).

The co-authors of this article—one a Librarian and the other an Adjunct Professor —overcame such obstacles and collaborated productively on information literacy instruction. We explore the reasons behind our success, detail the hidden labor underlying this work, describe course objectives and the structure constructed to satisfy those objectives, analyze students’ accounts of their affective journey through the course, and offer suggestions for those wishing to cultivate a similar classroom environment.

Our experience indicates that instructor-librarian collaboration forged around shared histories and structured by codeveloped objectives positively influences students’ receptivity to information literacy concepts. As demonstrated by surveys of those enrolled in the course, students’ self-awareness of their own mastery increased as they applied threshold skills learned in class. Although data do not allow us to correlate academic achievement to students’ survey responses, aggregate results in both academic work and survey responses suggest that for many students these insights led to greater independence.