The following presentations included findings from the study.
The Liminal Library (LILAC 2015)
Sync Up With Faculty: Collaborating With Faculty to Cross Thresholds (Texas Library Association 2015)
Looking Deeper and Reaching Further With Threshold Concepts (Kentucky Joint Spring Conference 2016)
The idea of threshold concepts has generated a great deal of excitement in the discipline of librarianship and has strongly influenced the drafting of the new Framework for Information Literacy. However, the conversations around these threshold concepts have been largely limited to librarians. How might faculty respond to questions like, “What are threshold concepts? What do threshold concepts related to undergraduate inquiry look like in my discipline? In what ways do these threshold concepts cross disciplinary boundaries?” In 2014, two librarians at a small liberal arts college in the upper Midwest embarked on a grant-funded initiative to introduce a group of faculty to the idea of threshold concepts and invite them to collectively identify critical points where students wrestle with problems related to their use of information. By involving faculty from many disciplines in the process of identifying 1) which threshold concepts are common to all disciplines and 2) the best ways to nudge students across those thresholds, the librarians hoped to fill a significant gap in this emerging theoretical framework. By discussing points where students get stuck, the librarians could look for threshold concepts that are generalizable while also identifying how these concepts are manifested in different disciplines. As librarians, we understand that research experiences are among the most transformational of learning opportunities for undergraduates, preparing them for lifelong learning regardless of their career path. However, we don’t have a common vocabulary for this kind of learning, and we haven’t engaged campus-wide in understanding why this kind of learning matters. We believe that, by teasing out the underlying concepts that students experience through participating in research in any major, we can improve our instruction programs and strengthen our collaborations with faculty.
This poster session will present the findings of a year-long, grant-funded initiative in which we engaged faculty members (and librarians at peer institutions) in discussions regarding information literacy threshold concepts. In addition to small group conversations, faculty members participated in a summer workshop and a focus group. The poster will highlight the results of the project, including lessons learned and next steps. This project may provide a model other librarians can adapt locally when discussing the new Framework for Information Literacy with their faculty.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
