Chat Room- Selling Information Literacy

How can we make information literacy skills important to both teachers and students, while actually teaching students something meaningful about the Internet besides how to copy and paste? Perhaps Eileen Culkin has the answer.

Culkin is the librarian at Inter-Lakes Junior-Senior High School in Meredith, NH. She was a classroom teacher there for 18 years, most recently teaching seventh graders. She received her library certification three years ago, with mentoring from her friend and colleague Susan Lamoureaux, the Inter-Lakes Elementary School librarian.

While getting her degree, Culkin knew that many students weren't learning much when they used the Internet to do research. Too many assignments could be completed by little more than simple copying, pasting, and rearranging a few words. She did a lot of research into the American Association of School Librarians' Information Power program. "I was immersed in Information Power," she says. When she started as a librarian, she realized that the Inter-Lakes district was training neither teachers nor students in information literacy principles, effective research skills, and using the Web properly as a research tool.

With Lamoreaux's support, Culkin encouraged teachers to collaborate with her, and she reports some success. At least six of the school's 50 teachers plan assignments regularly with Culkin, gathering suitable Web sites—and good books—and setting up effective research projects. But she still found that the teachers could use the Information Power principles more effectively. Whenever she could, Culkin talked with them about blending information literacy skills into more of their assignments. But progress in getting teachers involved with it only inched along.

Things changed, however, after Culkin built a Web site for her library (www.inter-lakes.k12.nh.us/ilhsmedia) and promoted it to students and teachers as often as she could. Students' research habits have shifted. Before, students went straight to Yahoo! to do their research, ignoring the subscription databases such as ProQuest and Science Facts on File. Now the portal serves as an indispensable research tool to students.

How did she alter teachers' and students' perceptions? Whenever she demonstrated how to research an assignment effectively, she always started from the library site. She convinced several popular teachers to require using it on important assignments. She was quietly stubborn. "It was a battle to get them to use the Web page," she says, "and I convinced them individually." Now that there's a cart of Apple iBook laptops moving around the school, students are doing more research away from the library. Since she's assembled her subscription databases and recommended sites on the Web page, students both at home and at school are logging into those resources more often.

Now she has her greatest opportunity to promote information literacy at her school. Having found a sympathetic ear in Kathleen Hill, the district's curriculum coordinator, Culkin is now a member, along with Hill, Lamoreaux, and teachers from across all grades, of a committee that is creating an information literacy curriculum that's integrated into all classes from K to 12. "We realized that [promoting information literacy skills] couldn't be [just] a library thing, and the curriculum coordinator's support gave credibility," she says. The committee, which met for the first time in May, is now deeply ensconced in the process of educating teachers at the staff meetings about why information literacy skills are important. For the first time, the Inter-Lakes district will be able to measure how these skills affect learning.

The committee aims, by the end of this school year, to establish benchmarks for the curriculum to show what students should know and what progress is expected from them. Students will learn to find and evaluate useful resources online, and teachers will teach differently. "If we want to avoid plagiarism, we can't assign students to find a book or a Web site on John Adams and give a simple report," says Culkin. "It's too easy to copy and paste. Instead, we need to assign students to gather, say, seven resources and put together and analyze what they find. Otherwise the learning isn't valuable."

The committee members expect to begin using the curriculum next year. Culkin sees a challenging road ahead: Not all of Inter-Lakes' teachers have bought in to the value of information literacy skills and still need to be convinced. Culkin plans to do everything she can to persuade them.