Information Literacy Can Save Your Life: how first-year college composition students can become critical thinkers in the digital age
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation (20 minute presentation)
Target Audience
Other
composition instructors, high school English teachers, high school librarians, college librarians, instructional librarians
Location
Room 212
Abstract
In the 2016 Project Information Literacy Report, “How Today’s Graduates Continue to Learn Once They Complete College,” Alison J. Head argues that college graduates are in desperate need of questioning skills. Although college instructors are focusing on information literacy and connecting core curriculum to critical thinking outcomes more purposefully than ever before, our graduates still “believed that formulating and asking their own questions was the one skill that they had not developed in college but found they needed in their post-college lives” (Head 2016). This research and similar research conducted by both college librarians and composition instructors, illustrates the changing patterns of learning in the information age—and how Research as Inquiry may be the single most important piece of the 2015 IL Framework.
This paper presentation explores effective means of integrating inquiry into a first-year composition classroom by illustrating the barriers, habits, and behaviors of entering college students and using preliminary grounded method research to show the positive outcomes of teaching questioning as a threshold concept. Because the information age is an active barrier against questioning and therefore against critical thought, fostering questioning as a foundation of the composition classroom and incorporating questioning into all aspects of classroom learning can give students the foundation for critical thought needed in today’s information saturated world—and show how learning to question may even save their lives.
Presentation Description
The information age is an active barrier against questioning and therefore against critical thought—this presentation explores effective means of integrating the 2015 IL Framework’s Research as Inquiry into a first-year composition classroom to foster the questioning skills needed in today’s information saturated world—and show how learning to question may even save students’ lives.
Keywords
Information literacy, Research as Inquiry, critical thinking, common core, Google
Publication Type and Release Option
Event
Recommended Citation
Field-Rothschild, Katherine, "Information Literacy Can Save Your Life: how first-year college composition students can become critical thinkers in the digital age" (2017). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 43.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2017/2017/43
Information Literacy Can Save Your Life: how first-year college composition students can become critical thinkers in the digital age
Room 212
In the 2016 Project Information Literacy Report, “How Today’s Graduates Continue to Learn Once They Complete College,” Alison J. Head argues that college graduates are in desperate need of questioning skills. Although college instructors are focusing on information literacy and connecting core curriculum to critical thinking outcomes more purposefully than ever before, our graduates still “believed that formulating and asking their own questions was the one skill that they had not developed in college but found they needed in their post-college lives” (Head 2016). This research and similar research conducted by both college librarians and composition instructors, illustrates the changing patterns of learning in the information age—and how Research as Inquiry may be the single most important piece of the 2015 IL Framework.
This paper presentation explores effective means of integrating inquiry into a first-year composition classroom by illustrating the barriers, habits, and behaviors of entering college students and using preliminary grounded method research to show the positive outcomes of teaching questioning as a threshold concept. Because the information age is an active barrier against questioning and therefore against critical thought, fostering questioning as a foundation of the composition classroom and incorporating questioning into all aspects of classroom learning can give students the foundation for critical thought needed in today’s information saturated world—and show how learning to question may even save their lives.
