Disciplinary Applications Of Information Literacy Threshold Concepts

"Critical pedagogy incorporates inclusive and reflective teaching for aims of social justice; it provides mechanisms for students to evaluate their social, political, and economic standing, and to question societal norms and how these norms perpetuate societal injustices. Teaching librarians have long incorporated social justice into their work, but focused interest in critical library pedagogy has grown rapidly in recent years. In two volumes, the Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook works to make critical pedagogy more accessible for library educators, examining both theory and practice to help the busy practitioner explore various apsects of teaching for social justice. These volumes provide a collection of ideas, best practices, and plans that contribute to the richness of what it means to do this type of work in libraries."--Page 4 of cover.

In 25 chapters divided into sections mirroring ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education--Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Information Creation as a Process, Information has Value, Research as Inquiry, Scholarship as Conversation, and Searching as Strategic Exploration--Disciplinary Applications of Information Literacy Threshold Concepts explores threshold concepts as an idea and the specifics of what the concepts contained in the Framework look like in disciplinary contexts. The chapters cover many disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and physical sciences, and a range of students, from first-year undergraduates to doctoral students.

"Teaching Information Literacy Threshold Concepts: Lesson Plans for Librarians is a collection designed by instruction librarians to promote critical thinking and engaged learning. It provides teaching librarians detailed, ready-to-use, and easily adaptable lesson ideas to help students understand and be transformed by information literacy threshold concepts. The lessons in this book, created by teaching librarians across the country, are categorized according to the six information literacy frames identified in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education (2015). This volume offers concrete and specific ways of teaching the threshold concepts that are central to the ACRL Framework and is suitable for all types of academic libraries, high school libraries, as well as a pedagogical tool for library and information schools". --Publisher.

Naming What We Know examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. The first part of the book defines and describes thirty-seven threshold concepts of the discipline in entries written by some of the field’s most active researchers and teachers, all of whom participated in a collaborative wiki discussion guided by the editors. These entries are clear and accessible, written for an audience of writing scholars, students, and colleagues in other disciplines and policy makers outside the academy. Contributors describe the conceptual background of the field and the principles that run throughout practice, whether in research, teaching, assessment, or public work around writing. Chapters in the second part of the book describe the benefits and challenges of using threshold concepts in specific sites—first-year writing programs, WAC/WID programs, writing centers, writing majors—and for professional development to present this framework in action. Naming What We Know opens a dialogue about the concepts that writing scholars and teachers agree are critical and about why those concepts should and do matter to people outside the field.

Threshold Concepts on the Edge explores new directions in threshold concept research and practice and is of relevance to teachers, learners, educational researchers and academic developers.

Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines brings together leading writers from various disciplines and national contexts in an important and readable volume for all those concerned with teaching and learning in higher education.

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. In any discipline, there are certain concepts – the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ – whose acquisition is akin to passing through a portal. Learners enter new conceptual (and often affective) territory. Previously inaccessible ways of thinking or practising come into view, without which they cannot progress, and which offer a transformed internal view of subject landscape, or even world view. These conceptual gateways are integrative, exposing the previously hidden interrelatedness of ideas, and are irreversible. However they frequently present troublesome knowledge and are often points at which students become stuck. Difficulty in understanding may leave the learner in a ‘liminal’ state of transition, a ‘betwixt and between’ space of knowing and not knowing, where understanding can approximate to a form of mimicry. Learners navigating such spaces report a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, anxiety, even chaos. The liminal space may equally be one of awe and wonderment. Thresholds research identifies these spaces as key transformational points, crucial to the learner’s development but where they can oscillate and remain for considerable periods. These spaces require not only conceptual but ontological and discursive shifts. This volume, the fourth in a tetralogy on Threshold Concepts, discusses student experiences, and the curriculum interventions of their teachers, in a range of disciplines and professional practices including medicine, law, engineering, architecture and military education. Cover image: Detail from ‘Eve offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden and the serpent’ c.1520–25. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved.