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  Learning Beyond the Classroom: Engaging Students in Information Literacy through Co-Curricular Activities

  Silvia Vong and Manda Vrkljan

  Co-curricular learning is an approach to teaching experiential learning using activities or programs for students outside of their coursework that include intentional learning and development. Co-curricular learning benefits from having clear learning outcomes as well as helping develop competencies that connect to students’ academic or career goals. It can be a way to engage students in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and have them begin to apply its concepts to all areas of their life and studies.

  Learning Beyond the Classroom explores activities that can help develop students’ IL knowledge, stimulate them academically and creatively, and help them develop new skills. In four sections—Campus Connections, Employment Experiences, Innovative Initiatives, and Assessment Approaches—chapters illustrate different approaches to incorporating the ACRL Framework concepts and how best to measure a student’s success to demonstrate the value of the co-curricular activities.

  A student’s development within their chosen discipline prepares them for a future career, but it is the transferable skills they acquire through experiential activities that demonstrate their full understanding of the concepts taught. Learning Beyond the Classroom can help librarians include information literacy concepts within co-curricular activities and prepare their students to apply critical thinking to everyday pursuits.

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  Library Partnerships in International Liberal Arts Education: Building Relationships Across Cultural and Institutional Lines

  Jeff Hiroshi Gima and Kara Malenfant

  Internationalization continues to gain traction among US colleges and universities as overseas branch campuses now dot the globe alongside an established and growing group of independent American-modeled institutions of higher education, some founded as early as the 19th century. As higher education and the academic library environment evolves, librarians at many of these independent institutions are identifying priorities that include not only collaborating with educational stakeholders, enhancing teaching and learning, and connecting to the institution’s mission, but also positioning themselves as active and creative partners in increasingly digital learning and scholarship. An international environment is both a challenge and an opportunity for these priorities.

  Library Partnerships in International Liberal Arts Education explores these challenges and opportunities through perspectives that are inherently international and intercultural because of the authors’ own backgrounds, and in particular because of their institutional environments. The authors are librarians, faculty, and technologists at institutions that belong to the AMICAL Consortium, a consortium of American-modeled international liberal arts institutions working together on common goals for libraries, technology, and learning. The chapters describe library-anchored collaborations that demonstrate struggles, but also successes and rich possibilities, in these thoroughly international—and increasingly digital—liberal arts institutions. They provide cumulative knowledge, reference points, and aspirational targets for planning future library-related collaborations in similar environments.

  While a fascinating look at new collaborative roles and digitally focused priority areas for academic librarians as they are being addressed within AMICAL’s membership, the compelling ideas arising from these intercultural contexts have broad application and introduce opportunities to engage in international collaboration with the members of this unique consortium.

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  Sharing Spaces and Students: Employing Students in Collaborative Partnerships

  Holly A. Jackson

  Academic libraries continue to evolve from the traditional focus on collections to an increased emphasis on community space and the inclusion of makerspaces, academic success centers, learning commons, and other areas within the physical library space. These partnerships often involve sharing student employees in multi-department positions, and these positions require unique planning, goal setting, training, and assessment.

  In six chapters—The Importance of Partnerships, Annual Goals, Hiring Students, Developing Training, Assessing Success, and Moving Forward—Sharing Spaces and Students helps partners within the library bridge the gap between expectations and outcomes, and hire and train students to deliver high-quality work on behalf of all involved parties. Case studies throughout the book examine partnerships with academic departments, writing centers, career centers, cultural centers, tutoring services, technology services and information technology (IT) departments, as well as first-year experience and peer-learning departments.

  As library partnerships with other campus departments become more and more common, it’s important that libraries know how to plan for these partnerships and hire, train, and assess the students who will work within them. With prompts, ideas for goal-setting, agreements, checklists, and more, Sharing Spaces and Students can help you create your plan for student workers, ensure healthy and happy library partnerships, and serve the students using these crucial services.

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  Supporting Today's Students in the Library: Strategies for Retaining and Graduating International, Transfer, First-Generation, and Re-Entry Students

  Ngoc-Yen Tran and Silke Higgins

  In the last decade, the United States has seen a marked increase in nontraditional students, a diverse population of adult students who attend college while working, supporting families, or negotiating any number of circumstances that might delay the completion of their higher education goals. Studies have consistently shown that nontraditional students are more likely than traditional students to not complete their degree work or take longer to graduate for a variety of reasons, including outside responsibilities, difficulties adjusting to academic and campus environments, and new or different learning methodologies. As a result of the rise in nontraditional students and university-wide efforts to increase student retention and graduation rates, academic libraries are shifting and expanding their capabilities in order to better provide resources, services, and spaces to meet users’ unique needs.

  Supporting Today’s Students in the Library collects current strategies from all types of academic libraries for retaining and graduating nontraditional students, with many of them based on learning theories and teaching methodologies. The book explores methods for overcoming language barriers, discusses best practices, and presents case studies that support the changing student population. Additionally, Supporting Today’s Students in the Library provides a variety of ideas for new services, spaces, and outreach opportunities that support nontraditional students on campus and beyond.

  With targeted ideas and strategies for increasing agency and engagement, as well as addressing the diverse needs and challenges of nontraditional student populations, Supporting Today’s Students in the Library: Strategies for Retaining and Graduating International, Transfer, First-Generation, and Re-Entry Students demonstrates how academic libraries are successfully serving these students.

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  Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization

  Andrea Baer, Ellysa Stern Cahoy, and Robert Schroeder

  As political polarization has continued to grow within and beyond the United States in past decades, the challenges of engaging in open and constructive dialogue have become increasingly apparent. The effects of this tension are evident in numerous aspects of library work, including interactions and relationships in our local contexts and in our larger professional community, as well as all areas of the library—classrooms, collections, technology, management, programming, LIS programs, and library spaces.

  Reflective dialogue asks us to pause before reacting, to ground ourselves in a sense of compassion for ourselves and others, and to use that grounding to open a space to listen and to speak with the goal of recognizing a shared humanity and appreciating difference. In four sections, Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization explores the various ways in which librarians experience and respond to political polarization and its effects, both in our everyday work and in our professional communities:

  • Libraries as Dialogic Spaces: Limits and Possibilities
  • Dialogue amid Polarization and Extreme Skepticism: Challenges and Opportunities
  • Special Collections and Archives: Past and Present in Conversation
  • The Information Literacy Classroom: Uneasy Questions, Creative Responses

  Divisive times can spark positive social change with more intentional reflection, listening, and empathy across social groups and identities. Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization can be a catalyst and a resource for reflective and constructive dialogue, and a prompt for asking hard and sometimes uncomfortable questions about what reflective dialogue is, what forms it might take and in what contexts, who it does or does not include, and what its possibilities and limitations are.