Abstract
In this conceptual paper, I provide ideas for challenging library traditions, including the habits of our institution and the habitats they occupy. As librarians, we can encourage play and manage failure through reflection and iteration rather than penalty and closure. Librarians can create a classroom environment that allows for mistakes and child-like inquiry. Once we are less afraid to make mistakes, we open up the environment for play and experimentation. As the stakes for student success in American universities rise, the university library has an opportunity to engage students in their learning through critical pedagogy and reflective information literacy. It is important to establish a sense of adventure in confronting new realities about higher education and the way students learn. As we seek creative solutions in the classroom to stimulate thinking and fuel a renaissance in education for the twenty-first century, the library can lead the way for cross-disciplinary germination.
Notes
- 1.
It’s the last of the three points, critical literacy as leading to transformative action, that I am most interested in here. As we will later see, the roots of critical literacy as part of a democratic framework also lend itself to creativity and transformative action.
- 2.
There is a real opportunity to use creativity and divergent thinking in conjunction with T. Mackey and T. Jacobson’s proposal for a Metaliteracy framework. As they frame a definition, “Metaliteracy challenges traditional skills-based approaches to information literacy by recognizing related literacy types and incorporating emerging technologies”.
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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Newell, Z. (2015). Transforming Library Instruction Through Creativity. In: Kurbanoglu, S., Boustany, J., Špiranec, S., Grassian, E., Mizrachi, D., Roy, L. (eds) Information Literacy: Moving Toward Sustainability. ECIL 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 552. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28197-1_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28197-1_31
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