Teaching

Faculty librarians teach skills and concepts essential for academic success, including information literacy, primary source literacy, and courses that explore the intersections of information and society. Our instruction may take the form of full-term, for-credit courses; stand-alone workshops; or customized sessions integrated into other courses.

Library Instruction Request Form: Request a library instruction session for your course.

Information Literacy

Information literacy is the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning. (ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education)  As such, it is critical to any project in which finding, evaluating, and using information is required.

Information literacy promotes awareness of the variety of contexts (technological, rhetorical, social, cultural, economic, and legal) which condition the creation, access, distribution, and use of knowledge. As such, information literacy instruction is more than training in how to operate information technologies like search engines and databases. Rather, it includes both the practical skills and critical discernment necessary to engage with our complex information environment. The ability to recognize and interrogate the many technologies that mediate our access to and use of information is an important component of information literacy in the twenty-first century.

Monroe Library’s Teaching & Learning Team draws upon the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) to shape our instruction program.

In turn, the library instruction program supports the Loyola Core Competencies, which expressly include information literacy.  It also fosters the university’s Jesuit values, which prioritize critical thought.  By teaching information literacy within the major programs, as well as in the Core, we also support SACS Accreditation Standard 11.3, which states that “The institution ensures that users have access to regular and timely instruction in the use of the library and other learning/information resources.”

Curriculum-integrated Instruction

Faculty librarians work with departmental faculty to identify priority courses within programs for high-impact instruction. In order to integrate instruction, liaisons work with those course instructors to plan sessions around explicit learning outcomes, active learning, and learning assessment. Ideally, librarians will work with courses that teach essential research methods and information-intensive skills in each field of study.

Please contact your liaison to plan for library instruction. Examples of information literacy instruction include but are not limited to sessions on finding information, evaluating sources, academic integrity, archival and special collections research, and copyright. 

Primary Source Literacy

Monroe Library librarians and archivists also have a special interest in promoting primary source literacy and providing learning experiences to students across the curriculum. We seek to engage learners with primary sources in all formats, including unique materials from our Special Collections & Archives and at partner institutions in New Orleans, digital collections in the Louisiana Digital Library and other online repositories, as well as more widely distributed formats such as newspapers, datasets, creative works, and other records of the human experience.

Primary sources are materials in a variety of formats that serve as original evidence documenting a time period, an event, a work, people, or ideas. Primary source literacy is the combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, and ethically use primary sources within specific disciplinary contexts, in order to create new knowledge or to revise existing understandings. (Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, SAA-ACRL/RBMS Joint Task Force on Primary Source Literacy, 2018)

LIBR Courses

In addition to contributing information literacy and primary source literacy instruction to courses offered across the Loyola curriculum, librarians also teach their own courses. The following are courses recently taught by Loyola librarians.