Goals, Objectives, Outcomes

For a while now, I’ve been frustrated by the term information literacy. It seems like the perfect term to describe the way we all should be in this changing landscape of information (“literate”) but then when we try to talk about it with people outside librarianship, they are flippant or dismissive. Students already believe they are information literate, although studies show that their confidence levels exceed their actual skills. And teaching faculty often define information literacy as being able to search databases. Which is true, yes, but it’s so much more.

So, as a result, I’ve been asking myself how do we talk about information literacy without saying those words?

I don’t think it can be boiled down to a word or phrase, which makes marketing the message a little more complicated. I’ve begun to think about it in terms of goals, objectives, and outcomes. This framework is found in many instructional design and pedagogical modules, but even before the assessment or learning activity development. In L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences, he starts out the process of designing a course with questions about goals. But rather than listing the concepts that relate to the subject matter, he asks “What would I like the impact of this course to be on students, 2-3 years after the course is over?”

Now, librarians are often not the instructors of record for specific courses. But we can think of our programmatic goals in a similar way. For example, one of the goals the Teaching & Learning Committee here at the University of Pittsburgh came up with is:

To empower our community to see themselves as savvy consumers and creators of information.

As you may notice, this definitely has markings of information literacy and the ACRL Framework, but is more of a conversation starter than the term “information literacy.” Once we have our goals set up, we can then talk about specific objectives and outcomes for various interactions with students, whether one-shot, tutorial, or teaching consultation with faculty.

What are some ways you talk to your stakeholders about information literacy? Do you have other terms that you use?