Information Literacy as a Tool for Social Justice

Overview: This interactive workshop describes the development of applied tutorials in information literacy as a tool for social justice. Academic librarians and social work faculty share their collaboration and teaching methods in preparing social work students for community practice.Proposal text: Proposal:
Social work practice increasingly requires skillful research and resource identification, quickly reviewing multiple sources of information. An evidence-based approach is central to effective and ethical social work practice, and requires skills of locating, searching strategically, assessing information, and applying intervention approaches. Further, social workers serve the most vulnerable among us and are on the frontlines of the effects of misinformation (such as "fake news”); they are acutely aware of the negative individual and community effects of false and misleading information. Social work students need to be prepared to meet the current, broad professional demands of information literacy (IL), including digital literacy, which extends across micro, mezzo and macro levels of social work practice.

Recent work calls on the collaboration between academic librarians and social work instructors to develop teaching methods that integrate within social work curricula (Johnson, Bausman & Ward, 2021). The recommendations for collaboration include academic librarians and social work instructors “being genuine partners”; developing sustainable ways to meet systematic IL needs; and ensuring opportunities for learning that are fully embedded in the curriculum (vs. “one-off instructional sessions”) (Johnson, Bausman & Ward, 2021). Developing IL, with the expertise of library science and social work, has been documented as an essential component of anti-oppressive pedagogy in social work education (Johnson, Bausman & Ward, 2021).

Given the increasing demands on being a thoughtful information consumer within a field that requires much of its practitioners, it is especially imperative that social workers hone their IL skills in order to both effectively and efficiently provide their clients and communities with authoritative information to address their unique needs. As future social work practitioners, MSW students are learning the value and application of evidence-based practice in order to inform their research questions (i.e. client and community needs) and sharing that researched information for application (i.e. client utilization/integration of research). They also need to be strategic web researchers and practice discernment in source selection, as scholarly literature databases are not likely to be an available resource once they graduate. The tutorials cover the following topics: Information Literacy and Social Justice; Social Workers’ Role in the Research Process; Advanced Search Strategies; Google Scholar and Citation Tracking; and Information Creation & Evaluation.

Pedagogically, these tutorials are divided because we recognize the content, while using social work as a lens, asks students to interrogate their current information consumption and production practices, and requires time for learning, reflection, and integration into their own practice as clinicians and researchers. We also want to respect the varied preferences for how to learn. The tutorials incorporate visual media, text, and individual assessments along with opportunities for discussion of IL-social work intersections in class discussions.

References
Johnson, S. C., Bausman, M., & Ward, S. L. (2021). Fostering information literacy: A call for collaboration between academic librarians and MSW instructors. Advances in Social Work, 21(1), 1-25.
Saunders, L. (2017). Connecting information literacy and social justice: Why and how. Communications in Information Literacy, 11(1), 55-75. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.1.47