The Roles of Academic Librarians in Fostering a Pedagogy for Information Literacy

Gloria Leckie is associate professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, and Anne Fullerton is liaison librarian, Biology and Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo. There is widespread agreement among academic librarians that they can make a crucial difference in ensuring that information literacy skills are integrated into university programs in some manner, and that they must make significant efforts to work with faculty to achieve this end (Warmkessel and McCade 1997; Baker 1995; Rader 1995; Lipow 1992). However, this is not an easy task, and numerous studies have shown that academic librarians and faculty do not understand each other’s roles or expectations very well (Carpenter 1997; Crowley 1996; Hardesty 1995). The lack of understanding is further complicated by the existence of distinct pedagogical discourses for the two groups, which only serve to further distance faculty and librarians from each other. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the pedagogical discourses of faculty and librarians, and to put forward some ideas about how an understanding of discourse can aid academic librarians in developing pedagogical roles that will foster course/program-related integrated information literacy. The assumptions guiding the paper are that 1) academic libriarians have an important role to play in higher education by helping students to become information literate, and 2) course/programrelated integrated information literacy is a desirable way to accomplish this.