Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2024
Journal / Book Title
LOEX Conference Proceedings 2024
Abstract
Montclair State University will begin implementing its new general education curriculum, known as Montclair Core, in the Fall 2024 academic term. Following years of collaborative conversations among university stakeholders, including the library, critical information literacy (CIL) was adopted as a foundational value in the new curriculum. Embedding CIL into the Montclair Core represents an incredible opportunity for the library to cultivate new partnerships and share our expertise more broadly with students and faculty. However, this opportunity also poses a number of challenges to an already under-resourced Research and Reference Services (RRS) department at the Harry A. Sprague Library. After years of “doing more with less,” our small team of teaching librarians is exhibiting signs of stress and burnout resulting from ever-expanding workloads, an all-too-common experience within the profession today (Almeida, 2020). In keeping with the spirit of CIL, the RRS librarians used this moment to reflect upon our values, priorities, and sense of professional well-being as we considered the challenges of developing a CIL-oriented program from the ground up. Invoking the CIL literature, the Montclair Core values, and our own lived experiences, we agreed to foreground an ethics of care in our new program. This paper will document our journey from the development and embedding of CIL in the Montclair Core to the current status of our CIL program. In so doing, we hope to share practical insights with other academic librarians to help navigate the process of developing a CIL program at their own institutions.
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Wallace, Drew; Moreno, Perri; and Baird, Catherine, "Growing Critical Information Literacy in our General Education Program by Grounding Ourselves in an Ethics of Care" (2024). University Libraries Scholarship and Creative Works. 103.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/spraguelib-facpubs/103
Published Citation
Wallace, Drew; Moreno, Perri; and Baird, Catherine, "Growing Critical Information Literacy in our General Education Program by Grounding Ourselves in an Ethics of Care" (2024). LOEX Conference Proceedings 2024. 15. https://commons.emich.edu/loexconf2024/15