How do we activate our students? And how to we get the academic teachers to understand the importance of information literacy? In a cooperative project between the Karolinska Institute University Library (KIB) and the Department of Learning, Informatics, Ethics and Management (LIME) at the medical university Karolinska Institutet, we have created a course that handles those questions into a win win situation for teachers and students, the educationalists at LIME and the teaching librarians.
The main objective of the project is to make the academic teachers understand how student activating methods can create a more learning positive environment, and at the same time enhance the information searching skills of the teachers.
Some of the methods we have used have taken a more experimental form, i.e. the part when one of the librarians played the role of a “bad teacher” and then a “good teacher” to create an understanding of what the climate in the classroom does for the students’ ability to learn. The following discussion focused on how the bad versus the good teacher made the participants feel, and how it helped or obstructed their learning.
Our thoughts beforehand was that the academic teachers would be drawn to the course to learn more about the methods, and we would be able to show the importance of good ability to search for information at the same time. Information seeking was being taught with the help of student activating methods, so that the discussion about how the methods worked would be based on practical experience for the teachers. In the evaluation it was obvious that the teachers had learned a lot about information seeking in general and was very pleased with that. “Imagine how much trouble it would have saved me if I knew about this before” was a common response.
This project has also created a spin-off effect for the teaching librarians. The involved librarians has greatly enhanced their pedagogic abilities, and learned practical methods to use in the library user education. The methods are applicable on most teaching situations.
|