Examples
- Moraine Valley Community College Faculty Development Course: Swanson, T. (2017). Sharing the ACRL Framework with faculty: opening campus conversations. College & Research Libraries News, 78(1), 12-48.
- University of Buffalo Posters
- University of Arizona Big Questions and “ACRL IL Revisions Next Steps blog post on their development
- Bucknell University Resources
- Campbell University Information Fluency Plan
- Old Dominion University Brown Bag Workshop Plans (plus related LOEX presentation)
Activity
Browse the above examples of outreach and marketing, and post a comment with your answers to ANY of the following reflection questions:
- What elements or approaches from the examples seemed most useful, inspiring, or applicable to your institutional context? How might you implement or adapt them at your library?
- What additional examples of Framework-inspired outreach/marketing have you seen or developed? Share links to examples.
- Many of the examples above revise or condense the language of the frames to make it more approachable or relevant to the local institution. How might you approach editing the language from one of the frames to make it better fit your institutional needs?
- Identify one small-scale, Framework-inspired outreach project that you could take on in the near future. Who would you like to connect with, and what kind of method (LibGuide, poster, online or in-person discussion, etc.) would you use? How could you scale up from this project to something more ambitious?
23 Framework Things 
There is so much good stuff there. Visually, I really liked the infographics from University of Buffalo, and the Bucknell posters are wonderful in their simplicity. I also appreciated how Campbell University included the section: “what we teach” under each frame. Seeing these examples, I’m inspired to create a frameworks’ libguide for my institution. It will fall under our information literacy section, and I envision it as a tool for introducing faculty to the framework and possibly geared towards students as well. It will certainly be a step up from emailing faculty a link to the framework as I’m currently doing. Scaling up from there, my ultimate goal is to host a program or workshop on campus for faculty, particularly for department chairs and members of the curriculum committee. The framework course for faculty offered through Moraine Valley Learning Academy serves as a wonderful model for sharing the framework. I don’t think I could pull off something so ambitious, but I would like to do similar work with faculty around identifying threshold concepts and finding ways to connect the threshold concepts of their discipline to the framework.
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The University of Arizona has made great strides in (forgive me) reframing the Framework into language that is more accessible and familiar to faculty. The one that I will explore applying is “Research Evolves”. The way I read the big questions created here allows these two words to embrace other frames. This will address the concerns raised in the Brown Bag lunches at Old Dominion where “They want one perfect article!” which is an issue I imagine we all have encountered at the reference desk. Or in my case the occasional student who needs some research to back up the paper they have already written. If I can convey to students that they will not find their research neatly packaged in clear language I welcome it. And if I can get into more classes in person or online to share this message we may have more work than we can handle.
The question that emerges for me is how to market this to faculty. If the curriculum and calendar are full already, how can I bring this to classes. I want to explore better ways to embed this concept into the LMS an work with students “just in time” to fully engage in the process.
In the meantime, one of my colleagues is working actively with the Writing Program to ensure we get into all the Intro English courses as they are required as part of the Core Curriculum. I will approach her to see if we can explore whether the English faculty would be open to integrating some of the Frames into their instruction with support from the library. Perhaps if we expand the principle of “Research Evolves” to include the writing process the students are learning.
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What elements or approaches from the examples seemed most useful, inspiring, or applicable to your institutional context? How might you implement or adapt them at your library?
I really liked the professional development approaches where libraries held workshops and/or courses for professional development for faculty organized around the frameworks, and I love the idea of doing something similar here… but I wonder about getting buy-in from faculty. I think we would have to brainstorm ways to give them some more concrete benefit than just the learning experience, such as some sort of professional development credit, as at least one of the programs in the readings did. I’d have to investigate how that would work on our campus, but I like the idea.
I did also like the posters and other promotional materials, but I wonder how they create interest for them and make sure faculty are using them? I have been working on a LibGuide along these lines on and off, but have never felt satisfied by the way it has come together – I think looking at how others have done this is useful. I also like the idea of rewording the frames to make them easier to digest and use for others outside the library profession is also a really helpful way to approach the issue.
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I find the University of Buffalo’s infographic posters to be very appealing; they are easy to follow, use a consistent format, and are written in a contemporary language (pictures and short blurbs) with which most college students are familiar. I can see them posted throughout the library.
I also like Bucknell’s interactive online approach with the questions linking to additional resources. Even if a student does not click through, the four boxes that describe each framework are clear and provide a place for students to start learning.
My library has a marketing committee and sharing these links with them might be a valuable resource as models of additional ways to reach students and faculty.
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After reviewing all of the suggested documentation, I’m a fan of Wiggins Memorial Library at Campbell University’s approach.
Their “adopt a common language” approach is phenomenal, and the way that they break down each frame into its components is great for external stakeholders like administrators and faculty. By providing a frame definition that is accessible, plus knowledge practices that shore up the definition, the external stakeholders gain some background knowledge about the frame. Then, the library takes it one final step by showcasing how the frame is taught and applied in enumerated courses. This is probably the part of this guide that I love the most. Each frame’s teachable applications are identified and verified by course number. So, when the accreditation cycle rolls around, the eternal scramble isn’t going to happen for justification of what is being taught where. It’s already identified and laid out for the accrediting body to view, for the administration to take and roll into the QEP and annual reports, and for the faculty to roll into their lesson plans and departmental curricula.
After the faculty identified the two frames that were most important to them via survey and follow-up questions, I laid out the knowledge practices and dispositions of those frames in a chart and placed the teaching concepts of the library instruction next to the knowledge practices and/or disposition that matched them. It was a visual way for me to plan out the instruction revision and ensure that not only was I going to cover the material I needed to cover but also that I was doing justice to the frames and their ensuing practices and dispositions. So, I’m working with ideas akin to Campbell U’s guide.
The University of Buffalo Libraries’ posters are wonderful; I found them a few months ago and thought they were wonderful infographics that really plotted out the frames visually, not only for us as professionals, but for our external stakeholders, like the faculty and the students – those in our sphere who aren’t working with the frames everyday but who are impacted by the frames as we teach them within classroom instruction.
When I created my faculty survey, I revised the language of the frames to make it more layperson friendly for the faculty. Even with the revised language, several of the faculty members expressed anxiety that they had entered a “liminal space” as they read the frames and felt uncomfortable because the frames presented ideas in ways that they had not considered before in their academic careers.
My next project is to work with one of the faculty members to convert the library instruction into a streaming tutorial for one of her online courses. While this may not be “outreach” in the traditional sense, it is outreach because this will be the very first streaming library instruction tutorial done here at my institution.
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I really like what the Arizona University Libraries and the University of Buffalo have done with the Frames. AUL’s handout with very specific questions as well as sample student learning outcomes that can be adopted by instructor makes the concepts more concrete. The University of Buffalo’s posters do something similar with their next steps look at how the framework can be addressed in the learning process.
They’re short and digestible which I think would work better at my institution. Faculty already feel like they don’t have much time to learn things they’d like to learn in order to improve their teaching. I also know that they feel like the timeline for most of their classes, especially with losing the odd day here and there for a holiday, is too condensed. But maybe seeing small, specific ideas will help them envision how to naturally fit the Framework in with their existing curriculum.
Ideally, a brown bag or presentation would probably be best to kick start a discussion but it’ll be the smaller questions or SLOs that would do most of the work.
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Last summer the Writing Center Director and I were invited to our faculty’s annual workshop. Since the faculty had wanted us to present on “fake news,” we only touched upon the Framework. Still, the faculty got exposure to the Framework, and I got a chance to collaborate with the Writing Center.
One of the faculty even asked me to do one of the workshop exercises with her class. The activity involved guessing whether or not a site was fake. One student made the insightful point that you need at least some background knowledge to fully evaluate a site. This point reminded me of Swanson’s (2017) “novice to expert trajectory” and of this piece
https://hapgood.us/2016/12/19/yes-digital-literacy-but-which-one/
We sometimes take it for granted that students have such background knowledge.
Overall I want to build on such momentum. The resources here, especially the Pagowsky piece, will help me follow up with my faculty.
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I’m a big fan of the brown bag discussions created by Rachel Stott (last link in the list above). Rachel’s approach demonstrates that you don’t have to have all of the answers about the Framework before facilitating discussions with faculty about it. She provided a ton of useful reflection and discussion activity possibilities that could easily be incorporated into faculty development around the Framework. I’d really like to try out some of the discussion prompts she created with instructors at my institution.
One other outreach idea I’ve been considering for a while is inviting a few faculty members on my campus for an open-ended discussion about how they see the concepts from the Framework playing out in their own research and creative work. I think it would be really cool for students to have real-life examples of how faculty members relate to or understand these ideas. I could see this turning into a series of short videos, or maybe posters like the ones created at the University of Buffalo.
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