Several weeks ago, I was delighted to return to my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the annual conference of the American Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). While there, I attended a talk titled Future Proofing the Framework with Social Justice, Metacognition, and Digital Literacy.

The presenters were members of the ACRL’s Education and Behavioral Sciences Section’s Instruction for Education Committee. This committee is creating a companion document to the ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL Framework or Framework) that will provide librarians working in teacher education with information about effective instructional approaches.

The ACRL Framework

The ACRL Framework was adopted in 2016 to provide a structure for teaching and learning about information literacy. It is based on the principles of backward design and threshold concepts. Threshold concepts are defined as “those ideas in any discipline that are passageways or portals to enlarged understanding or ways of thinking and practicing within that discipline.” The Framework provides threshold concepts for information literacy. Knowledge practices, meaning ways “learners can increase their understanding of information literacy concepts,” and dispositions, which are the “affective, attitudinal, or valuing dimension of learning,” round out the parts of the Framework.

The Framework comprises six Frames, each covering an aspect of information literacy. Every Frame has associated concepts, knowledge practices, and dispositions. The six Frames are:

  • Authority is Constructed and Contextual
  • Information Creation as a Process
  • Information Has Value
  • Research as Inquiry
  • Scholarship as Conversation
  • Searching as Strategic Exploration

The Companion Document

The presenters’ committee is finalizing a LibGuide titled Instruction for Educators: Companion Document to the ACRL Framework. (They are using a LibGuide as the format for the document.) In its current form, it includes an introductory page, a resource list, a list of contributors, and a page for each Frame. The following sections are included on each Frame’s page:

  • A brief introduction to the Frame.
  • Education in Context, which discusses how the Frame relates to students in education programs, professional educators generally, and professional educators who teach information literacy.
  • Additional Key Knowledge Practices and Dispositions, which is divided into sections addressing social justice, digital/media literacy, and metacognition/reflection.
  • Three sample learning objectives and suggested activities for each.
  • A section linking the Frame with relevant parts of the professional standards for educators.
  • A section mapping the ACRL Framework to the AAC&U Value Rubric.
  • Finally, citations to relevant scholarly articles.

To create the companion document, the committee divided into small teams so that no major task was left to an individual. It also held discussion events to hear from education librarians who weren’t on the committee. In addition, committee members reviewed companion documents created by other ACRL sections. Fields that have already developed a companion document include journalism, political science/international relations, writing/literature, science/engineering/math, social work, sociology, and women/gender studies. Of these, the presenters found the social work document to be especially helpful.

The presenters stressed that one of the goals of this session was to provide audience members with ideas and insights that they could use in creating a companion document for their own disciplines. That got me thinking about how the Framework relates to teaching legal literacy skills.

The Principles and Standards for Legal Research Competency

The AALL’s Principles and Standards for Legal Research Competency (“Principles and Standards”) currently guides a lot of legal research instruction. The executive board approved this document for the first time in 2013. In April 2020, they approved a revised version. 

I’ve used the Principles and Standards in developing my legal research classes. Unlike the ACRL Framework, it lays out Standards and related Competencies. I find this useful for my 1L classes, which probably include more traditional bibliographic instruction than is currently fashionable. I do this because, in my experience, students need and appreciate a certain degree of “click here” instruction.

However, it feels like we are entering an era where traditional research methods will either coexist alongside artificial intelligence-powered approaches or be almost entirely replaced by them. Think about how much ChatGPT has driven the conversation on this blog lately. I am reminded of a quote from Nicholas Mignanelli’s 2020 Law Library Journal article, Critical Legal Research: Who Needs It?: 

One can easily imagine a future in which a legal document is uploaded free of citations, only to have the “correct citations” automatically inserted, to say nothing of a time when complex briefs will be created from previously uploaded material.

(Mignanelli 2020, 337).

Even if we haven’t reached that point yet, I find it hard to believe that’s not where we are going. This new era may benefit from the ACRL Framework’s more open-ended, less prescriptive approach. Specifically, the Framework may be better suited than the Principles and Standards to serve as the basis for teaching critical information literacy skills, which will likely be increasingly important in an AI-dominated era.

Critical Information Literacy and the Framework

The Framework is already being used to guide legal research instruction. For example, Yasmin Sokkar Harker[1] and Latia Ward[2] have published articles about using the Framework. And Olivia Smith Schlinck has written on this blog about using the Framework for teaching critical information literacy skills.

ACRL must approve the companion document being developed by the Instruction for Education Committee. I was not thinking about an ACRL-approved document. However, I believe the AALL’s Principles and Standards were based, in part, on ACRL standards that preceded the Framework. Maybe something similar can be done with the Framework. I dream of eventually teaching a Framework-based semester-long critical legal information literacy course, and I suspect I am not alone. Such courses would benefit greatly from a structure for developing and sharing law-specific learning objectives, instructional materials, and assessments tied to the Framework.

[1] Sokkar Harker, Yasmin. 2016-2017. “Legal Information for Social Justice: The New ACRL Framework and Critical Information Literacy.” Legal Information Review 2:19-60. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/leinforv2&i=26.

[2] Ward, Latia. 2022. “A Librarian’s Experience Teaching Critical Information Literacy,” Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 41, no. 2 (2022): 52-66. https://doi.org/10.1080/0270319X.2022.2089808.