LibGuides: Actionable Design Justice for Libraries: Design Justice in Action

Introduction

The Ohio Five Information Literacy Cohort came together to design anti-racist information literacy online modules that could be used across our institutions. We started this process by reading and discussing research on critical pedagogy and anti-racism in libraries (see Resource List). As we sat with these concepts, we realized that we missed a significant step in this process, student voices.

This page details how we took a step back and let Design Justice take the lead, where we invited the communities that would be impacted by our work into our design process.

We have outline many of our main points in the subsequent pages. However, if you would like to see our full write up of the research we have conducted thus far, please see the attached PDF.

Initial Survey

Our first step was to see what information literacy topics students were interested in learning about with a quick survey. Our intent with this initial survey is to get a broad idea of the topic that students would like to see as our first information literacy module. We purposely designed a fairly simple survey that was not going to gather much in-depth information, because we wanted to lower the barriers for students to participate. We hoped the shorter the survey, the more students would take the survey.

Student Survey on Information Literacy
The first question of the survey asks students what ACRL Framework they would be interested in learning about. Their answer would then take them to follow-up questions on the chosen Frame. A key to this survey was to get away from the jargony language of the framework and describe the concepts in student-centered language.
Faculty and Staff Survey of Information Literacy
These are the same basic questions as the student survey, but instead asking faculty and staff what they believe their students need to learn about.

Focus Groups

The next stage of our quest to collaborate with students was to host a set of focus groups, both in-person and online to expand on the information that we gathered from the initial surveys. During our time together, we prompted students to talk about their positive and negative learning experiences, how they assess their own understanding, and what information literacy topics they are the most interested in learning about.

Focus Group Questions
The student's interests and group dynamics set the pace of the discussion, but focus group facilitators made sure to focus the conversations on at least one question in each group.

Future Plans - Students as Designers

The next stage of this process is to use the information we gathered from the survey and the focus groups to actually build a pilot module. We will collaborate with paid student workers to develop learning modules based on the feedback we received in our surveys and focus groups, developing content that students want to learn using learning and assessment techniques that they find effective. One of our take-aways from the survey and focus group process is that we did not fully succeed in translating the framework to student-centered language, so we will be collaborating more deeply with students moving forward.