Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal August 2008 Volume 6(4)

Lifelong Learning

Advocating information literacy

The Scottish Information Literacy Project has just been awarded substantial new funding. John Crawford and Christine Irving give an update on what it has achieved so far.

What has now become the Scottish Information Literacy Project began modestly in 2004 as a one-year project, beginning with the appointment of Christine Irving as Project officer in October of that year.

The project was itself the offspring of a much smaller but important study by Glasgow Caledonian University, the Drumchapel Project, which was an overview of the IT and information literacy (IL) skills of school pupils in a deprived area of Glasgow. This showed that there was a need for an IL framework which would link those skills learned at school with higher skills learned at University. Skills learned at school could also be directly applied in the workplace.

The initial project was therefore to develop an IL framework linking secondary and higher education.
This sole objective did not last long. We soon discovered a need to explain and promote the concept of information literacy to educational and other bodies which we either wanted to influence or seek funding from. We therefore had to develop an advocacy focus. This led directly to a petition to the Scottish Parliament, ‘…to urge the Scottish Executive to ensure that the national school curriculum recognises the importance of information literacy as a key lifelong learning skill’.

When the project started we quickly recruited leading IL advocates in Scotland as project partners. We have now widened the project’s focus to recruit partners in the workplace and the Adult Literacies agenda. The project has therefore now expanded to include the following objectives with an increasing focus on lifelong learning and workplace issues:

• To develop an IL framework, linking primary, secondary and tertiary education to lifelong learning including workplace and adult literacies agendas
• Advocacy on behalf of IL for education and wider community
• Working with IL champions both UK and worldwide
• Researching and promoting IL in the workplace l Identifying and working with partners, both in education and the wider community
• Researching the role of IL in continuing professional development
• Researching the health and media literacies agenda.

The project’s key product from which all other work has followed is the still developing Draft National Information Literacy Framework Scotland. The initial work was done in 2006-7.

To develop the framework, other frameworks, models and definitions at home and abroad were examined. The aim was to map the existing learning that was taking place and allocating a notional level to learning outcomes utilising relevant reference points such as the SCQF (Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework) generic level descriptors. The intention of this was to provide a general shared understanding of each level which can then be linked to academic, vocational or professional practice.

The starting point for developing the framework was SCQF level 5 (Intermediate 2) as the only current national SQA (Scottish Qualifications Authority) qualification which is at this level. This was then used as a template for drawing up equivalent SCQF levels 4 to 1 and 6 to 7 covering secondary schools and further education colleges.

Higher education and further education colleges cover SCQF levels 8 to 12. HE uses the SCONUL model, therefore it was felt that the skills within the seven headline skills from the SCONUL Seven Pillars Model for Information Literacy should be used. In addition, exemplars of how two universities have adopted and modified this model to create IL frameworks for their own institutions were added to the framework appendices.

The SCQF levels do not cover primary schools but there is good practice in this area covering the present 5-14 curriculum within Scotland, and the City of Edinburgh’s Explore model was used. A short section on lifelong learning including workplace learning was also included.

The completed draft Framework was piloted with project partners between September 2007 and Easter 2008. The piloting included the identification of good practice, some of which were showcased at the Project Open Meeting at the end of May by project partners Craigholme School, Ardrossan Academy, the University of Abertay and the Scottish Government Information Management Unit (Information and Library Services).

Early this year we obtained funding from LTS (Learning and Teaching Scotland) to identify exemplars of good practice within the cross-curricular area of IL at different levels, and within different subject matters, for dissemination through their Curriculum for Excellence sharing practice space. For project details see www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/LTS.html.

This work offers an important mechanism to share good practice between all involved in learning and teaching and give a higher profile to the exemplars. The activities will be accessible through subject matter as well as IL activity. An example of this is an IL activity created for a second year history class involving the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or a project on impressionist painters for a first-year art class. We aim to complete this work in August.

The Framework is also beginning to achieve formal recognition. In February 2008 the Curriculum for Excellence Literacy and Language draft outcomes and experiences were published. Of particular importance to the project are the three lines of development for literacy skills:

• Reading - Enjoyment and Choice, Tools for reading, Finding and using information, Understanding, analysing and evaluating
• Writing - Enjoyment and Choice, Tools for writing, organising and using information, creating texts
• Listening and talking - Enjoyment and Choice, Tools for listening and talking, Finding and using information, Understanding, analysing and evaluating, creating texts

These development lines reflect information literacy skills and competencies contained within the framework.

In the next few months we plan to redraft the framework to make it a genuine lifelong learning document with the expansion of the primary, lifelong, workplace and community learning elements to include the allocation of specific IL skill levels to these areas.

The project has also formed a partnership with the NHS Health Education Board for Scotland which is working on its own NHS Information Literacy competency framework. Due to the experience and expertise developed on the project’s own framework, Christine was invited to join the NHS advisory group and the two projects have greatly benefited.

These outcomes derive directly from the framework. We now plan to work with LTS and project partners to link the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) draft Learning Outcomes and Experiences (these will replace the present curriculum) with IL activities and the framework. We also aim to increase usage of the National Information Literacy Framework Scotland and look at incorporating IL into teacher CPD activities and initial teacher training.

In parallel with these activities we have made contacts and recruited partners to support the workplace and lifelong learning aspects of our work. We have found staff working in Adult Literacies to be very supportive. They already undertake basic skills training and understand the value of IL as an employability skill. Using our Adult Literacies contacts, the Scottish Government Information Management Unit Library Services and Health Service contacts we conducted an interview-based research project with 20 people in the workplace between December 2007 and January 2008. This suggests that there is scope for progress although probably more so in the public sector. Interviewees usually used only a narrow range of sources, mostly internally generated, and the main source of information used is always other people. Advanced internet searching was little used and there seems to be a training need here.

Following on from the workplace research findings and recommendations we have made contact with Glasgow Chamber of Commerce which is putting us in touch with SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises); CBI Scotland which will help us to meet members of larger organisations with well developed CPD programmes into which information literacy training could be fitted; the STUC whose Everyday Skills Group will be a good point of contact; and the newly established Skills Development Scotland . We are also keen to work with public library services with well developed skills training programmes on to which IL training could be ‘piggybacked’. Dumfries and Galloway’s Libraries, Information and Archives has expressed an early interest in participating.

Over the course of the Project we have developed good working relationships with relevant agencies, notably LTS which has also funded two of our projects. Funding has also come from learndirect Scotland, for preliminary work on the framework and to develop a learning principles paper for its branded learning centres’ Learning Principles Toolkit. The Framework design and piloting was funded by Eduserv and we have just obtained more than GBP 41,500 from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to carry on the work of the project until September 2009.

We have given as much attention to the publicising of our work as time has permitted. Our website is increasingly well used, we have reported regularly in the professional press, we speak regularly at conferences and have held open meetings. Last October John went to Washington to speak at a meeting of the (US) National Forum on Information Literacy. Last December we received a delegation of Finnish librarians and in June we had a visit from 20 American school librarians.

We feel we have good reason to be proud of our achievements. We have created an information literacy community of practice which we lead. We are establishing networked resources and we hope that the revised Framework will prove to be a powerful advocacy tool with which to pursue the lifelong learning agenda at Scottish Government level.

Dr. John Crawford is Library Research Officer e: jcr@gcal.ac.uk and Christine Irving is Researcher / Project Officer e: christine.irving@gcal.ac.uk, Scottish Information Literacy Project, Glasgow Caledonian University.

Information Scotland Vol. 6(4) August 2008

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