Against the Wind: Challenges and Barriers to Canadian Academic Librarians’ Instructional Practices

Abstract

Helping students learn how to navigate information—and misinformation—is as
important as ever. The Canadian information literacy (IL) landscape continues to evolve
along with rhetorical, theoretical, and contextual developments, such as the new
Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and the critical library
pedagogy movement. However, relatively little is known about actual changes to
librarians’ IL practices over time, and what causes or prevents librarians to change their
practices. This paper shares results from a twenty-year study of IL practices in Canadian
academic libraries, with a focus on the barriers and challenges to this work.