Information Literacy Teaching and Collaboration with the School Library

What Teachers Think and Do

Abstract

What do school librarians and teachers know about each other? When two individuals with different professional backgrounds and expectations work together, knowledge of the other is required. The study that is presented in this paper contributed to librarians’ discovery of the world of teachers. A qualitative case study approach allowed to gain an in-depth understanding about teachers’ conceptions of student information literacy learning as well as teachers’ practices of information literacy teaching and collaboration with the school library in an entire faculty in a US independent high school. The study revealed that information literacy teaching in formal education is a highly complex endeavor. A major implication for practice is that school librarians need to take into account this complexity and agree with teachers on common understandings of information literacy and negotiate opportunities, objectives, and responsibilities with them for providing pedagogical interventions about information literacy.