(via Jennifer Schwartz, DePaul University)
Registration is now open for the 15th annual Information Literacy Summit. The event will take place from 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM on Friday, April 29, on the campus of Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, IL. The theme of this year’s meeting is “Shifting Perspectives: Developing Critical Approaches in Information Literacy”. The conference is jointly sponsored by the DePaul University Library and the Moraine Valley Community College Library. The cost of attending is $20 for presenters and $40 for everyone else. Librarians who are involved with teaching and learning in any aspect are encouraged to attend. (This includes staff from academic, special, public, and school libraries.) Teachers and other educators who want to discuss information literacy, student research, and student use of information may also find the conference useful.
This year’s keynote address, “Critical Pedagogy in a Time of Compliance”, will be delivered by Emily Drabinski, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Library Instruction at Long Island University, Brooklyn. The speech will focus on how the promise of critical pedagogy lies in its capacity to change lives–our own and those of our students–as we try new ways of thinking and teaching that challenge systems of power that privilege some and not others. In the last ten years, critical pedagogy has moved from the margins to the center, most clearly in its influence on the new Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Frames like “Information has Value” and “Authority is Constructed” have long been tenets of critical voices in the field, voices that can now be heard emanating from the center of our professional lives. And yet, critical approaches to teaching and learning face acute challenges from a higher education environment that increasingly values teaching and learning by the numbers, tying everything from accreditation to book budgets to quantifiable outcomes. In this talk, Emily Drabinski will explore these tensions and offer thoughts on how we can change the world while keeping our jobs.
For more information about the conference, and to register, click here.