Sara Sharun and Erika E. Smith

Educational development
partnerships and practices
Helping librarians move beyond the one-shot

G

iven the current, widespread concern
about “fake news” and information
disorder, those working in post-secondary
contexts have recognized a pressing need to
develop students’ digital literacy (DL). Based
on our experience collaboratively designing and delivering a faculty workshop on
“Teaching Students about Fake News,” we
see library connections to educational development as one way to address this need.
Because faculty members design, develop,
and deliver the requisite curriculum—and
are often called upon to address the challenges that their students face in navigating,
evaluating, and applying online content—
they are frequently a first point of contact for
help.1 Research examining student interactions with online news, social media, and
other digital content also demonstrates how
faculty play a vital part in facilitating and
supporting critical digital engagement.2 All
of this underscores the importance of faculty
roles in promoting digital and information
literacies. A fruitful strategy for librarians
to build better connections with faculty is
through educational development strategies.
While educational strategies stemming
from instructional design have received some
attention in library research and practice,
there has been much less discussion about
potential library connections to educational
development. Educational development (ED)
is a term commonly used to describe the
intentional planned actions and activities—
often professional development opportuniOctober 2020

ties, instructional programs, or other educational initiatives—that faculty members and
institutions undertake to enhance teaching
and learning in higher education.3 The role
of educational developers, many of whom
work as pedagogical experts within teaching centers, is to facilitate individual faculty
learning, as well as wider instructional and
organizational development, with the goal of
“helping colleges and universities to function
effectively as teaching and learning communities.”4 Recent discussion about connections
between libraries and ED highlights a number
of ways that the library community can join
broader conversations about teaching and
learning in higher education, particularly
through wider collaborations with centers
for teaching and greater involvement in
educational development.5
As colleagues who are collocated within
our university’s Library and Learning Centre,
we recognized an opportunity to foster digital
literacy through educational development
practices. Since the “fake news” phenomenon
was of great interest on our campus, we
looked to promote digital literacy by creating
a faculty workshop on disinformation within
an established and well-recognized program

Sara Sharun is assistant professor and librarian, email:
ssharun@mtroyal.ca, Erika E. Smith is assistant professor
and faculty development consultant, email: eesmith@
mtroyal.ca, at Mount Royal University
© 2020 Sara Sharun and Erika E. Smith

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within the Academic Development Centre.
Integrating approaches from the fields of
educational development and library and information science (LIS) to engage with these
topical issues enabled us to build individual
and institutional awareness of digital literacy
and extend the reach of instructional support
on campus.
This article provides an example of how
librarians can leverage educational development strategies to move beyond one-shot instruction by engaging faculty both as learners
and as educators, and how partnering with
educational developers can help disperse
information and digital literacies across the
university curriculum.

An educational development
initiative aimed at fake news
As it is on many campuses these days, fake
news has been a hot topic at our institution.
Library-led interventions to teach students
about fake news are common, as evidenced
in the number of online teaching resources,
conference presentations, and publications
appearing among the LIS community over
the past few years. However, while the discourse around fake news in academic libraries is often centered on students, there are
far fewer examples of including faculty in
outreach and instruction efforts addressing
information disorder and disinformation.
In our roles as a liaison librarian to
the School of Communication Studies and
an educational developer, who provides
expertise in emerging technologies, we
noticed that both educators and students
were overwhelmed by—and, in many cases,
ill-equipped to deal with—fake news. While
some of these issues were being covered
through existing library instruction with our
undergraduate students, formal initiatives
helping educators to discern disinformation
and build their own capacities with digital literacies did not exist. As a result, we saw faculty learning and development as an urgent
area to address. We collaborated to create a
new workshop that allowed us to gauge and
respond to faculty needs while also opening
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October 2020

up space for discussions about information
and digital literacies more broadly.
In our 90-minute educational development workshop, “Teaching Students about
Fake News: Curriculum Strategies for Navigating Bias and False Content Online,” we
illustrated ways for faculty to foster students’
critical assessment of digital information and
scaffold digital literacies within their own
curriculum. The workshop format allowed
educators to build their own knowledge
and skills in these areas in a supportive environment. We successfully cofacilitated the
workshop three times in the spring and fall
of 2019. Voluntary registration was available
to faculty and staff across campus, and the
workshop audience included faculty from a
variety of disciplines, as well as librarians and
university staff who provide support services
for students.
Our workshop begins with an activity that
enables us as facilitators to check for common (mis)conceptions and identify shared
areas of concern that we can respond to
either in the session or in separate one-toone consultations. We follow this discussion
with definitions and examples of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation
drawn from contemporary media and from
the literature.
After establishing foundational terminology and a shared understanding of common
issues connected to current examples, we then
transition to a brief hands-on activity, where
participants evaluate two similar online health
sources. Using research from the Stanford History Education Group6 and short explanatory
videos by Mike Caufield,7 we then work with
the group to hone concrete strategies (including lateral reading) that are efficient and effective in helping to determine the credibility of
such sources. Several faculty members have
told us that they found this particular activity to be so helpful that they planned to use
it with their own students. We conclude the
workshop by providing a model for building
digital literacies and presenting assessment
ideas and resources that educators can use in
their lives and in the classroom.
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workshop, we therefore highlighted a transRecent research shows that digital literacy
disciplinary model for developing digital litconversations do not typically take place in
eracy9 to demonstrate how DL knowledge,
university classrooms,8 and while our initial
interactions with workshop participants
skills, and attributes (KSAs) could be inreflected these findings, we are hopeful
corporated into any disciplinary context or
that collaborative initiatives like ours could
level of study.
help to close this gap. Faculty in our workUsing educational development apshops generally indicated that although they
proaches to discuss digital literacy as a curwere concerned with students’ exposure to
ricular issue had a number of benefits. We
information disorder, they had not incorpowere able to reinforce the importance of
rated these concepts into their assignments
faculty roles in developing digital literacies by
and were more
showing recent
accustomed
evidence that
to steering
students seek
students totheir guidance
wards acaon source selecdemic sources
tion, evaluation,
and discourand use. This
aging the use
created opportuof “popular”
nities for discussources than
sion about the
they were to
impact on stuhelping students when facdents tackle
ulty exclusively
source evaluarequire scholarly
tion. By buildsources, a pracing relationtice that inhibits
ships, illustratdevelopment
ing pragmatic Diagram illustrating three interconnected domains of digital a n d t r a n s f e r
strategies, and literacy involving procedural and technical, cognitive, and of information
sociocultural knowledge, skills, and attributes. Erika E. Smith,
making space
evaluation skills
Renate Kahlke and Terry Judd, 2018, https://doi.org/10.6084
for critical conbetween the
/m9.figshare.11908425.
versations, we
classroom and
are optimistic
everyday life.10
that this pattern could change in the future.
Often, the relevance or meaning of inforWe were especially encouraged that a nummation and digital literacies can be difficult
ber of participants followed up with us indito communicate effectively with faculty imvidually for further curriculum consultation
mersed in their disciplines who may feel they
as they worked to incorporate strategies for
have little time or lack an ability to address
combating fake news into their own teaching.
such topics. In our workshop, we encouraged faculty to see how information and
digital literacies could be incorporated into
Key takeaways
their curriculum in meaningful ways and to
While the disciplinary context of particuchallenge their assumptions that these KSAs
lar digital literacies is certainly important,
are beyond the scope of their course content
it is equally clear that concerns about stuor disciplinary expertise.
dents’ ability to effectively use technologies
In particular, we prompted faculty to
to create, find, evaluate, and communicate
consider the limitations of some of their traonline information span and transcend the
ditional academic approaches to information
disciplines. In our educational development
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seeking and use. We provided assessment
ideas that move past a dichotomy between
“scholarly” and “popular” sources and promote the guided use of the popular information sources (including those found via
social media) that students encounter and
use in their everyday lives.
The workshop generated great discussions about disciplinary assumptions, values,
and expectations for information use, and
prompted participants to think about how,
where, and when information and digital
literacies should be a part of a student’s
university experience. Many participants
concluded that this is a larger conversation
that needs to take place around campus,
something that we intend to facilitate in
the future through curriculum planning and
educational development initiatives.

Forming beneficial partnerships
The benefits of forming partnerships between educational developers in academic
teaching centers and librarians are significant. Our collaborative faculty workshop
provides a contemporary example of how
librarians can address the challenges of
sustainability by meaningfully scaling up IL
instruction and filling in gaps in traditional
IL instruction programs. There is value in
considering the learning needs of faculty
when it comes to opening up conversations
around integrating digital and information
literacies, in planning for sustainable coverage of IL and DL, and in considering the
potential impacts of an educational development approach to IL support for faculty
and their students.
This type of partnership also provides an
effective means of engaging faculty with IL
and DL concepts. These workshops allowed
us to frame these concepts in the context
of a particular phenomenon—information
disorder—that was relevant, timely, and
applicable in various disciplinary contexts.
We recently updated our face-to-face session
to an online format including current issues
surrounding fake news and the coronavirus
pandemic, piloting it with an undergraduate
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October 2020

audience in spring 2020, and we plan to
facilitate an updated online workshop with
this focus in order to meet faculty needs in
fall 2020.

Conclusion
This partnership between the Library and
the Academic Development Centre provided an opportunity to reach interested
faculty from a wide variety of departments
and disciplines. Our approach enabled us
to facilitate valuable cross-campus conversations with faculty about incorporating
information and digital literacies across
the curriculum—and, more importantly, in
their own teaching.
By intentionally using an educational
development lens, we resisted tendencies toward isolated “one and done”
training techniques. Viewing our workshop as a simple but meaningful step
toward addressing the larger problem
of fake news and information disorder,
we communicated the value of lifelong
learning by sharing our own process of
continuous growth in the face of these
complex, evolving issues. We also encouraged others to keep building their
knowledge and skills through ongoing
professional development and reflective
practice, making the avenues for future
growth opportunities through our Library
and Learning Centre transparent.
The need for greater faculty involvement
in building digital literacy is clear. If information and digital literacy development is
everyone’s job, and if we do want to move
beyond the one-shot student instruction
model, then there is an opportunity for librarians to make use of their expertise and
experience in new, collaborative relationships. In our experience, powerful partnerships between librarians and educational
developers are one way to ignite wider
curricular change and catalyze individual
teaching improvement.

Notes
1. Alison J. Head, Erica DeFrain, Barbara
448

Fister, and Margy MacMillan, “Across the
Great Divide: How Today’s College Students
Engage with News,” First Monday, 24, no. 8
(2019): 1-18, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/
ED597133.pdf.
2. Alison J. Head, Barbara Fister, and
Margy MacMillan, Information Literacy in
the Age of Algorithms: Student Experiences
with News and Information, and the Need
for Change, 2020, https://www.projectinfolit.
org/uploads/2/7/5/4/27541717/algoreport.
pdf.
3. Cheryl Amundsen and Mary Wilson, “Are We Asking the Right Questions?
A Conceptual Review of the Educational
Development Literature in Higher Education,” Review of Educational Research,
82, no. 1 (2012): 90–126, https://doi.
org/10.3102/0034654312438409.
4. Peter Felten, Alan Kalish, Allison
Pingree, and Kathryn M. Plank, “Toward
a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in
Educational Development,” To Improve the
Academy, 25, no. 1 (2007): 93, https://doi.
org/10.1002/j.2334-4822.2007.tb00476.x.

5. Sharon B. Mader and Craig Gibson,
Learning in Partnership, National Institute
for Learning Outcomes Assessment, 2019,
https://www.learningoutcomesassessment.
org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ViewpointMaderGibson.pdf.
6. Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew,
Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning
More When Evaluating Digital Information,
2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3048994.
7. NewsWise, “Online Verification Skills,”
YouTube video, June 29, 2018, https://www.
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsSbsdukQ8VYy8
8IiSJhz4NyBxxtLzsNr.
8. Head, Fister, and MacMillan, Information Literacy in the Age of Algorithms.
9. Erika E. Smith, Renate Kahlke, and
Terry Judd, “From Digital Natives to Digital
Literacy: Anchoring Digital Practices Through
Learning Design,” Proceedings of the Australasian Society for Computers in Tertiary
Education, 510-515, http://2018conference.
ascilite.org/.
10. Head, Fister, and MacMillan, Information Literacy in the Age of Algorithms.

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