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Certainly, most academic-disciplinary literacy initiatives in the Ibero-American context have arisen with the purpose of achieving social justice, especially in a territory that has suffered from inequity and whose deepening has increased with the current health emergency situation. However, despite well-intentioned initiatives, these programs, in general, have followed Anglo-Saxon models far removed from Ibero-American needs and reality. Therefore, in their implementation, they have dichotomies that ultimately weaken their sustainability over time and their results in their level of real inclusion, some of these – considering the approaches of Tierney (2018) and others – are: assimilation/accommodation, elitism/inclusion, institutional reform/educational innovation, research/action, remediation/re-mediation, standardization/contextualization, performance/learning, submission/emancipation, monologism/dialogism and homogeneity/diversity. In this way, based on a qualitative and reflective analysis on the experiences of three academic literacy programs in three universities in Argentina, Chile, and Spain, we will make these tensions explicit, and we will reveal practices that are truly contextualized to the communities where they are inserted, such as their eclectic, collaborative, dialogic, and remediated nature, which allows them to be constantly codesigned by the participation of students, professors, and tutors and whose research is promoted through action. In this sense, these countries can be related by sharing the language, a recent tradition of academic literacy and high school dropout rates. Finally, knowing both the strengths and the contradictions they still hold will contribute to continuing the process of contextualizing to the communities and, thus, establishing them as emancipatory pedagogies from the South to the South.

This chapter presents a discussion of innovations in pedagogic approaches for high-achieving, pre-degree pathway program students at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

The question under discussion in the academic language classroom is the extent to which dynamic cohorts of multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary students are being enabled to fulfill individual learning goals as well as the institution’s expectations of pathway learners and academic language users. Wingate (2015) argues that in the absence of an epistemological and socioculturally embedded literacy instruction, students are not equitably prepared for success in the discipline or the wider institution. The chapter reviews critiques of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and Academic Literacies by addressing “the best of both worlds” (Wingate & Tribble, 2012, p. 492) approach.

The chapter continues with a case study into the Academic Vocabulary in Literacy strand of the Foundation EAP course on the International Foundation Programme at Edinburgh University. There then follows close analysis of innovation by course designers to adapt the “best of both traditions” model (Wingate & Tribble, 2014, p. 2) into an integrated academic language and literacy approach. It is posited that this approach could enable attempts at transition for high-achieving foundation students by experiencing language in dynamic and multi-modal genres.

Within the context of forced migration, literacy can facilitate liberation and participation, though literacy often serves instead to exclude. Given the ongoing global refugee crisis, literacy researchers must work toward understanding how literacy shapes the livelihoods of those impacted by forced migration. The purpose of this study was to interrogate the ways in which certain literacies were valued or disregarded in the pursuit of a college degree and to uncover the ways that refugee-background students navigated these limitations. Using a multiple case study, this research explored the experiences of six students from refugee backgrounds as they navigated the literacy expectations of the college program. This chapter highlights two themes – our way versus their way and playing the game – that highlight the ways that participants pushed against the literacy constraints that they perceived in the program.

To examine the ways in which video supported an interdisciplinary literacy intervention for struggling high school students in re-engaging youth in school and developing academic literacy.

This chapter draws on an ongoing qualitative case study of the two classrooms that comprise the high school literacy intervention, presenting strong inductive themes as to the central goals of the program and the role of video in facilitating those goals.

Video was a crucial resource in a type of “spiral curriculum” (Bruner, 1996) that explored a relevant and engaging year-long theme by moving students from informal reflection and discussion to formal academic writing.

Video can be a crucial resource for helping teachers rethink what texts and topics “count” in the literacy classroom. For students positioned as “at risk,” this move can help a literacy classroom to reframe students’ academic identities and find relevant contexts for developing academic literacy.

Information literacy instruction in higher education tends to focus on a relatively small slice of the information literacy landscape: academic research skills. Students often fail to see the relevance of these sessions beyond the direct application to their assignments. In addition, while this type of instruction helps students succeed academically, it does not necessarily prepare them for their future careers, which can lead to a lapse in student engagement. A prior exploratory survey study among alumni of four bachelor of nursing programs provided insight into current information practices of professional nurses and how librarians could have better prepared them for their eventual workplace. This chapter outlines how this evidence informed a change in information instruction, now preparing nursing students for professional as well as academic success. This evidence-based approach has the potential benefit of making instruction more relevant and engaging to students, while at the same time expanding their information literacy skills. Teaching nursing students professional information literacy skills, in addition to academic information literacy skills, leads to better-prepared nurses which ultimately benefits their patients. The chapter provides several implementation examples but also addresses the challenges that librarians face when pursuing evidence-based practice to increase student engagement.

This qualitative case study explored the information literacy acquisition of 23 students enrolled in a learning community consisting of an advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) writing class and a one-unit class introducing students to research at a suburban community college library in California. As there are no other known learning communities that link an ESL course to a library course, this site afforded a unique opportunity to understand the ways in which ESL students learn to conduct library research. Students encountered difficulties finding, evaluating, and using information for their ESL assignments. Strategies that the students, their ESL instructor, and their instructional librarian crafted in response were enabled by the learning community structure. These strategies included integration of the two courses’ curricula, contextualized learning activities, and dialogue. ESL students in this study simultaneously discovered new language forms, new texts, new ideas, and new research practices, in large part because of the relationships that developed over time among the students, instructor, and instructional librarian. Given the increasing number of ESL students in higher education and the growing concern about their academic success, this study attempts to fill a gap in the research literature on ESL students’ information literacy acquisition.

This chapter presents selected findings from an exploratory case study, which aimed to identify the information literacy of undergraduate students in the Faculty of Arts, Silpakorn University, Thailand. An embedded case study approach was adopted, data were gathered from academics, students, and librarians and relevant policy and curriculum documents were examined. Four departments were chosen as units of analysis within the case study to represent the different disciplines. These were Departments of Thai, Modern Eastern Languages (MEL), History and Geography. A total of 23 lecturers from these 4 departments were interviewed. A total of 35 students from the same departments and 10 librarians from the Central Library were surveyed using focus groups.

For each department, the data was analysed and triangulated and the information literacy conceptions of academics and students were mapped and compared, together with a picture of the department’s goals and pedagogic approach for information literacy. Finally, findings from all four departments were brought together to provide holistic insight into the information literacy of students in the faculty.

It emerged from the data that both staff and students identified a number of personal attributes that were expected of the information literate student. These were categorised into four groupings: attitude, research skills, generic skills and knowledge. The study revealed some common and distinct characteristics of different disciplines, which reflect the similarities and differences of perceptions of information literacy in this study. The key variations were: the conceptualisation and nature of ‘information’, the degree to which the outside world is of importance and the use of specialised technology.

Information literacy education is perceived as a holistic approach, integrated through courses across the curriculum through formal and informal education. Students are engaged with different aspects of information literacy through different teaching, learning and assessment methods and activities. Independent learning is emphasised as a teaching and learning strategy. Discussion-based and coursework-based instructions are identified as best methods in developing students’ information literacy. The findings also reveal that teaching and learning information literacy is deemed the responsibility of academic lecturers while librarians are not involved in information literacy education.

A major challenge in teacher education in the United States is how to address the academic and linguistic needs of the growing numbers of emergent bilingual students. A second challenge is how to prepare predominantly White monolingual preservice teachers with little exposure to speakers of languages other than English to educate culturally and linguistically diverse students. With these two challenges in mind, this study examines how a course on literacy, language, and culture grounded in pedagogies of discomfort shifts preservice teachers’ deficit orientations toward emergent bilingual students’ language and literacy resources. Using Ofelia García’s (2009) definition for emergent bilingualism, this mixed-method study was conducted from 2011 to 2013 with 73 preservice teacher participants enrolled at an urban mid-Atlantic university. Quantitative data consisted of pre and post surveys while qualitative data comprised written responses to open-ended statements, self-analyses, and participant interviews. Findings evidence preservice teachers’ endorsement of monolingualism before coursework; however, pedagogies of discomfort during coursework provoke critical reflection leading to significant shifts in preservice teachers’ dispositions toward teaching language diversity in the classroom with implications for teaching emergent bilingual students.

This chapter focuses on the methodological implications of producing rich narrative data about higher education at the meso-level. While micro- and macro-level higher education studies often miss out on the nuances of the practices that happen in between, meso-level research straddles these levels, often bringing both ‘structuralist’ and ‘agentic’ tensions into interplay. The chapter highlights the importance of the academic ‘workgroup’ as a unit of analysis in understanding the interplay between the micro-level of individuals in academia and the macro-levels of the university and the higher education sector. The study investigated the practices of a ‘workgroup’ of academics who engaged in a common project over a period of three years. Researching how academics make meaning of their practices requires the use of alternative methodologies which are relatively under-utilised in higher education. The methodologies and iterative data production strategies used in the study are discussed in the chapter, including the processes of grounded open coding and segmentation of the data, as well as the levels of discourse analysis. Finally the chapter provides some reflections on the data analysis process, highlighting the challenges for data production when conducting a meso-level analysis.