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A common way for academic libraries to support student success is through partnership with writing centers. Practices such as applying service design thinking to develop and inform integrated library and writing center services can lead to a student-focused space. This chapter outlines how service design, studio pedagogy, and peer learning informed the setup and ongoing services in The Undergrad Research and Writing Studio (URWS or, the Studio), a shared space in the Oregon State University Libraries. The URWS model is grounded in studio pedagogy, which employs a “propose-critique-iterate” approach to student writing development (Brocato, 2009). Research and writing consultants assist student writers when they have a question, mirroring libraries’ point of need service approach. Librarians and studio faculty collaborated on the training curriculum, which emphasizes how research and writing are intertwined processes. Peer consultant reflection and assessment inform the ongoing development of the overarching program, service, space, and training, ensuring alignment with the ethos of centering students and their learning.

Research and writing can be challenging tasks for undergraduate students, and evaluating online sources for use in papers can be especially difficult to do well. This chapter discusses a partnership between a library and a writing center to teach writing consultants the basics of the Information Literacy Framework and online source evaluation. This included providing additional education for peer writing consultants. Consultants became more fluent in the aspects of evaluation and provided perspective on how and why undergraduate students struggle with this in the research and writing process, establishing the value of assembling networked pedagogical models for teaching information literacy.

As online academic programs and online student populations continue to grow, it is important to consider the population of graduate-level students and what support they need from the university in order to be engaged and successful. This chapter will provide a review of the theory and research to show that there is a need for academic support for graduate-level students while also discussing how institutions have worked to create meaningful connections for students. Drawing on Astin’s theory of student involvement, this chapter will discuss three ways that the University Academic Success Programs department at Arizona State University has worked to address that need and provide academic support to online graduate students: online graduate writing centers, online dissertation writing camps, and employment of online graduate students. Using interview examples from former student tutors, this chapter will show how these opportunities helped online graduate students feel valued, supported, and connected to the institution. This chapter will conclude by addressing limitations, areas for program growth and future research, and recommendations for practitioners to apply in their own institutions.

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.

Illustrated through ethnographic data drawn from a case study of a full-day kindergarten in Ontario, Canada, this chapter argues for an approach to inclusive curriculum that places the ethical relation at the center and promotes children’s rights through opportunities for multimodal communication. Theoretically, this case drew on multimodal literacy and ethical curricula. The study used ethnographic tools such as class observations, semi-structured interviews, and collection of children’s work. Findings indicate that responsive, ethical curricula through multimodal pedagogies were intrinsically inclusive of all children’s funds of knowledge and encouraged children to become curricular informants and take control of their choices of meaning making.

Project REEL (Resources for Early Educator Learning) was a quasi-experimental, delayed-treatment professional development (PD) design to provide training, coaching, and materials to 220 early childhood educators (ECEs) in 85 diverse, high-needs settings (family, group, and center-based) across Tennessee. Its two primary goals were to (1) increase the frequency of research-based classroom learning experiences that promote language/literacy, numeracy, and social/emotional development among diverse early learners through training and coaching to ECEs and (2) improve the language/literacy, numeracy, and social/emotional readiness of children in low-income areas through research-based training of ECEs and parents. Even with differences in ECEs’ educational backgrounds and diverse settings, teachers in both treatment groups improved and maintained their knowledge and skills in response to the intervention. Preschool children in two cohorts showed significant improvements in most language and literacy measures over the course of an academic year, and improvements were often beyond that due to maturation (using age-controlled measures). Given the amount of improvement seen across a wide array of measures, there is substantial convergent evidence that the Project REEL PD approach was successful in promoting long-lasting improvements in the practices of ECEs in diverse settings and from diverse backgrounds. This chapter follows the development, implementation, and results of two literacy-related modules (“Print Awareness” and “Book Strategies”) for directors and teachers of three- and four-year-olds. These modules are representative of our training design, with its intensive focus on coaching in the diverse settings, and will provide the most beneficial model for other ECE professional developers to follow.

In this chapter, we explore uses of corpus linguistics within higher education research. Corpus linguistic approaches enable examination of large bodies of language data based on computing power. These bodies of data, or corpora, facilitate investigation of the meaning of words in context. The semiautomated nature of such investigation helps researchers to identify and interpret language patterns that might otherwise be inaccessible through manual analysis. We illustrate potential uses of corpus linguistic approaches through four short case studies by higher education researchers, spanning educational contexts, disciplines and genres. These case studies are underpinned by discussion of the development of corpus linguistics as a field of investigation, including existing open corpora and corpus analysis tools. We give a flavour of how corpus linguistic techniques, in isolation or as part of a wider research approach, can be particularly helpful to higher education researchers who wish to investigate language data and its context.

The purpose of this case study is to demonstrate how a liberal arts college library has reimagined its spaces in response to the changes in higher education, particularly integration of educational technology into research, teaching, and learning; changes in students’ information-seeking behaviors; and an increasingly important role of local special collections as a means to preserve and reinforce unique institutional identity.

This case study is built on the first-hand experience, as all contributors directly participated in each phase of the process, from formulating ideas to completion of the current stage.

Meaningful and high-impact space adjustments do not necessarily entail extensive budgetary investments. They do entail, however, developing comprehensive goals and directions and a level of collaboration among library departments and relevant academic units in order to deliver cohesive services, programming, and a creative, nimble response to the constantly changing needs of the patron.

We believe that these high-impact, cost-conscious improvements provide a useful model for other small academic libraries preparing to reconfigure or renovate their spaces. We offer a model for creating a dynamic, service-centered space on a limited budget.

The overwhelming majority of the literature related to library spaces focuses on large universities, and the treatment of space topics in small undergraduate colleges, and liberal arts colleges in particular, is strikingly negligent. This case study of a small liberal arts college will help fill the void by adding to the rare voices commenting on library spaces in liberal arts colleges.

To describe how the digital writing experiences of two collaborating second-grade classrooms are representative of a digital writing cycle that includes barriers, bridges, and outcomes. Additionally, this chapter aims to link theory and practice for teachers working with an increasingly younger generation of multimodal learners by connecting teacher reflections to New Literacies perspectives.

The current study is informed by multiple perspectives contributing to New Literacies research. These perspectives blend the traditional disciplines of literacy and technology while recognizing both the growing use of digital tools and the new skills and dispositions required for writing. This chapter uses multiple data points to present (1) how the teachers approached implementation of digital writing tools, (2) how students responded to the use of digital writing tools, and (3) how the digital-related writing experiences aligned with key tenets of New Literacies research.

The authors present student barriers for full participation with corresponding bridges implemented by teachers to help students navigate in the digital writing classroom. Each finding is supported with examples from student and teacher interviews as well as classroom observations and artifacts. The chapter concludes with a “lessons learned” section from the perspective of the teachers in the study with each tenet supporting a New Literacies perspective by addressing key considerations of multimodal environments such as the importance of early opportunities for teaching and learning with new literacies, the need to help inexperienced students bridge technical skill gaps, and the benefit of social relationships in the digital community.

By adapting findings of the study to a digital writing cycle, this chapter discusses how guiding principles of New Literacies research reflects classroom practice, thereby granting current and future teachers a practical guide for bridging theory and practice for implementing digital writing experiences for elementary students in multimodal environments.

We are living in an electronic age, where everything that we want to know or are curious about is increasingly facilitated by the internet and search engines. Now, much of the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips. Students have unlimited access to information in the form of e-books, journals and other open sources. The value of a physical repository of knowledge is diminishing and the printing of material is becoming less compelling. It has been noted that college students spend as much time on the internet as they do while studying (Jones, 2002). The most pertinent question is whether the library is still considered an important source of information to students? Can we imagine a university without a library with just computers and a server room? The information highway is posing new challenges that the librarians have to deal with (Dunn, 2002; Rockman & Smith, 2002). In the past, gatekeepers like the librarian decided what a student should read, depending on their level of study and their comprehension power. The picture has altered and now students decide what exactly they should read with the click of their computers. Leaders in higher education institutions are skeptical as to how much they should actually invest in buying books, how many shelves to create to stack them and whether the collection of books is going to be an indicator of the academic quality of that institution. This book talks about a vital subject as to how much and in what ways a library can engage a student to create information literacy. Various interventions have been discussed as case studies in colleges and universities from Canada to India. Student-centered workshops have been designed along with university partnerships with a writing center as well as the role of a library as a source of socio-economic transformation in Africa. The experiences shared by the authors in this book will be a valuable resource for librarians across the world as they increase their collaborative efforts to promote the value of information literacy for students.