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Purpose – This chapter provides the reader with an overview of the process involved in creating a Literacy Center to help students to rise above challenges and flourish academically. It focuses on instructional planning that brings the curriculum to life for P-12 students and emphasizes their strengths and interests.

Methodology/Approach – The authors describe the process of creating a Literacy Center that focuses on students’ strengths and enhances student achievement. They communicate the factors involved in (1) initiating the planning process, (2) designing a policy manual, (3) creating instructional frameworks, and (4) enhancing literacy development through support from home.

Practical implications – This chapter includes a detailed overview of the creation of a Literacy Center, a process that could be replicated by the educators who read the chapter. This description provides educators with insights that could facilitate the planning process and provide ideas for lesson planning and curriculum development in a Literacy Center.

Social implications – The chapter suggests how faculty could work together to create a Literacy Center to enhance student achievement in the community. This could potentially help P-12 students in many locations to acquire the skills and strategies they need in order to turn challenges into strengths. This will help Literacy Centers to provide effective, research-based literacy instruction and promote outstanding literacy leadership in our schools.

The study aims to explore collaborations between writing centers and libraries which create opportunities for providing information literacy intervention for students doing researched writing. This case study gathered data from writing center logs to uncover if and how information literacy activity was occurring during consultations.

A representative sample of writing center logs recorded between September of 2013 and May 2014 was mined for frequencies of library and information literacy terms. Transaction logs were coded and analyzed according to the frames in the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

Information literacy is discussed in only 13 per cent of consultations. Referrals to librarians accounted for less than 1 per cent of all transactions. Students most commonly asked for assistance in formatting citations, but deeper information literacy conversations did occur that provide opportunities for engagement with the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

Transactions were examined from one university. Although findings cannot be generalized, the results were applicable to local services, and this study provides a model useful for libraries and writing centers.

This study provides ample direction for future collaborations that will take advantage of the intersections of information literacy and writing instruction to improve student research skills.

Although much has been written about partnerships between libraries and writing centers, this study uniquely demonstrates a model for data sharing across institutional boundaries and how one library mined existing data from a writing center.

Purpose – This chapter provides the reader with an overview of a reflective video pedagogy for use within a literacy center or within professional development contexts. The conceptual overview is followed by two-case examples that reveal how literacy centers can serve as rich, productive research sites for the use and study of reflective video pedagogy.

Methodology/approach – The authors describe their ongoing work to develop and integrate a reflective video pedagogy within a literacy center during a 15-week practicum for literacy-specialists-in-training. The reflective video pedagogy is not only used by the clinicians who work with struggling readers twice a week, but it is also used by the researchers at the literacy center who study the reflective video pedagogy through the same video the clinicians use.

Practical implications – Literacy centers are dynamic sites where children, families, pre/in-service teachers, and teacher educators work together around literacy development. Reflective video pedagogies can be used to closely examine learning and teaching for adult students (i.e., clinicians) and for youth (i.e., children in elementary, middle, and high school) and also for parents who want their children to find success with literacy.

Research implications – In recent years “scaling up” and “scientific research” have come to dominate much of the literacy research landscape. While we see the value and necessity of large-scale experimental studies, we also posit that literacy centers have a unique role to play. Given that resources are scarce, literacy scholars must maximize the affordances of literacy centers as rich, productive research sites for the use and study of a reflective video pedagogy.

This paper aims to apply integrated academic literacies and threshold concepts constructs to the development of graduate student literacies. Western Washington University has developed a graduate peer-tutors program to advance integrated academic literacies and graduate student agency. Graduate peer-tutors are expert-outsiders (Nowacek and Hughes, 2015): expert in conversations about literacies and outsiders to disciplinary expertise. Peer-tutors augment a support ecosystem that includes faculty advisors, subject librarians and others. Libraries should lead innovative programs to develop integrated literacies, and librarians should leverage both subject and literacies expertise as part of an ecosystem of support.

Drawing on library, writing center and higher education scholarship, the author draws on research methodologies from writing center scholarship to explore models for integrated graduate student literacies. The author collaborates with graduate peer-tutors to connect theory and practice in the Graduate Research & Writing Studio (GRWS).

Peer-tutor models offer a valuable layer of support for graduate students engaged in thesis-writing. Peer-tutors, faculty advisors and subject librarians play important roles in advancing development of integrated literacies. The role of peer-tutors is unique in advancing integrated literacies, and addressing affective barriers and equity concerns.

Economic pressures have transformed higher education, ushering new populations into graduate programs. Opportunities to enhance inclusivity cannot be realized without support for development of literacies. Libraries should lead with innovative services that address barriers to graduate student success.

The author leverages the unique laboratory offered by the GRWS and engages graduate peer-tutors in connecting scholarship and practice. Drawing on contemporary theoretical lenses on literacies, she argues for libraries’ leadership of programs that support integrated graduate student literacies.

The University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville (UTMC) Preston Medical Library (PML) and Health Information Center (HIC) has provided a novel contribution to increasing consumer health literacy and reducing health disparities in a unique variety of ways. UTMC librarians have used qualitative, quantitative, and practice-based methodology and research to demonstrate what a regional medical library working with internal and community partners can accomplish. At UTMC, there has been a focus on the value of health literacy for the patient, the clinician, and the health care system itself. In 1993, the UTMC PML began a consumer and patient health information service, which was the foundation for increasing consumer health literacy. In 2014, UTMC took a leading role in advancing consumer health literacy through the opening of the HIC, a patient- and family-focused library inside of UTMC. This chapter will focus on the PML’s history as a reliable resource in providing patients, family members, and the community with accurate and trustworthy health information, as well as the librarians’ role related to health literacy and health disparities through various initiatives and projects. Additionally, this chapter will highlight specific suggestions for libraries interested in starting similar initiatives, such as obtaining support from leadership, opportunities for funding, and how to address roadblocks.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

Information is provided about each source, and the paper discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

Information literacy has been consistently undertheorised. The purpose of this paper is to contribute in the ongoing theorisation of information literacy by exploring the meaning and implications of the emergent grounded theory of mitigating risk for information literacy research and practice.

The grounded theory was produced through a qualitative study that was framed by practice theory and the theoretical constructs of cognitive authority and affordance, and employed constructivist grounded theory, semi-structured interviews and photo-elicitation methods to explore the information literacy practices of language-learners overseas.

This paper provides a theoretically rich exploration of language-learner information literacy practices while further identifying the importance of time, affect and information creation within information literacy research and practice as well as the need for the continued theorisation of information literacy concepts.

The paper’s constructivist grounded theorisation of information literacy remains localised and contextualised rather than generalisable.

The paper raises questions and points of reflection that may be used to inform the continued development of information literacy instruction and teaching practices.

This paper contributes to an increasingly sophisticated theoretical conceptualisation of information literacy as well as forming a basis for ongoing theoretical development in the field.

By engaging in critical literacy, participants theorized Blackness and antiblackness. The purpose of this study was to have participants theorize Blackness and antiblackness through their engagements with critical literacy.

The authors used a youth-centered and informed Black critical-race grounded methodology.

Participants’ unique and varied revelations of Blackness as Vitality, Blackness as Cognizance and Blackness as Expansive Community, served to withstand, confront and transcend encounters with antiblackness in English curricula.

This paper provides a model for how to engage Black youth as a means to disrupt anti-Black English education spaces.

This study provides a foundation for future research efforts of Black English outer spaces as they relate to English education. Findings in this study may also inform existing English educator practices.

This study theorized both the role and the flexible nature of Black English outer spaces. It defined the multi-ethnic nature of Blackness. It proposed that affirmations of Blackness sharpened participants’ critical literacies in Black English outer spaces as a transformative intervention to anti-Black English education spaces.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on information literacy and library instruction providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2016.

The paper provides information about each source, describes the characteristics of current scholarship and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

This paper aims to describe the critical literacies of high school students engaged in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project focused on a roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons, in a queer-led afterschool space. The paper illustrates how youth critique and resist unjust societal norms while simultaneously envisioning queer utopian futures. Using a queer theory framework, the authors consider how youth performed disidentifications and queer futurity.

This study is a discourse analysis of approximately 85 hours of audio collected over one year.

Youth engaged in deconstructive critique, disidentifications and queer futurity in powerful enactments of critical literacies that involved simultaneous resistance, subversion, imagination and hope as youth envisioned queer utopian world-building through their fantasy storytelling. Youth acknowledged the injustice of the present while radically envisioning a utopian future.

This study offers an empirical grounding for critical literacies centered in queer theory and explores how youth engage with critical literacies in collaboratively co-authored texts. The authors argue that queering critical literacies potentially moves beyond deconstructive critique while simultaneously opening spaces for resistance, imagination and utopian world-making through linguistic and narrative-based tools.