Maggie Murphy – författare

Visual literacy is an interconnected set of practices, habits, and values for participating in visual culture that can be developed through critical, ethical, reflective, and creative engagement with visual media. Approaches to teaching visual literacy in higher education must include a focus on context and not just content, process and not just product, impact and not just intent. Unframing is an approach to visual literacy pedagogy that acknowledges that visuals are a pervasive part of everyday life, as well as embedded into every scholarly discipline.  In four parts, Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces explores:   Participating in a Changing Visual Information Landscape Perceiving Visuals as Communicating Information Practicing Visual Discernment and Criticality Pursuing Social Justice through Visual Practice  Twenty-four full color chapters present a range of theoretical and practical approaches to visual literacy pedagogy that illustrate, connect with, extend, and criticize concepts from the Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education: Companion Document to the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Topics include using TikTok to begin a conversation on academic honesty and marginalization; supporting disciplines to move to multimodal public communication assignments; critical data visualization; and exclusionary practices in visual media.  In exploring the discussions and engaging with the activities in Unframing the Visual, you will find new inspiration for how to unframe, adapt, and apply visual literacy pedagogy and praxis in your work.

The “first-year experience” is an emerging hot topic in academic libraries, and many librarians who work with first-year students are interested in best practices for engaging and retaining them. Professional discussion and interest groups, conferences, and vendor-sponsored awards for librarians working with first-year students are popping up left and right. A critical aspect of libraries in the first-year experience is effective information literacy instruction for first-year students. Research shows that, despite growing up in a world rife with technology and information, students entering college rarely bring with them the conceptual understandings and critical habits of thinking needed for finding, evaluating, and ethically using information in both academic and real-world contexts. Faculty in upper-level courses expect students to learn about the research process in their first year of college, and instructors in the first-year curriculum expect librarians to teach this to their students. Despite all this, designing, teaching, and evaluating effective information literacy instruction specifically for first-year students is not necessarily intuitive for instruction librarians. That is why Teaching First-Year College Students: A Practical Guide for Librarians is a comprehensive, how-to guide for both new and experienced librarians interested in planning, teaching, and assessing library instruction for first-year students. The book:Examines the related histories of library instruction and first-year experience initiativesSummarizes and synthesizes empirical research and educational theory about first-year students as learners and novice researchersEstablishes best practices for engaging first-year students through active learning and inclusive teachingFeatures excerpts from interviews with a number of instruction librarians who work with first-year students in a range of positions and instructional contextsIncludes examples of activities, lesson plans, and assessment ideas for first-year library instruction for common first-year course scenariosIncludes a template to use for library instruction lesson planningWritten by a library instruction coordinator with a graduate degree in First-Year Studies and a first-year instruction librarian, Teaching First-Year College Students: A Practical Guide for Librarians is the first comprehensive, how-to guide for both new and experienced librarians interested in planning, coordinating, teaching, and assessing library instruction for first-year students.