Integrating Service Learning into Teaching Information Literacy: The Librarian as Designer and Facilitator for Information Literacy Instruction

Service-learning is a newly developed pedagogical approach that enhances teaching, learning and reflecting, of which the purpose is to integrate meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich students' learning experiences. This current project is to design and deploy an Information Literacy course taught by a librarian faculty that includes digital learning materials funded and developed by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan and Service-Learning approach for the students to serve in a community library. The aims of the study are to understand the role of the librarian as the designer and facilitator in the delivery of information literacy courses, and assess the impact of digital learning materials developed from a service-learning approach on the students' performance in terms of their cognitive, affective (civic responsibility) and library instruction skills. Action research method is applied for the course design, deployment and evaluation. The service-learning approach is taken for the course design that students are required to serve in a community library. Digital learning materials developed by MOE are used as teaching materials. The course which is entitled "Network Information Organization and Retrieval" with a total of 24 students from Ching-Yun University in northern Taiwan participated in the course. The major research instruments include a questionnaire and students' service journals. Quantitative as well as qualitative data are collected and analyzed. The results of the action research are reported and possible implications are discussed.