Barbara Brydges, M.A., M.L.S.

Barbara Brydges, M.A., M.L.S., is the Director of Information Services for the Faculty of Education of the University of Calgary. She has responsibility for the Faculty's technology services, the Doucette Library of Teaching Resources, and the library of the Centre for Gifted Education, which she established and managed for a number of years prior to her current appointment. Before coming to the university she managed the Humanities Department at the Calgary Public Library and taught a readers' advisory course in the SAIT library technician program. She finds this diverse background helpful when working with students and materials in a curriculum library. She and Tammy Flanders see it as their responsibility to ensure that teachers-in-training realize that the information literacy skills they learn as students are also skills they will have to teach when they become educators.

Tammy Flanders

Tammy Flanders is the Reference Coordinator for the Doucette Library of Teaching Resources in the Education Faculty at the University of Calgary, where she has been employed for eighteen years. She is also responsible for developing and maintaining the juvenile literature collection for the library, as well as many other aspects of the collection. Promoting awareness of juvenile resources available to aspiring teachers within an inquiry-based program is a prime aspect of the library instruction that currently is of interest to her. Tammy also fosters appreciation for good children's literature through several parent/child book clubs she facilitates in a local children's bookstore.

Where the wild things are: An inquiry approach to information literacy

Barbara Brydges and Tammy Flanders, University of Calgary

session 1b / Thursday, May 11 / 10:30 - noon

The 'empty jar' image of teachers pouring information into the heads of students has long-ago been discarded by education, but all too often it is still the model at work in library instruction. This session will address how working within an inquiry-based teacher preparation program has challenged our own ideas about information literacy and impacted our library instruction. The University of Calgary teaching-training program is case-based and field oriented, a shift away from traditional courses - leaving us to find new ways of 'inserting' ourselves into the program. Remaining faithful to the intent of the University of Calgary's Master of Teaching program we make our library instruction as much about looking for the questions, as about finding the answers. Whatever the topic of our workshops, we ask ourselves, "What is it that students can do in order to know what we're talking about?' We ensure that each workshop has an interactive component, where students are expected to ask questions of the topic. And then, with some trepidation about losing 'control', we venture into the wild, wooly and largely uncharted world of 'going with the flow', 'seeing what develops' and 'winging it'. We'll talk about the process we've been through in 'inquiring' into how to change our library instruction, and give examples, including video footage, of the activities with which we use with students. We engage participants in one of these activities to stimulate the creative and critical thinking processes that our undergraduate students experience. Our intent is to reflect the continuous questioning that embodies inquiry-based learning.