Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

How, as content creators and learning designers,  do we start to think about and approach race and racism in our work? How do we do this individually and when working with programme teams? 

In our previous post we introduced some of the ways in which race and racism feature in all levels of content creation. But how can we ensure we consistently consider and address these different aspects in our work?

As people seek to learn more about race, bookstores have begun selling out of books on antiracism. These titles are, of course, also available in libraries, but can be difficult to locate in the catalog. Patrons will be able to find them through known title searches, but the catalog should go beyond this.

The first user task in the “Library Reference Model” is to find, defined as “to bring together information about one or more resources of interest by searching on any relevant criteria.” Ideally, a patron should be able to search terms such as racism or antiracism in the library’s catalog and find a comprehensive list of titles on the topic or start with a known title and find other, related works. However, catalog records often fall short due to lack of appropriate keywords or subject headings. When a patron is ready to move beyond recommended reading lists and discover new books, will the library catalog aid in discovery?

By now, we have all realized that preparing for the upcoming fall semester isn’t going to feel like any other August filled with syllabus preparations. Whether we are planning for a remote, digital or hybrid course, or a cautious, unfamiliar version of an in-person course, the entire semester has to be planned to “expect the unexpected.” This daunting pedagogical task is made more complicated if you have multiple courses to prepare, and even more difficult if you teach at more than one college.