Information Literacy Practices Using Active Teaching-Learning Methodologies in Higher Education

Introduction

Individuals who are information literate have knowledge, skills and attitudes that involve everything from recognizing their information need to using information in a responsible and critical way. Thus, Information Literacy allows individuals to be aware of tools for research, storage, management, sharing and use of information, for the construction of new knowledge, from the incorporation of concepts and practices aimed at the mastery of techniques and their independence.

Libraries mediate access to information and support teaching-learning activities and, in the case of university students, provide services to the academic community that support the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. To attain these goals, librarians have taken on new roles such as pedagogical mediator and educational agent, teaching classes, organizing projects aimed at Information Literacy, in addition to improving their own educational and pedagogical knowledge and renewing their own Information Literacy skills (Dudziak, 2007).

The actions promoted by librarians are structured in the form of Information Literacy Programmes one of the most common activities being classes that are also called in the literature “instructional sessions”. These sessions are usually given in the traditional way of lectures, however, there are other ways to promote instructional sessions, with constructivist strategies and pedagogical resources for effective literacy teaching.

Active Teaching-Learning Methodologies (ATLMs) are based on constructivist theories and arise to overcome the limitations of traditional teaching models that see the student as a passive recipient of information. The constructivist approach places the student at the centre of learning, so that students assume an active participant role in the creation of content, adopting a critical and reflexive posture. Miter et al. (2008) consider working with ATLMs as singular, given that they promote education focussed on the vision of the whole and allows for the expansion of consciousness in awakening the learner’s creative curiosity.

Active learning techniques are diverse and can be based on activities, games, projects, problems, among others, which can encompass Digital Information and Communication Technologies (DICTs) and generate other teaching modalities, as is the case for the so-called “flipped classroom”. Pedagogical strategies are influenced in different ways by technologies and, according to Valente (2014), DICTs can provide opportunities for the development of innovative activities and facilitate the development of active learning strategies.

Considering that the library must accompany and contemplate new pedagogies in its services so that it becomes an efficient space for the exchange and construction of knowledge, the development of Information Literacy as an integral part of the pedagogical environment, can present positive results combined with the practices based on the precepts of ATLMs to ensure greater effectiveness in student learning.

For data collection, bibliographic research with content analysis of the retrieved publications was used. The search was carried out in online, multidisciplinary and specialized information sources in the areas of ​​Information Science and also in ​​Education, with 23 publications from between 2015 and 2019 selected for analysis. The sources of information adopted for the collection were:

• National:

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    Encontro Nacional de Pesquisa em Ciência da Informação (ENANCIB); Congresso Brasileiro de Biblioteconomia, Documentação e Ciência da Informação (CBBD); Seminário Nacional de Bibliotecas Universitárias (SNBU)

• International:

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    SCOPUS; Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA); Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) and American Library Association Proceedings

In the SCOPUS, LISA and ERIC databases, the search was carried out in the fields: title, abstract and keywords with the following descriptors:

• Subject 1: “competência informacional” OR “competência em informação” OR “letramento informacional” OR “letramento em informação” OR “alfabetização informacional” OR “alfabetização em informação” OR “information literacy”.

• Subject 2: “metodologias ativas” OR “aprendizagem ativa” OR “aprendizado ativo” OR “ensino ativo” OR “active learning” OR “active teaching-learning” OR “action learning”.

• Subject 3: “ensino superior” OR “higher education” OR “tertiary education”.