afforded greater opportunities to develop online induction materials. The require- ment to pivot to online delivery afforded the freedom to deliver more inductions as online sessions or use recorded materials to supplement face-to-face teaching.
A flying start to university My first fruitful opportunity to deviate from the standardised 30-minute lecture during induction week came in 2017 as part of the Flying Start project. This was a university-wide Office for Students funded project, which set out to change the entire approach to induction week. Moving away from information-heavy sessions, the focus was on creating an academically challenging introduction to undergraduate study which demystified expectations of university life and created a sense of belonging at the university3
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As part of the pilot project, I was asked to design library induction workshops for contemporary art students. I devised a workshop which used drawing as an activity to explore students understand- ing of the library. This coincided with the development of a self-paced library induction module on the university virtual learning environment. Centralising access to procedural information about setting up accounts, borrowing books and soft- ware, frees up space in an induction for information literacy rather than informa- tion giving.
I had read a journal article about using drawing for information literacy teaching and decided to try applying this method to a library induction. Briar and Lebbin’s collaborative speed drawing is a low-tech, low-cost and fun method for teaching information literacy. It embraces a visual, kinaesthetic, and social way of learning which is important for art and design teaching. Engagement with the visual dimension makes it accessible to students with different abilities.
Artistic ability is not important, and the drawings are simply a conversation starter which allows us to challenge, clarify and change the images that underpin student understanding. Setting good questions is an important foundation of using drawing for information literacy. In a library induction, I use the question “What is a library?”. Students are asked to draw a response in groups or individually, we discuss the responses and then I tell them about how our library is different. For example, drawings of shushing librarians are countered with information about our friendly staff and different types of study spaces. The value in this session comes from the discussions that arise about the drawings created by students. The “what is a library?” workshop was rolled out to other courses in later years
34 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL June 2024
Book poetry.
and still forms a core part of my library induction options today. In my teaching, I have used the method in classroom or art studio settings with groups of up to 40 students using the lesson plan outlined. However, the method offers flexibility for adaptation to other settings and could be scaled up or down for different cohort sizes. For example, drawing could be used in a lecture theatre setting as a variation on
Collections workshop.
the “think, pair, share” activity, with students asked to draw instead of writ- ing down ideas.
Library inductions in the context of
transitions to university life The discussions I was having with students as part the drawing sessions were a turning point for me in how I understood the purpose of the library
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