The extent to which service learning courses use library services and resources has not been explored. The pedagogy of service learning has been used in academia at least since the 1970’s. A 1998 Campus Compact study of 575 colleges and universities found 11,800 courses adopting service learning. In the same year a Rand survey discovered that 3,000 new service learning courses had been created during 1995-1997, with an average of 60 students per program. Yet, one can examine separately the literatures of library and information science and service learning and barely find a mention, not to say in-depth analytical research, of the impact of service learning on library services, information literacy, information seeking behavior, or critical thinking as it pertains to human information processing.
This poster session will present a model of service learning, a triangulation of community engagement, learning, and reflection which highlights the dynamics between each. To this model will be incorporated an information literacy component encompassing student information-seeking behaviors and how these behaviors might be affected by particular learning environments and pedagogies (e.g. a service learning course.) The questions then become, how are the dynamics of the service learning model changed when an information literacy component is added; how is the concept of information literacy, and information seeking in general, altered when used in the context of a service learning pedagogy.
Three models of library literacy will be modeled, each advancing the efficacy of library services and resources for service learning courses: a Learning Process Model, a Course Objectives Model, and a Subject Content Model. Overall, the session intends to spur a dialogue and research interest among librarians and library scholars who hopefully will begin generating empirical studies to demonstrate what dynamics may exist among service learning, information literacy, and library services in general.