Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework

Teaching our students how to become flexible and accurate evaluators of information requires teaching them adaptable processes and not static heuristics. Our conventional information literacy teaching and learning tools are simply not up to tackling the life-long, real-world challenges and transferable applications required by today’s evolving information landscape.

Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework provides librarians and non-librarian practitioners with ways to teach and learn with social media. It addresses how to broadly conceptualize information literacy teaching with social media and allay any student reluctance to using social media for academic purposes. It proposes how to map some of the ACRL threshold concepts onto specific social media platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, while providing general guidance for if and when those platforms change. There are eight concrete, cross-disciplinary lesson plans that factor in design, assessment, and student engagement. Finally, the book considers how up-and-coming platforms might empower students to be critical content creators and encourage librarians and faculty to support and create new information literacy initiatives on their campuses.