Information literacy in the interdisciplinary classroom

Interdisciplinary Studies’ greatest strength - that it is concerned with analyzing, understanding, confronting, and, if possible, solving complex, real-world issues - is also what makes interdisciplinarity so difficult to teach and learn. Interdisciplinarians need to be able to read, speak, and analyze across disciplines. To do that, interdisciplinarians need to understand their own assumptions about knowledge, the underlying assumptions of disciplines, and how disciplines create new knowledge, and be able to analyze and critique those assumptions and modes of inquiry. Perhaps most fundamental of all, interdisciplinarians need to know how to find the knowledge and insights produced by disciplines. This is a lot to ask of new interdisciplinary learners. To aid them in this process, educators must craft programs that give learners opportunities to build the skill set needed to carry out interdisciplinary work focused on complex issues. This starts with information literacy. A highly developed information literacy capacity is a means to critically analyze information and make sound decisions for us, our families, our communities, and our world (ACRL, 2000). This chapter explains information literacy and its benefit to interdisciplinary learners. It will explore constructivism as the educational philosophy most appropriate to bring information literacy into the interdisciplinary classroom, and how specific constructivist pedagogical constructs, experiential learning, and metacognition can be engaged for this purpose. The chapter concludes with examples of how information literacy capacity building can be incorporated into coursework that focus interdisciplinary students on better understanding themselves and their disciplines and in engaging real-world complexity.