LOEX 2026

Our information literacy instruction landscape is fundamentally challenged, from the limitations of one-shots to the complexities of our information ecosystem. Therefore, we must capture students’ attention quickly, communicate with clarity, make learning sticky, and support students’ ability to apply and transfer key concepts and skills. “Stories” serve as a pedagogical tool to not only spark interest, but also prompt meaning making, demonstrate relevance, and communicate impact. Stories can take the classic shape of anecdotes, as well as bite-size forms like analogies, images, and metaphors. We will explore how incorporating stories into our teaching can make concepts click and bring skills to life. Join us to discuss your favorite stories as well as information literacy concepts for which you would find stories most useful.

Participants will:
1. Be able to recognize and describe the pedagogical value of storytelling in teaching and learning including how stories support engagement, recall, meaning making, and transfer.
2. Identify and map shared/sample stories to specific information literacy concepts and skills, demonstrating the relevance of storytelling to the information literacy arena.

Do you always begin your research with a list of search terms and alternative terms? Do you always start your search with library databases? Librarians often outline specific steps that students should take and provide structured guidelines we expect them to follow. But do we always follow these steps and guidelines ourselves? Why not? And how might this impact our effectiveness as instructors? In this interactive workshop, participants will explore the concept of "authenticity" as it relates to teaching information literacy and will consider steps they can take to embrace authenticity in their teaching. Participants will be encouraged to think about how we can teach the research process as it is, rather than what we think it should be.

Participants will:
1. Describe key characteristics associated with authenticity in teaching
2. Recognize teaching practices common to librarians that do not conform to expectations for authentic teaching
3. Reflect on how they can apply the understanding of authenticity in teaching to their own instructional practices

The blank stare, the uncomfortable silence, the tick...tick...tick of the clock while the question still hangs in the air. What's an instruction librarian to do? Three techniques to engage student learning include: guided notes, cooperative learning strategies, and task-based learning. This workshop will show you how to combine the best practices of each approach by creating a single interactive worksheet meeting three instruction goals: creating a structure to learn new things, prompt classroom discussion, and help students complete their assignments. Post session participants will have access to additional material including selected resources covering each teaching methodology and additional example worksheets.

Participants will be able to:
1. Identify three teaching methodologies: guided notes, cooperative learning, and task-based learning in the facilitation of library instruction
2. Determine which teaching methodologies can be used to meet key library instruction goals
3. Combine these techniques and design interactive worksheets creating an engaging library instruction session with lively classroom discussion

In this session, we will consider several alternatives to the standard library database demonstration frequently used in one-shot instruction sessions. Gather new ideas from three practicing instruction librarians with diverse experiences and pedagogical approaches. Participants will select from three hands-on stations to explore active learning techniques that can promote better learner engagement and retention of library lesson objectives. Through game-playing, assessment of learning objects, discussion, and more, participants will walk away with new or enhanced activities to implement in their own classrooms. Join us as we dive into library instruction that is anything but a database demo!

Participants will:
1. Evaluate several strategies for teaching database search skills and think critically about how to best engage learners beyond a lecture-based learning experience
2. Consider how they would apply several active learning strategies to their own lessons to increase learner engagement
3. Be able to explain why active learning teaching strategies offer a more engaging experience for students when teaching database search skills

The traditional one-shot often feels like a missed opportunity. How can we get out of the shallow end and dive deeper? This interactive workshop reframes the one-shot by combining intentional pedagogical principles with a sustainable, blended approach. We'll explore creating on-demand, multimodal content using lightweight EdTech tools to free up class time for more meaningful learning. Attendees will collaboratively design solutions to common, problematic instruction requests through scenario-based learning, leaving with a practical framework to create effective, high-impact learning opportunities that engage all learners.

***Participants can bring a laptop to take part in the hands-on activities during the workshop, though there will also be printed worksheets as well for those that do not have a laptop.***

Participants will:
1. Apply pedagogical principles (e.g., backward design, small teaching) to restructure a traditional one-shot session into a "flipped" or blended model
2. Identify appropriate multi-modal tools (e.g. H5P, Genially) for creating sustainable, on-demand instructional content
3. Conceptualize active learning activities to replace passive lecturing during in-class time

Dive into a creative approach to research and collaboration! This session explores how faculty and librarians partnered to complement group projects by replacing or supplementing typical research papers with research-based zines, fostering student engagement with an experiential learning technique aligned with the Universal Design for Learning guidelines. Participants will see examples of student-created zines, learn strategies for designing assignments, hear faculty and student feedback, and discuss how this format encourages critical thinking and creativity. We will also share our plans for the next steps on the horizon for this project. Whether you're curious about zines in your instruction or seeking innovative ways to collaborate across disciplines, this session offers practical insights and inspiration for making waves in your teaching and outreach.

Participants will:
1.  Analyze the benefits and challenges of replacing traditional papers with zines in research-based assignments.
2.  Design a collaborative assignment that integrates zine creation into class projects.
3.  Evaluate strategies for fostering creativity and critical thinking through faculty-librarian partnerships.

How do you transform a boring lecture hall into a community of active, excited, and engaged learners? Experience how we turned our large enrollment LIB 1600 course into a dynamic space for active, skills-based playful learning. In this session, participants will experience four classroom-tested hands-on strategies, games, and interactive activities that can be integrated into any information literacy curriculum. Walk away with a toolkit of strategies and real-world examples to personalize any classroom, no matter how large, and make the learning engaging and fun.

Participants will:
1) Design an interactive lesson using instructional strategies that engage large classrooms and audiences
2) Modify parts of their current curriculum to increase active engagement and memory retention through a pedagogy of play
3) Communicate and collaborate with other participants on different ways that they can reach large audiences made of diverse learners.                      

This interactive workshop explores how Students as Partners (SaP) pedagogy (Cook-Sather et al., 2014) can transform information literacy (IL) instruction, drawing on a conceptual model integrating SaP with the Framework for Information Literacy (LeGrand, 2025). The facilitators will share experiences infusing student-instructor partnership in their teaching (Fundator et al., 2024) and guide attendees through practical design exercises to engage students' knowledge and goals within the Frames. Reimagine instruction with asset-based, relational language and design learning for transformative action. Leave with strategies to co-create meaningful IL learning experiences with students, promoting shared responsibility and agency in the classroom and beyond.

Participants will:
1. Identify instructor-centered assumptions in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy.
2. Apply Students as Partners principles to reframe information literacy instruction using relational, asset-based language.
3. Design a partnership-oriented IL activity or lesson plan that incorporates student agency and transformative action.

As generative AI becomes ubiquitous in higher education, instruction must move students' AI literacy beyond spotting hallucinations to critical interpretation. Students need to understand that generative AI responses that appear singularly authored and authoritative emerge from a statistical blending of training data, platform policies, algorithmic design, and user prompts. This workshop introduces a critical information literacy framework presenting generative AI as a polyphonic, unreliable narrator. Participants will practice four heuristics (authorship mapping, provenance chasing, interrogating the narrator, and narrator/audience switching) with live tools and adapt them to their own instructional contexts. Please bring laptops and be ready for a fun and educational session. Takeaways will include scenario cards, activity templates, and readings.

Participants will be able to:
1. Map at least three socio-technical forces (like training data, fine-tuning, market goals) that influence what generative AI says, how it says it, and to whom.
2. Apply two of the critical reading heuristics to reveal how generative AI privileges certain knowledge, perspectives, and voices while marginalizing others
3. Design or revise one discipline-specific instructional activity that integrates a critical reading heuristic to support students' agency and critical use of AI

Deficit thinking is deeply embedded within American higher education systems, making it hard to root out. Deficit thinking disproportionately harms students from underrepresented communities by degrading their personal or cultural identities. Teaching librarians are likely to recognize the adverse impacts of deficit thinking but may be unsure of how to actively prevent it. This workshop will reframe deficit thinking as a cognitive bias and will expose common deficit-based narratives within higher education teaching settings. This workshop aims to train librarians in equity-based thinking and will equip librarians with strategies to move forward with this work after the Conference.

Participants will:
1. Learn how to recognize widespread cognitive biases of deficit thinking within the higher education academic context and articulate their harmful effect on underrepresented students.
2. Practice transforming common deficit-based narratives into equity-based perspectives.
3. Identify strategies for planning library instruction experiences grounded in strengths-based approaches.