Literacies — Information and beyond: The Learning Commons and the embedding of academic literacy instruction in disciplinary courses. Presented at WILU Conference, May 8-10 2013. University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB

The growth of the Learning Commons concept has fostered increased adoption of an integrated approach to the support of student learning. Academic support services associated with reading, writing, research, and learning skills collaborate to offer programming that recognizes the recursive, non-linear nature of scholarly processes. Academic literacy becomes a central focus as librarians work with other campus support services to extend the narrower traditional focus on information literacy. A librarian, writing professor, and literacy studies graduate student will describe how the York University Learning Commons is striving to move beyond the library and into the classroom. We will describe our recent efforts to encourage the integration of academic literacy instruction into disciplinary courses through work with instructors on assignment design and curriculum development. We base our work in part on focus groups we conducted with York instructors for the purpose of learning how they conceptualize the needs of their students, and their own role as instructors, in the development of academic literacy. We will describe the primary results of our discussions and how those results assisted us in designing our faculty programming.