Teaching First-Year College Students

The “first-year experience” is an emerging hot topic in academic libraries, and many librarians who work with first-year students are interested in best practices for engaging and retaining them. Professional discussion and interest groups, conferences, and vendor-sponsored awards for librarians working with first-year students are popping up left and right. A critical aspect of libraries in the first-year experience is effective information literacy instruction for first-year students.

Research shows that, despite growing up in a world rife with technology and information, students entering college rarely bring with them the conceptual understandings and critical habits of thinking needed for finding, evaluating, and ethically using information in both academic and real-world contexts. Faculty in upper-level courses expect students to learn about the research process in their first year of college, and instructors in the first-year curriculum expect librarians to teach this to their students. Despite all this, designing, teaching, and evaluating effective information literacy instruction specifically for first-year students is not necessarily intuitive for instruction librarians. That is why Teaching First-Year College Students: A Practical Guide for Librarians is a comprehensive, how-to guide for both new and experienced librarians interested in planning, teaching, and assessing library instruction for first-year students. The book:

Examines the related histories of library instruction and first-year experience initiativesSummarizes and synthesizes empirical research and educational theory about first-year students as learners and novice researchersEstablishes best practices for engaging first-year students through active learning and inclusive teachingFeatures excerpts from interviews with a number of instruction librarians who work with first-year students in a range of positions and instructional contextsIncludes examples of activities, lesson plans, and assessment ideas for first-year library instruction for common first-year course scenariosIncludes a template to use for library instruction lesson planningWritten by a library instruction coordinator with a graduate degree in First-Year Studies and a first-year instruction librarian, Teaching First-Year College Students: A Practical Guide for Librarians is the first comprehensive, how-to guide for both new and experienced librarians interested in planning, coordinating, teaching, and assessing library instruction for first-year students.

Adrienne Button, MS, MLIS is the Instruction Coordinator for the Kaufman Library at Georgia Gwinnett College. In her role as Instruction Coordinator, Adrienne developed the GGC Information Literacy Omnibus, a foundational document that aligns the ACRL Framework to the research process, with particular emphasis on designing learning experiences for first-year students. She has presented on this work at several national conferences and was most recently invited to speak at the 2017 ACRL Conference on how to adapt the Omnibus at the local level. Adrienne also teaches two credit-bearing courses, GGC 1000: The First-Year Seminar and GGC 2000: Introduction to Information in the 21st century. Her most recent publications include a chapter in TheFirst-Year Experience Library Cookbook and a paper in the 2017 LOEX Conference Proceedings. Adrienne received her Master of Library and Information Science in 2005 from the University of South Florida and her Master of Science in First-Year Studies from Kennesaw State University in 2017.



Maggie Murphy, MLIS is a First-Year Instruction & Humanities Librarian for the University of North Carolina at Greenboro’s University Libraries, where she teaches library instruction sessions for more than 1300 first-year students a semester in English composition, basic communication, and first-year seminar courses. Maggie has presented on first-year librarian instruction at Library Instruction West, the Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy, The Innovative Library Conference, and more, with upcoming presentations at ACRL 2019. Her recent publications include chapters in Motivating Students on a Time Budget: Pedagogical Frames and Lesson Plans for In-Person and Online Information Literacy Instruction and The Engaged Library: High-Impact Educational Practices & Academic Libraries (both forthcoming from ACRL Press). Maggie is also the author of over 30 children’s books on technology, natural science, and popular culture for juvenile nonfiction publisher PowerKids Press (an imprint of Rosen Publishing), under her own name and several pen names. She received her Master of Library and Information Science from Rutgers University in 2012.