Thriving in Academe

Tales from Real Life
Reflections on Becoming a Willing Partner

In the fall of 1998, when I was still trying to find my bearings as the newly appointed director of the Academy for the Art of Teaching, I was approached by the head of the library's reference department with an offer I couldn't refuse.

She wanted to know if I would be interested in partnering with her in working with faculty to develop their own and their students' information literacy competencies.

It was just about a month after the Faculty Senate had endorsed the Information Literacy Initiative, which called for integration of information literacy into the University's academic fabric.

This opportunity was too good to pass up! First and foremost, I believe in partnering as the key to any program's success.

Second, and most important in this case, I consider the advancement of information literacy to be an opportunity for faculty to enhance their teaching skills in a way that helps them as well as their students.

We launched our program as a sequence of three 3-hour sessions advertised to the entire faculty via E-mail. We had room for 25 in the only suitable room. Within days we had filled the 25 slots and had more than 25 people on the waiting list!

So we immediately launched a second, parallel, three-session sequence, and we've had fully booked sessions ever since.

Maybe this could happen on your campus, too.

—Leora Baron
Florida International University

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