Information Literacy Partner of the Month

February/March 2022

Congratulations to Dr. Ellen Schaefer-Salins of the School of Social Work, who is the SU Libraries’ Information Literacy Partner of the Month for February-March!

In nominating Dr. Schaefer-Salins, Mou Chakraborty, Director of External Library Services and liaison to Social Work, wrote:

Dr. Ellen Schaefer-Salins understands the role information literacy plays in student learning and has consistently reached out to me for library-related matters. She has integrated library resources in her other classes, but I got to closely work with her when she applied for and received the SU Libraries Course Enhancement Grant for the Disability Studies: Culture and Practice (SOWK 475) course.  She involved me from the planning stages prior to applying for the grant and was very receptive to my idea of creating an engaging alternative final assignment to a research paper. Both of us graded the final course assignment based on the jointly developed rubric. I was embedded in her MyClasses course throughout with a separate discussion thread, Ask Mou, where I interacted with the students. She also provided valuable input for the course LibGuide I created. Since this was a fully online course, students did not have any scheduled meeting time. However, Dr. Schaefer-Salins believed it would be beneficial to the students to have some synchronous information literacy sessions. Accordingly, I did three sessions, including a couple to teach the students to use a multimedia tool which was adopted for the final assignment. She invited me to participate in her other classes as well, where students did their presentations and I could comment on them. 

Working with Dr. Schaefer-Salins has been a model for a true faculty-librarian collaboration. She was willing to let me experiment with the multimedia tool and treated me as a true partner in her course. Since the multimedia tool was very successful with the students in her course, I was able to use it in several other Social Work courses. I’m thankful that we got to present together (A Faculty-Librarian Partnership Developing Interactive Curriculum for a Disabilities Studies Course) at the Council on Social Work Education Annual Program Meeting in October 2021 and that we will be publishing about it.

It is for this willingness to creatively work with librarians to help students engage with information sources that we have chosen Dr. Schaefer-Salins as our IL Partner of the Month for February-March.

In addition to recognizing Dr. Schaefer-Salins on the SU Libraries’ website and social media, we also will purchase a book in a field of her choice to be added to the Libraries’ collection in her honor.