The Open Inquiry Toolkit for Information Literacy is a learning design approach that aims to cultivate habits of mind in undergraduate students, faculty, librarians, and others in higher education to promote the intellectual virtues needed for research and learning both, individually and in community.

Intellectual virtues are the deep personal qualities or character strengths of a good thinker or learner. They include qualities like curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual tenacity. This model also facilitates students’ ability to:

•  engage in nuanced inquiry in improved assignments and projects
• contribute to richer and more respectful classroom dialogues, discourse, and discussion; and
• develop throughlines to advance their own investigations on complex and evolving issues in their academic majors, in co-curricular activities, and in preparing for the world of work and the responsibilities of citizenship.

The Open Inquiry Toolkit for Information Literacy builds on the Association of Research College and Research Libraries’ previous work done in the (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2017), which organizes the compelling and challenging ideas necessary for students to learn the complexities of research and inquiry. This toolkit introduces major threshold concepts such as “Scholarship as Conversation.” With this concept, students learn to see the dialogue and controversies among scholars and researchers over time. For each threshold concept, the toolkit identifies “dispositions” that students should cultivate. Some of these include curiosity, openness, and skepticism in their own research questions, which influence their assumptions about experts and processes of peer review, their use of information sources, and their presentation of their own research findings, whether in papers, presentations, or classroom debates.

The Open Inquiry Toolkit for Information Literacy much more explicitly advances the “dispositional” dimension of learning by designing assignments and curricula to cultivate the intellectual virtues, and to help students understand their own biases as well as the biases and limitations of sources and the scholars, thought leaders, or influencers who produce them. A virtues-based approach requires that students reflect on their own learning and self-correct on an ongoing basis, fill in gaps in their understanding, and be guided by faculty in understanding disciplinary thinking and practices in order to grapple with unresolved questions and ongoing controversies. This model excludes learning only one ideology or applying just one interpretive “lens.” The Open Inquiry Toolkit promotes multiple interpretive frameworks to advance a deeper understanding of challenging questions and controversies.

The Open Inquiry Toolkit is needed because current conceptions of research instruction and information literacy:

• address some aspects of learning but omit a primary one: individual cultivation of habits of mind that facilitate trust-building and community formation; and
• neglect the the agency of students to form their own character strengths over time in navigating the world of information.

Current Frameworks and Their Limitations

• Instrumentalist information literacy emphasizes students’ skill mastery and course completion to buttress graduation rates and workforce development, but may neglect knowledge transfer and lifelong learning;
• Digital literacy competencies, including algorithmic literacy, focus on emerging information formats but may remain disconnected from the full breadth and depth of scholarly communication;
• Metaliteracies develop metacognition in the individual learner but may neglect epistemic community-building;
• Informed learning cultivates disciplinary information use and knowledge creation but may neglect the affective dispositions underpinning information literacy;
• Threshold concepts, including the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, cultivate discrete skills and dispositions, but may focus on the academic context to the exclusion of knowledge transfer for professional and lifelong information needs;
• Critical information literacy raises awareness of the potential for power and oppression in information systems, but a reliance on identitarianism may contribute to “epistemic closure” (Sanchez 2010) and preempt questioning, curiosity, and learning in community.

Given the particular strengths and gaps of each of these models, what is missing?

A solution:

The Open Inquiry Toolkit for Information Literacy

The Open Inquiry Toolkit will inform library and information literacy instruction with a new focus on intellectual virtues and cognitive biases.

The Open Inquiry Toolkit aims to cultivate habits of mind in undergraduate students, faculty, librarians, and others in higher education to promote the intellectual virtues needed for research and learning, both individually and in community. Intellectual virtues are the deep personal qualities or character strengths of a good thinker or learner. They include qualities like curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual tenacity. This model also facilitates students’ ability to:

• Engage in nuanced inquiry through improved assignments and projects
• Contribute to richer and more respectful classroom dialogues, discourse, and discussion; and
• Develop throughlines to advance their own investigations on complex and evolving issues in their academic majors, in co-curricular activities, and in preparing for the world of work and the responsibilities of citizenship.

Benefits for Faculty:

Cultivate human creativity.
By applying intellectual virtues to learning design, this Toolkit provides guidance on creating assignments and other learning assessments that can’t be done with ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence.

Teach with impact.
This Toolkit supports intentional, effective learning design that improves the teaching and learning experience for instructors and students alike by appropriately supporting student learning, rewarding originality and creativity, promoting accessibility and inclusion, and building a classroom community around student inquiry.

Inspire your teaching practice.
Emerging and experienced teachers alike can benefit from approaching their teaching practice from a new perspective. This Toolkit applies virtue epistemology to teaching intellectual virtues across the disciplines, giving educators a new framework for learning design and imbuing teaching and learning with the joy of inquiry.

Benefits for Students:

Outsmart ChatGPT.
This Toolkit delivers learning experiences that facilitate students’ intellectual development. This will set them apart from generative artificial intelligence tools like Chat GPT and improve their free expression and dialogic skills.

Build confidence and resilience.
In an environment of rising student anxiety, depression, and stress, this Toolkit will help to build students’ confidence and resilience by coaching them in the intellectual tools and habits of mind they will need to chart their own intellectual paths through complex information environments.

Foster expression.
This Toolkit provides resources for cultivating a climate of open inquiry and facilitating meaningful student interactions that can promote student expression and ability to engage with different voices, perspectives, research methods, and bodies of evidence.

To learn more, please click here to see our annotated bibliography.

Please click here to see our annotated bibliography.

Intellectual virtues are the qualities and character strengths that enable good thinking and learning. Intellectual virtues are dispositions to think and act in ways that promote true belief, knowledge, and understanding. Accessible to everyone, intellectual virtues are distinct from, but can enhance, cognitive ability and access to information. For more information about intellectual virtues, see Educating for Intellectual Virtues.

The Open Inquiry Toolkit focuses on a core set of intellectual virtues:

• Curiosity: the capacity to observe, ponder, and inquire, characterized by a propensity for wonderment about the world and a desire to understand it by being attentive and asking questions.
• Open-mindedness: an encompassing motivation to see things as they are, characterized by the willingness to challenge an existing belief in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding through due regard for evidence and reasoning.
• Intellectual humility: a willingness to acknowledge the limitations and imperfections of one’s own knowledge and to identify and admit what one doesn’t know.
• Intellectual tenacity: the capacity to withstand intellectual challenges while maintaining intellectual carefulness, thoroughness, and diligence, characterized by the willingness to exert effort in thinking, reasoning, and learning.
• Intellectual autonomy: the exercise of intellectual agency in inquiring and gathering, attending to, evaluating, and synthesizing evidence and reasoning in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding exemplified by independent thinking.
• Epistemic responsibility: an appreciation for the epistemic interdependence of all thinkers and the necessity of epistemic community characterized by an embrace of intellectual pluralism and the civil exchange of ideas and information.

Please click here to see our glossary.