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
- 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
This 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 (2016), 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” which 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.
