Many academic and public libraries display their unique archives and special collections materials in exhibition spaces. With an array of primary sources and visuals, special collections exhibitions offer a wonderful venue for experiential learning of constructed narratives and perspectives. This Exhibition Explorer Card Deck is designed to guide students to experience close viewing of special collections materials through explicit steps for thinking rhetorically and critically in an exhibit space. The Exhibition Explorer Deck consists of eight cards, including one card with basic instruction on how to use the deck, five cards asking students to answer specific questions about the exhibit, and two cards with short activities to promote mindfulness as students move through the exhibit space. Each card is double-sided with an activity title on one side and questions/activities on reverse. This exhibition exercise can take place complementary to or independent of hands-on instruction sessions in departments of archives and special collections. Also, it is adaptable to use in various kinds of exhibitions in libraries, museums, and other learning spaces.

In-class Visit Lesson plan with Exhibition Explorer Card Deck:

Working in pairs or small teams, students visit the Archives and Special Collections exhibition. First, students shuffle the Exhibition Explorer Card Deck, then they work through each activity card in a random order. The shuffling of cards encourages serendipitous discovery of the exhibition, in which each student group conducts the exhibition activities following different orders of cards in the exhibit space. (15-20 minutes)

After students complete all the activity cards, the course instructor and/or special collections librarian facilitate a group discussion in the exhibition gallery. Students are asked to share observations from the exhibit exercise. Each group selects the activity card they find most engaging or confusing and share their responses to that card. Students are also asked to reflect on the connections between the exhibit exercise and applications for rhetorical thinking. (15-20 minutes)

This lesson is intended to increase students’ awareness of content types and how various source types are created in order to 1) assist them in accurate citation practices and 2) help them to effectively select and evaluate sources using basic indicators such as purpose, audience, authorship, and additional factors that shape the creation of the source.

A "jigsaw lite" activity to help students recognize that the information tools and systems they use in their everyday and academic lives are not neutral as existing power structures are reflected in the creation, organization, and access of information. Students work in small groups to read an assigned article about bias in a tool, source type, or system and answer questions to share with the larger class.

This lesson is designed for lower-division composition undergraduate students to learn frameworks for evaluating the audience and purpose of various information sources. After analyzing an array of sources for audience and purpose students can dig in to a source in more detail looking for markers of authority and discussing strategies for verifying claims.

BEAM Me Up is a one-shot session that works well in addition to a search strategies class, but can be done without. This session asks students to use the BEAM framework coined by Joseph Bizup to organize and synthesize research materials to create a complex and well-supported argument. Rather than evaluated sources using a checklist, the instructor using BEAM asks students to consider how the information will be used (and to consider how authors use information to build arguments). Adaptors may want to replace the sources given here with ones relevant to the students' curriculum. Our students are asked to create an argument that considers the city they live in, i.e. Memphis. I chose Stax Records because of its rich history locally and nationally, and because of its importance to the civil rights movement. I wanted to use a topic the students would find interesting and chose a variety of source types that I hoped would engage them both personally and intellectually. With credit to Brannen Varner, Michael Harris, and Joel Roberts.

A two-credit online undergraduate information literacy course used in an adult degree completion bachelor's program.

This is a participatory, variable lesson frame ready for you to modify to suit your instruction needs. This lesson and it's variations focuses on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators and part of the scholarly conversation and can also variously include conversations about about the scholarly information cycle and/or authority depending on instruction constraints and configuration.

This activity provides an interactive, student-centered, fun opportunity to explore skills of critical thinking and evaluation of resources. By allowing students to connect those things that they already know (even if they don’t know they know it) to larger concepts, we encourage them to trust themselves and to begin to develop their intuition as scholars, moving away from checklists and formulas for resource evaluation and toward a thoughtful critique of sources based on individual need and use.

Did fake news affect the presidential election? Do websites purposely publish misleading stories? In this workshop, learn how to evaluate the trustworthiness of news stories while responsibly sharing reliable information.

Are you finding reliable sources for your research papers and projects? Has your professor asked you to use scholarly sources? What is a scholarly source anyway? In this workshop, learn how to critically evaluate the information you find through books, articles, and websites.

**This lesson plan was adapted from "Establishing and Applying Evaluation Criteria" p. 74 -78 in Teaching Information Literacy Threshold Concepts Lesson Plans for Librarians, edited by Bravender, McClure, and Schaub (2015).**