We are delighted to welcome Shohana Nowrin back to CityLIS as she begins her PhD research. Here, Shohana briefly introduces herself and her work on information literacy.
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Hello everyone!!
It’s me, Shohana Nowrin, and I am very excited to share with you all that I recently joined in CityLIS as a research student. Before joining here, I have complet my graduation and post-graduation from the Department of Information Science and Library Management of University of Dhaka, Bangladesh and also completed my second master’s in Library Science from City, University of London with distinction.
After completion of my post-graduation from the University of Dhaka, I had joined in the same university in the same department as a Lecturer and currently, I am serving as an assistant professor there. Not only that, I had also worked as a Library officer for a short period of time in a private university of Bangladesh before starting my career as a teacher. I love my background in the field of Library and Information Science and I would love to spend my rest of the life working in this area and by witnessing the evolution of this field.
For my research, I have chosen the area of information literacy in a multicultural and multilingual environment within higher education. Currently, the libraries of higher education institutions are offering information literacy instructions to their students but those are mostly limited to English only. However, in this age of globalization, where higher education institutions are promoting cultural diversity in their institutions, the academic libraries should also look for options to meet the needs of international students[1].
Accordingly, information literacy is very important to satisfy the huge demand of information emanated from these students as information literacy refers to the group of skills that enable a person to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information”[2].
Without having appropriate literacy instructions in place, difficulties may occur to the international students in understanding the academic practices of plagiarism and copyright law because of their different cultural ideas towards intellectual properties[3].
While I was studying my MSc at CityLIS, I had also come across different types of multilingual and multicultural challenges because of my cultural and language differences. So, the area of information literacy in a multicultural and multilingual environment attracted me massively since I faced the same condition by my own.
Although, it is too early to finalize any specific outcomes of my project at the initial stage, however, I am curious to find out what types of challenges are faced in understanding information literacy instructions by the students of higher education who come from multicultural environments and exploring their experiences or opinions in solving these challenges.
Due to the absence of appropriate information literacy instructions for the culturally diverse group of students, the librarians of the higher education institutions may also experience new challenges in providing literacy instructions to the non-native English students. So this also important to investigate their opinions and experiences towards designing information literacy courses or programmes.
I am also interested to find out whether there are any models, which have previously considered the issues of multilingual and multicultural aspects in higher education institutions, amongst various existing models of information literacy, and if not, then what would be the solution for the students of higher education in these circumstances.
I hope that my research might make a great contribution towards understanding information literacy instructions and programmes for the non-native English students.
References
- Amsberry, D. (2008). Talking the talk: library classroom communication and international students. The Journal of Academic Librarianship,34 (4), 354-357.
- ACRL (2000) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries.
- Badke, W. (2002), International students: information literacy or academic literacy? Academic Exchange Quarterly, 6(4), 60-65
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Shohana Nowrin is on Twitter.
This is an edited version of this post from Shohana’s blog, Limit exists only in the mind.
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