Addressing Barriers to Research-Informed Practice: A Library and Social Work Collaboration to Empower Future Practitioners

• Published in: Communications in information literacy Vol. 18; no. 1; pp. 38 - 55
• Main Authors: Dinscore, Amanda, Gonzalez, Debbie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tulsa Communications in Information Literacy 01.06.2024
• Subjects: Access to information; authority; Collaboration; critical information literacy; Curricula; Education; Empowerment; Ethics; Evidence-based practice; Information literacy; information privilege; Institutional repositories; Interlibrary loans; Knowledge; Librarians; Libraries; lifelong learning; open access; Open access publishing; Oppression; Pedagogy; Professional practice; Qualitative research; Racism; Research methodology; Scholarly publishing; Social work; Students; Subscriptions; User training; United States > US
• ISSN: 1933-5954; 1933-5954
• DOI: 10.15760/comminfolit.2024.18.1.3

Social work education prioritizes the use of research to inform practice. As university students, prospective social workers have a wealth of research available to them as well as librarians to help them find, evaluate, and use that information. However, access to much of this research ends once the student graduates—at a time when it is most needed to inform their professional practice. To address this challenge, a librarian and a social work faculty member worked with one class of students in their final semester of a bachelor’s degree in social work program to promote awareness of information privilege and barriers to access, to expand their understanding of authority to include marginalized voices, and to utilize an open pedagogy assignment as a means of proactively addressing these challenges. This article describes what was learned from this effort, including the results of surveys conducted with students before and after instruction.