by Misha Robinson
My journey to metaliteracy has not been expected or exactly straightforward; I am an adjunct lecturer at a community college in Maryland and started out as a fierce advocate of media literacy and critical consumption in the age of social media. It was at the Maryland Consortium for Adjunct Faculty Professional Development in 2024 that I ran into the idea—and the woman—who lit the spark. Dr. Rhianna Rodgers was the keynote speaker that day, and she had a great deal to say about AI and its potential applications for the classroom. I was something of an AI skeptic—not closed, but definitely wary. At the Q&A, I asked her how I could integrate AI into the media literacy that I was teaching—less ‘how to use AI’ and more ‘how to identify AI-generated content’ and ‘how to defend yourself against doctored reality.’ Her response was immediate—she put me in touch with a colleague, Dr. Thomas Mackey, and told me to ask him about metaliteracy. She explained that metaliteracy asks learners to consume more critically but also to reflect on what they consume and to use that knowledge to make something new. I reached out and Dr. Mackey and I connected, and I have never looked back.
This summer, I learned that Dr. Mackey was giving a presentation with some colleagues about Metaliteracy and AI up at SUNY Stony Brook, so I figured what the heck, and I went up to attend the conference for a day. I came away practically vibrating with ideas and enthusiasm, and with a burning need to share metaliteracy with other faculty, not just with my students. There is so much that metaliterate class construction can do to facilitate deep learning, and metaliterate learning elegantly addresses student use of AI, which seems to be the digital elephant in the room these days.
Bringing Metaliteracy to Fellow Faculty
So, there I was: an adjunct instructor at the front of a room filled with part-time, full-time, and tenured faculty, thinking that I had something ground-breaking to share. To say that I was nervous would be an understatement. However, I have often referred to myself, somewhat jokingly, as a shameless evangelist for metaliteracy, and now I had my chance!
First, I wanted to illustrate the benefits to students of teaching from a metaliteracy framework—namely, that students become more reflective and engaged learners. They work in collaboration with others to synthesize and produce new knowledge and contribute that knowledge responsibly as civically minded people engaged in building the world they want to live in. Second, I had taken great pains to construct my presentation as one that was discipline-agnostic; I had no idea who would be in the room, either in terms of their department or discipline or how they might feel about integrating technology such as AI or podcasts into their classes. It was critical that the presentation feel relevant to everyone so that no one felt it was a waste of time or a poor fit. As it turns out, I had a handful of librarians and faculty from the departments of English, accelerated learning, math, philosophy, and academic development, among others. I seized the opportunity given to show everyone that metaliteracy unites strands of thought and learning from across disciplines.
I took the opportunity to explain how metaliteracy benefits their students by better preparing them for a world that is inundated with information and leaves them on their own to sort it out. I showed them what metaliteracy could do for their students—like history students analyzing historical misinformation about pandemics like the 1918 Influenza, building digital exhibits using primary sources, then collaborating with health science students on how to improve public health communication for future pandemics. Then, I showed my colleagues how to do it themselves: I provided basic guidelines for how to build metaliteracy into classroom assignments, from lab reports to literature reviews, using verbs like Find, Synthesize, and Reflect that map onto Bloom’s Taxonomy to keep it familiar.
Okay, But… Why Metaliteracy?
Metaliteracy requires you to take the knowledge you have found and evaluated and do something with it. Share it, remix it, collaborate with others and turn it into something new. It is not enough to have the information; use it to the benefit of your fellow humans. It feels naïve to say this, but I see the benefits of metaliteracy so clearly that it honestly never occurred to me that others might not. So, I was surprised when one of the participants challenged me to really differentiate metaliteracy from information literacy. The answer was, to me, so simple that I struggled for several minutes to articulate it. However, this was the moment when I found that my presentation truly landed with some of the faculty, as one of them turned around to the questioner and gave his version of what the difference between them was—he homed in on the metacognitive domain and suggested that was where the difference lies.
Advice for Presenters
For those who have read the articles, or the books, or have read this website from start to finish, and are thinking about bringing metaliteracy to their institutions, I offer the following advice: first, keep it broad and interdisciplinary. On the first slide after my title, I offered a reassurance that if you’re not sure where or whether metaliteracy fits your discipline, there would be examples from many fields of academia. Building a coalition of faculty across disciplines leads by example and gets people out of their ‘silos.’ Second, make it low effort: giving educators a broad overview of how to incorporate metaliteracy into the assignments they already use lessens the barrier to entry. Finally, if there are specific concerns that the community has, such as AI, address them directly.
Metaliteracy has so much potential to help not just students but all of us to integrate our hard-won knowledge and wisdom that we gain across situations and subjects, and to shape the world we want to live in together. Come and be my neighbor!
References
Jacobson, T., & Mackey, T. (2025). 2025 metaliteracy goals and learning objectives. Metaliteracy. https://metaliteracy.org/learning-objectives/metaliteracy-goals-and-learning-objectives-updated-2025/
Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson, “Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy.” College & Research Libraries 72, no. 1 (2011): 62–78.
Misha Robinson (she/they) holds a Masters in Liberal Studies from Indiana University. She teaches in the English department at The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC). Their teaching and research foci are English composition, metaliteracy, and neurodiversity and accessibility in education. She presently serves on the CCBC School of World Languages and Literature’s AI Committee, the Neurodiversity Unbound Committee, and on the Textbook Affordability Committee. When they are not teaching, Misha is an Emotional Support Human for a very spoiled Snowshoe cat named Selkie, collects fabric, and enjoys puzzles.
This post was written in its entirety by Misha Robinson, and utilized generative AI to check accessibility and provide editing feedback.
Metaliteracy.org 