Category Archives: civic-minded

How I Found Metaliteracy

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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.

One of the early slides in the presentation by the author that provides examples of how students can use interdisciplinary approaches to enrich and enhance understanding of the world around us.
Figure 1: This is one of the early slides in the presentation, giving examples of how students can use interdisciplinary approaches to enrich and enhance understanding of the world around us.

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.

A slide from the author's presentation on how to integrate metaliteracy goals into assignment types that educators already use.
Figure 1: A slide from my presentation on how to integrate metaliteracy goals into assignment types that educators already use.

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. 

Photo of the author Misha Robinson.

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 Explored in Deliberative Conversation about Identifying and Resisting Misinformation

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Picture of Tom Mackey presenting at Deliberative Conversation. Photograph take by Anita Brown.

A new metaliteracy workshop was facilitated by Prof. Tom Mackey as a Deliberative Conversation at the SUNY Empire State College Student Academic Conference on April 7, 2022. This was the first in-person student conference at the college since the global pandemic prevented such face-to-face gatherings for two years.

The interactive workshop provided an excellent opportunity to engage with students directly about Developing Metaliteracy to Identify and Resist Misinformation. This most current Deliberative Conversation was organized by Anita DeCianni-Brown, Collegewide Career Development Coordinator at SUNY Empire.

Photo of Tom Mackey and Students at Deliberative Conversation.

For additional background about the development of Deliberative Conversations at SUNY Empire State College, explore the paper by Principal Investigator (PI) Dr. Rhianna C. Rogers and co-PIs (including Anita Brown) for the Rockefeller Institute entitled The Value of Deliberative Conversation in Participatory Action Research A Student Commentary on the Buffalo Project – Academic Year 2017-18 (Murawski, et. al., 2020).

The metaliteracy resources, questions, and techniques applied in this workshop are openly available and transferrable to a wide range of settings. Feel free to facilitate your own Deliberative Conversation at your institution based on this presentation.

Photo credit: Thanks to Anita DeCianni-Brown, Collegewide Career Development Coordinator at SUNY Empire.

New Metaliterate Learner Characteristics Video

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A new video illustrating the metaliterate learner characteristics has been added to the Metaliteracy YouTube channel. The video completes a series that introduces the core metaliteracy components, including the learning domains, learner roles and characteristics.

Metaliterate Learner Characteristics CC-BY The Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative

The videos depict metaliterate learning in action: a learner considers the impact of the affective domain when seeking information on a topic about which they are particularly passionate (and perhaps biased); a metaliterate author creates a digital story that ethically incorporates repurposed content; and civic-minded citizens work together to create trusting online spaces by developing and enacting community guidelines. The examples in the videos, by no means exhaustive, encourage self-reflection as viewers contemplate the roles, characteristics, and domains they employ as metaliterate learners. The videos also emphasize that metaliterate learning is a continual, reflective process and prompt learners to consider the aspects with which they identify as well as those toward which they aspire.

Do you have ideas for how you might incorporate these resources into your teaching? Please feel free to embed the videos into your lessons and tell us about it in the comments! We’d love to know more about your ideas and practices.

Virtual Conference Features Metaliteracy Keynote

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A new metaliteracy keynote entitled The Role of Metaliteracy in Designing Open Learning Initiatives was presented by Profs. Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson at the virtual conference Intercultural Perspectives on Information Literacy on January 30, 2021. This international event is an outcome of the “Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy” project led by Prof. Dr. Joachim Griesbaum from Hildesheim University, Germany. This international collaboration connects the Department for Information Science and Natural Language Processing, Hildesheim University Germany and Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce, Pune, India. The conference YouTube Channel features recorded sessions, including the keynote.

This new presentation addresses today’s fractured information environment and how metaliteracy can be applied in these challenging times. Trudi and Tom talk about ways to rebuild trust in these environments through metaliteracy and to share ideas about how to design open learning initiatives with this model.

Metaliteracy Launches Reason & Respect Initiative at SUNY Empire

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Tom Mackey’s presentation Advancing Metaliteracy to Rebuild Trust launched the Reason & Respect initiative at SUNY Empire State College. This series of online conversations “provides a forum for students, faculty, staff, and our broader communities to explore and discuss topics related to the election and learn about critical issues” (SUNY Empire). Tom’s presentation examines metaliteracy as a pedagogical strategy to address the challenges of misinformation and disinformation during this election cycle and a global pandemic. According to the World Health Organization, the COVID-19 pandemic is also an “infodemic” that is defined by the spread of false and misleading information. The sharing of deceptive and untruthful information during a global pandemic is especially problematic when accurate and reliable communication is essential for saving lives. Misinformation and disinformation are amplified by echo chambers, tribalism, and contentious partisan environments that reinforce mistrust and division. How do we rebuild trust based on reason and respect? How do we engage in difficult conversations about critical issues while reexamining fixed mindsets and understanding multiple perspectives?

During an age of misinformation and well-orchestrated disinformation campaigns, it is especially vital to make informed decisions based on accurate content from reliable and truthful sources. Metaliteracy is a comprehensive model that helps individuals to become both critical consumers and ethical producers of information in participatory environments (Mackey & Jacobson, 2011; Mackey & Jacobson, 2014). Metaliterate learners are reflective, well-informed, and civic-minded contributors to shared communities. They adapt to changing information technologies and work conscientiously to build communities of trust (Mackey, 2019). Metaliterate learners reflect on how they feel about information and the specific contexts of information environments (Jacobson, et. al., 2018). They develop a metaliteracy mindset and examine their own predispositions while consciously seeking information from multiple perspectives and sources (Jacobson, et. al., 2018). Metaliteracy has been applied in many different educational settings, from classrooms and libraries to online virtual environments, showing that it is possible to advance rational and reflective dialogue among engaged participants in shared spaces. This presentation explores how metaliteracy is a lifelong practice for building truthful and trusted communities based on a shared commitment to both empathy and understanding.

References

Jacobson, T., Mackey, T., O’Brien, K., Forte, M., & O’Keeffe, E. (2018).   “Goals and Learning Objectives.” Metaliteracy.org, Retrieved from https://metaliteracy.org/learning-objectives/

Mackey, T.P., “Empowering Metaliterate Learners for the Post-Truth World.” In Mackey and Jacobson (Eds.). Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World. New York: ALA Publishing, Inc., (2019).

Mackey, T. P., & Jacobson, T. E.. (2011). Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy. College & Research Libraries, (January): 62-78.

Mackey, T. P., & Jacobson, T. E. (2014). Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy to Empower Learners. Chicago: ALA/Neal-Schuman Publishing.

Managing the COVID-19 infodemic: Promoting healthy behaviours and mitigating the harm from misinformation and disinformation. World Health Organization. (2020, September 23). https://www.who.int/news/item/23-09-2020-managing-the-covid-19-infodemic-promoting-healthy-behaviours-and-mitigating-the-harm-from-misinformation-and-disinformation.

Metaliteracy and Maker Literacy

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We are delighted to share this guest post by Sarah Nagle, Creation and Innovation Services Librarian at Miami University, Oxford Ohio. Sarah explores the maker movement, its tenuous fit with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, and what she defines as a strong alignment with metaliteracy.

Metaliteracy as a Bridge Between Maker Literacy and the ACRL Framework

Sarah Nagle, Creation and Innovation Services Librarian

The popularity of makerspaces has soared across the world since the onset of the Maker Movement in the mid-2000s. Makerspaces are collaborative working and learning spaces that often include technology such as 3D printers, sewing machines, laser cutters, and other equipment. While community and public library makerspaces led the charge in the early years of the maker movement, maker-centered learning has blossomed in the realm of education, becoming a popular learning tool in K-12 schools, and more recently in higher education. Often, university makerspaces live in the campus library. University libraries can provide broad access to communal, collaborative spaces for the campus community, making them an ideal location for makerspaces. Maker-centered learning has a strong multidisciplinary, collaborative aspect, and makerspaces traditionally put value on the open sharing of things and ideas, something that is deeply embedded in the spirit of libraries.

As makerspaces have grown in popularity in education, some important projects have arisen to study the benefits and outcomes of maker-centered learning. Agency by Design (AbD) (Clapp et al., 2017) is a multi-year research project that has studied maker-centered learning. Although the project focused mainly on K-12 education, many of the findings can apply to maker-centered learning for any age level. AbD developed a Framework for Maker-Centered Learning, which focuses on maker empowerment and design sensitivity. A prominent framework for maker-centered learning in higher education is the Maker Literacies Project (Wallace, et al., 2018), an IMLS-funded initiative started at the University of Texas Arlington, has developed a list of maker competencies for higher education, in addition to providing a wide range of examples of makerspace course integrations. A common thread for maker-centered learning frameworks is the development of a maker mindset, which places emphasis on empowerment, failure positivity, and critical thinking. Often absent from maker-centered learning frameworks is a strong emphasis on the acquisition of specific skills. In other words, even though students are learning specific tools, technologies, and software, the enduring value that they receive from maker-centered learning experiences is primarily related to mindset development.

The question of how maker-centered learning connects to information literacy instruction remains largely unanswered. Since moving from public to academic library makerspaces in 2018, I have grappled with how to bridge maker-centered learning with my library’s information literacy instructional mission, which focuses heavily on the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy. Attempting to map maker literacies to the ACRL Framework can be a difficult task; there are many similarities, but there are also many outcomes of maker-centered learning that don’t fit perfectly within the six frames. Then I began reading about metaliteracy and discovered that the concept provides an excellent overarching model for connecting experiential learning competencies like maker literacy to the ACRL Framework.

Metaliteracy places emphasis on learners as active, collaborative, and introspective creators. This perspective on information literacy broadens the scope of library instruction and makes room for new and innovative literacies, such as maker literacy. Below are some of the important ways that metaliteracy encompasses the outcomes of maker-centered learning.

  • Shift from consumer to creator – Goal 3 of the 2018 Metaliteracy Goals and Learning Objectives includes students’ ability to view themselves as producers of information. An important outcome of maker-centered learning focuses on this shift as well. Rooted in the ideals of the maker movement, the shift from consumer to creator fundamentally changes students’ outlook and connects closely with the theme of empowerment. Students are no longer blindly consuming information and things, but rather looking critically at all aspects of the designed world around them, with a confidence in their ability to analyze, tinker with, and design new objects.
  • Empowerment – Learner empowerment is mentioned in the metaliteracy documentation as an outcome of metacognition and metaliterate learning. Empowerment is also a key component of maker-centered learning frameworks. The ultimate outcome of the AbD Framework for Maker-Centered Learning is Maker Empowerment. This is defined as “A sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems, along with the inclination and capacity to shape one’s world through building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking” (Agency by Design, n.d.). In other words, maker-centered learning helps students critically evaluate the world around them, understand how things work, and gain confidence in their own ability to fix, improve upon, and create things.
  • Civic mindedness – One characteristic of metaliterate learners is their tendency to be civic minded. Civic mindedness is also a byproduct of maker-centered learning. When students experience empowerment through maker-centered learning, this empowerment begins to extend beyond themselves, often resulting in students’ commitment to use their newfound agency to make a difference in the world at large. A hallmark of the maker movement is the propensity of makers to use their skills to give back to their communities. A recent example is the maker community’s response to shortages of PPE and medical devices during the COVID-19 pandemic. When stories began circulating of PPE shortages, makers worldwide immediately stepped up in huge ways to design, develop, and manufacture face masks, shields, and even parts for medical devices such as ventilators. AbD identifies “Community Making” as one of the primary benefits of maker-centered learning, defining it as, “Finding opportunities to make things that are meaningful to one’s community and taking ownership of that process of making, either independently or with others” (Clapp et al., 2017, p. 41).
  • Metacognition – Metacognition is an integral component of metaliteracy, as one of the four domains of metaliterate learning. Although the current literature and frameworks on maker literacy do not explicitly address metacognition in maker-centered learning, the concept is certainly interconnected with the maker learning process. The maker mindset involves critical evaluation of one’s own beliefs and outlooks. In all of my makerspace instruction sessions, I start by introducing students to the maker mindset, which gives students the opportunity to understand and evaluate their own shift in thinking as they develop themselves as makers. Additionally, Wallace et al. (2018) discuss how maker learning activities were more effective when faculty members included self-reflection in the assignment. They describe how the addition of journaling or other self-reflective components to maker assignments increased student growth. This metacognitive step also contributes to maker empowerment, because when students understand the elements of mindset development, they have the ability to control their own learning.

As more academic libraries implement makerspaces, academic library maker educators may face pressure to demonstrate how maker literacy fits with the ACRL Framework. Metaliteracy not only expands students’ expertise of information literacy to include rapidly changing digital environments, it also has the potential to be the bridge that connects newly forming innovative literacies, including maker literacy, to the ACRL Framework. By embracing mindset development rather than skill acquisition, information literacy instruction has the potential to help students develop lifelong practices and viewpoints that will continue to serve them long after they graduate.

References

Agency by Design. (n.d.). The Framework for Maker-Centered Learning. http://www.agencybydesign.org/explore-the-framework

Clapp, E. P., Ross, J., Ryan, J. O., & Tishman, S. (2017). Maker-centered learning: empowering young people to shape their worlds. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Wallace, M., Trkay, G., Peery, K., Chivers, M, Radniecki, T. (2018, August 3-5). Maker Competencies and the Undergraduate Curriculum. Paper presented at the 2018 International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces, Stanford, CA. Retrieved from https://rc.library.uta.edu/uta-ir/handle/10106/27518

Sarah Nagle is Creation and Innovation Services Librarian at Miami University in Ohio, where she supports transdisciplinary projects and course integrations relating to a variety of maker and innovation topics. Sarah’s scholarly interests include inclusivity in the maker movement and how maker-centered learning can enhance learning both in informal environments and higher education.