What do we teach when we teach information literacy in higher education? This paper describes a pedagogical approach to information literacy that helps instructors focus content around transformative learning thresholds. The threshold concept framework holds promise for librarians because it grounds the instructor in the big ideas and underlying concepts that make information literacy exciting and worth learning about. This paper looks at how this new idea relates to existing standards and posits several threshold concepts for information literacy.
Threshold concepts are a theory of teaching and learning proposed by two British
educators, Jan Meyer and Ray Land. Threshold concepts can be used for teaching information literacy and could inform the Standards revision as well. There are five definitional criteria that make a concept a threshold concept