Frameworks for Collaboration: Articulating Information Literacy and Writing Goals in the Archives

Rhetoric and composition scholars have recently called our attention to the value of archival research in the undergraduate classroom, leading to rich collaborations with archivists and librarians at many institutions. As we engaged our own pedagogical collaboration as a university archivist and English faculty member, we realized that, though we might use slightly different language to articulate them or cite different sources in support of them, many of our learning goals overlapped. As we explored these goals together, we realized that they evidenced a correspondence in our disciplines that we had not explored—one that is reflected in our fields’ recent outcomes statements: the 2011 Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and 2016 Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. In this article, we briefly describe our course and use it as a touch point for comparing these disciplinary statements. We argue that analysis of the overlap between these two documents helps us articulate a new set of reasons for faculty to connect with their allies in libraries and archives to teach undergraduate research and writing.