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Leveling Up Information Literacy: Library Instruction & Tabletop RPGs in Conversation
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Poster (Research)
Date
2025-06-29
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.34944/em8p-5g42
Abstract
Instructional roles and responsibilities require librarians to adopt and refine effective classroom practices. Many of these tactics are also intrinsic to tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), where players adopt personas with specialized skillsets to determine appropriate scopes of investigation, persist against challenges, and resolve quests together (Bowman, 2010). RPGs are a creative activity where the players are also the audience – even the game moderator (GM) is a spectator who doesn’t know how events will unfold or when new knowledge may be produced.
Teaching librarians, like GMs, prepare students to embark on quests for knowledge, providing tools and strategies, and pivoting their gameplan when necessary in response to student inquiry and demonstration of knowledge practices. The performative nature of RPGs, as well as the abundance of best-practice advice available to GMs, can actually be a site of praxis for teaching librarians, offering a critical lens through which to demonstrate the dynamic nature of exploratory research and leverage improvisational thinking (Youakim, 2019).
This poster will highlight relationships found between one-shot instruction and tabletop role-playing games, based on a qualitative content analysis of professional literature and community-generated content (blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.) from the past ten years. Focusing on concepts of identity, agency, communication, and reflection, the presenters will offer a “character sheet” of collected tips and best practices for enhancing one-shot library instruction. Foundational knowledge covering RPG definitions, critical discourses from RPG player-critics, and performance theory will be included, as will novel ideas for incorporating an RPG ethos into the library classroom.
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Poster presented at the 2025 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition, which took place June 26-30, in Philadelphia, PA.
Citation
Jeitner, E., & De Voe, K. M. (2025, June 29). Leveling Up Information Literacy: Library Instruction & Tabletop RPGs in Conversation. Poster presented at the 2025 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition, Philadelphia, PA.
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