Teaching Copyleft as a Critical Approach to "Information Has Value"

The credit-bearing classroom provides librarians with expanded opportunities to connect with students as teachers, mentors, and advocates. Both the content and approach of one-shot sessions are often driven by faculty requests for resource-based instruction. Librarians teaching credit-bearing classes do not face the same constraints on their time with students or limitations on instructional content. Accordingly, librarians in credit-bearing settings can go beyond demonstrating databases or teaching discrete skills to engage students in learning research concepts and to advocate for information- related social justice issues. One such advocacy issue is copyleft, a movement responding to the constraints of traditional copyright by allowing the licensed work to be used, modified, and distributed as determined by the work’s creator. By introducing students to the copyleft movement, librarians can encourage students to make their works more freely available and to engage in the conversation of scholarship. This chapter presents a case study of a research methods course in which students created and embedded Creative Commons licenses in digital platforms in order to encourage learners to critically evaluate the production and value of information.