A visiting lecturer is an external facilitator, teacher or workshop leader, usually with particular interest and experience in a specialist area. Learners can benefit from a guest speaker bringing specialist insight or knowledge to a topic. Guest speakers can also serve to vary style and/or input during a longer session. In many professional, vocational and creative subjects, experienced practitioners are used as visiting lecturers and this can apply to the teaching of information literacy.

You may wish to bring in current practitioners to talk about how they interact with information. This would work particularly well in professional subjects, like marketing or law. A group of learners hearing from a professional can be much more powerful than a librarian lecturing about what ought to be done.

You may also wish to use a data protection officer, or someone involved with information compliance to talk about data security or freedom of information. Alternatively, ask a successful learner on a course you have run to return and talk about how they approached a challenging task. This might be any kind of learner ranging from a senior school pupil talking to younger learners about reading for pleasure, to second year undergraduate talking to first years about essay research, a recent PhD student or someone who has completed family history work. Guest speakers or visiting lecturers can provide a role model or be the voice of experience to learners who may not see the relevance or application of information literacy within their research.

You should also consider the role of guest speaker or visiting lecturer for yourself. Integrating information literacy into the mainstream curriculum will significantly improve learning as students appreciate its relevance and impact on their studies. Collaboration with subject teaching staff is crucial to this but acting as a visiting lecturer, perhaps as a precursor to a more active workshop, will raise your credibility and give the idea of information literacy more gravitas.

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