I have been reading a few books about library instruction and information literacy over the winter break. I have a few initial reactions to them, and I would like to share them over the coming weeks.

Title: Framing Library Instruction
Author: John Budd

This book is intended to offer a framework in which library instructional programs can be built. Budd is an advocate of an approach that he describes as “phenomenological cognitive action.” Drawing on phenomenological philosophy (e.g., Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) Budd describes this as an examination of how students search for meaning and understanding “in statements, images, or voices of others, and the teachers’ engagement of students in those searches.” He criticizes the tendency of the library profession to treat information as a thing and to give information a meaning beyond its “function as (a) tool…” He also advises library instructors to consider constructivist learning theory, which acknowledges the intersubjective role that socially constructed categories and language play and how these things are used to frame our understanding of material things. Therefore, Budd concludes that librarians should compel students to be “active in their learning, as well as in the historical evaluation of what is presented to them.”

Budd’s work raises some interesting questions, but for those librarians tasked with developing an instruction or information literacy program this book will probably not be that helpful. Budd surveys several important philosophical and educational theories that are very relevant to developing a framework for instruction. However, Budd’s work will probably not persuade colleagues that are not already predisposed to wade through dense explanations of these theories of theory’s importance to the day-to-day realities of providing instruction in a library setting.

If you follow your nose far enough into citations, you inevitably come across something from the past that recontextualizes things you think about everyday. Most information literacy/library instruction program coordinators (parse that phrasing as you will) have assessment on the brain in one form or another. Articles continue to pour forth on the topic and many of us seem to be almost in a state of perpetual hand-wringing about the effectiveness of our instruction and the importance of our libraries in the educational lives of our students, sometimes to the point of using statistics in – how should one say it? – somewhat “creative” ways.

But we can stop worrying. Someone already did it for us. And it’s documented in Richard Hume Werking’s 1980 Library Trends article, “Evaluating Bibliographic Education: A Review and Critique.” (Back issues of LT are at http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/999)

If you’re not familiar with the Feagley Library Orientation Test for College Freshmen, developed at Columbia University circa 1955, or the (now at the top of my reading list) article “Arrows for Freshmen” (Margaret Barkeley, Library Journal, May 15, 1939), this piece is for you.

A recent assessment of student research papers undertaken last semester where I work? See (more or less) Thomas G. Kirk, CRL 32:465-74, Nov. 1971.

Verily careers are built on reinventing the wheel. But how many of us know when we’re doing it?

A side note: Richard Werking now seems to be in the history department at Annapolis. His 2003 article in portal, “Vessels and Voyagers:
 Some Thoughts on Reading and Writing, Books and Libraries,” is a remarkable reminder of (recent) historical worries about the future of the book in the growing “digital age.” For more on this see the special issue Library Trends (1997) on the Benton Foundation’s report Buildings, Books and Bytes: Libraries and Communities in the Digital Age. Poke around the Benton website; you can find some interesting articles from the mid ’90s about the coming “information superhighway.”

I am now returning to this blog after a summer that seemed to go by way too fast. I am now getting back into the swing of things and making plans for the upcoming semester.

I really want to open this blog up to anybody that wants to discuss research, concepts, and intellectual debates that relate to information literacy. I want to hear what you are reading and how it shapes how you think about your information literacy work! Recent research from within the LIS discipline is welcome, but I would also like to welcome commentary and ideas from outside the discipline and profession. Were you reading some weird science fiction novel from the 1970s that made your think about different ways of teaching? Did you finally get around to reading Ulysses and you developed some insights about the nature of experience that you will use at reference desk? Was that stereotypical librarian on television last night reflective of how our students view us? Please share!

On to other matters…

I ran into this discussion over at Barbara Fister’s blog that relates to some of the things that I have thinking about this summer. I would recommend reading the interview and that she links to and the “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences” article discussed in the interview.

What this discussion has highlighted for me is how important disciplinary and general academic knowledge is when developing information literacy, research, and writing capabilities. Making sense of the key terms of a debate within a discipline requires a certain degree of experience with those debates. This became especially apparent to me when working on a project looking at the research and writing of undergraduate political science students. I just started Jane June and Richard G. Niemi’s book Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn and they point out that a student in a 200 level biology class would probably never enter the lecture hall or laboratory having heard heated discussions about the scientific method over the dinner table. This familiarity with the key terms of the discourse plays a huge role in just how a student conducts research and makes sense of what they find. This disciplinary knowledge is the only way to really make sense of all of those articles that stare back at you when you conduct a database search. In other words, something that takes a little more time than a 50 minute instruction session.

The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) program Ideas just posted a five part radio series/podcast of interviews with the philosopher Charles Taylor. So far I have only listened to the first three episodes, all of which have been excellent. There is a lot of interesting stuff about the culture of analytic philosophy at Oxford in the 1950s and Taylor’s discovery of phenomenology through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

In the first episode there is a discussion that made me think a lot about information literacy. Taylor argues that much what we know is learned through experience and engagement with the world, not through the creation of abstract categories within our minds. I find that it is important to remember this when teaching information literacy sessions. For example, I can talk until I am blue in the face about what peer-review is. However, students are not going to get a feel for the norms of academic discourse until they interact with and read a lot of texts. In other words, the nature of a scholarly source is not apparent until you interact with it.

Taylor is now on my summer reading list. I will probably be the only one on the beach kicking back with a copy of The Malaise of Modernity.

On Friday, April 22 the LACUNY Instruction Committee had an event at the Grad Center with James Elmborg from the University of Iowa.

I have posted an mp3 of the audio here.

Elmborg’s talk reminded me of how important it is to constantly ask questions about what we do as librarians. Librarianship is a thinking profession! It is great when we are reminded of that by a critically engaged librarian.

Reading this review in the London Review of Books of Nicholas Carr’s criticism of web culture in his book The Shallows lead me to consider how the act of teaching information literacy has changed as a result of the ubiquity of easily accessible information.

Near the end of the essay, Holt argues that—despite recent advances—neuroscience still can tell us remarkably little about the specific cognitive elements that spark creativity. Although tools like Google provide us with the ability to instantly retrieve massive amounts of facts and information without the need to remember them, we might well need all of that stuff swirling around in our heads in order to reach that indescribable “Eureka!” moment of creativity. Holt’s description of the French mathematician Henri Poincaré stepping onto a bus and suddenly devising a solution to a problem that had long been bedeviling him is illustrative.

‘The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable,’ he (Poincaré) wrote. ‘These sudden inspirations … never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless.’ The seemingly fruitless effort fills the memory banks with mathematical ideas – ideas that then become ‘mobilised atoms’ in the unconscious, arranging and rearranging themselves in endless combinations, until finally the ‘most beautiful’ of them makes it through a ‘delicate sieve’ into full consciousness, where it will then be refined and proved.

One of the biggest struggles that I have had in the library instruction classroom is to explain to students that there is frequently no discrete “answer” to the question that they are researching. I have found myself explaining that a key task of the researcher is to synthesize disparate elements (e.g., academic journal articles, primary sources) into a coherent whole. With a little guidance, most students seem to be able to become adept at searching. However, when some are presented with a lot of academic journal articles that address their topic in a general sense it takes awhile for them to catch on to the idea that each article might just address a very small aspect of their question and that they can use a specific piece of research as being illustrative of a more general concept or argument. It takes a lot of work and time to develop a sense of what that general concept or argument might be.

This reminds me that as library instructors we cannot expect those gratifying “Eureka!” moments every time we step in front of a class. If Poincaré can serve as any guidance, such moments may be just as likely to occur on the bus ride home as they are in the classroom.

For those interested in several recent monographs which have stirred up a lot of discussion about universities in the United States, this article in the New York Review of Books summarizes the key terms of these debates succinctly.

Peter Brooks concludes:

To me, the university is a precious and fragile institution, one that lives with crisis—since education, like psychoanalysis, is an “impossible profession”—but at its best thrives on it. It has endured through many transformations of ideology and purpose, but at its best remained faithful to a vision of disinterested pursuit and transmission of knowledge. Research and teaching have always cohabited: anyone who teaches a subject well wants to know more about it, and when she knows more, to impart that knowledge. Universities when true to themselves have always been places that harbor recondite subjects of little immediate utility—places where you can study hieroglyphics and Coptic as well as string theory and the habits of lemmings—places half in and half out of the world. No country needs that more than the US, where the pragmatic has always dominated.

I think that there is validity in this statement. However, I would contend that a commitment to rationalism is not strictly “disinterested.” In my opinion, a large problem with how many librarians view information literacy is that they see it as linear process in which empirical reality yields a series of distinct “facts.” If information literacy educators are unable to teach students how to analyze the discursive framework in which facts are presented then they will not be very successful. We live in a heavily mediated culture dominated by sound bites produced by outlets owned by publicly traded corporations and a wide variety social actors that are far from disinterested. Social subjects are not the atomistic rational “information seekers” that information literacy theory tends to present. Everyone makes sense of the world through a series complex social, economic, and ideological filters and relationships.

In my opinion the goal of an educator should be to teach students how understand the difference between empirical reality and an interpretative framework. Not because human beings are supremely rational, but because an interpretative framework that values empirical reality makes for a better society. I believe that we should be partisans of rational interpretative methods—or at least present the varied historical perspectives on the different ways in which societies have attempted to address these questions. To advocate such a perspective is to argue for something that may have little immediate utility in some cases, but it lies at the core of why I try to spend the time to sit down with a student at the reference desk and talk them through their research when all that they want is a quick transaction that will result in the required article for their research paper. Such is the yeomen’s work of an educator.

I encountered this discussion over at Inside Higher Education and it got me thinking the about ambiguity that I frequently find in the library instruction classroom. I think that the tension that Einsinger explores is one that is particularly pronounced for library instructors. On one hand, it is vitally important that students develop the basic ability to use library resources. After all, if a student cannot use the library catalog they are unlikely to have much success finding that book they need for their research paper. However, I think that librarians are uniquely susceptible to trying to obscure ambiguity. We are concerned with distinguishing from the “scholarly” and the “non-scholarly.” It is much easier to point to a database that has “scholarly” content than to encourage students working on a research paper to really think critically through the specific nature of their inquiry and integrate all of these sources into a cohesive whole. This is especially challenging when working with college freshman that may have never done a research paper at all. It is a tension which I think will never be easily resolved.

Einsinger finds that:

Facts are important, and should not be dismissed as irrelevant. But teaching only facts, especially in an age when they are so easily retrievable, without the complex contexts of the unknown, may leave our students more disengaged from and uninterested in the world around us. Teaching ambiguity may or may not make our students more civically engaged, or more likely to score higher on standardized tests.

But we live in ambiguous times. Today’s and tomorrow’s students should be prepared to engage in a world where societal problems do not necessarily have definitive solutions. Economic insecurity, wars in remote places and accelerating technological changes make us yearn for certainty. Perhaps our best response to the fluidity that surrounds us is to teach our students what ambiguity is, and how to appreciate it.

I agree with Einsinger’s sentiments, but it is easier said than done.

2011 LACUNY Instruction Committee Spring Event

Critical Information Literacy: The Challenge of Practice