More than Information, More than Literate | Peer to Peer Review
I don't care what we call it, so long as we do it. Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MNJune 30, 2011
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| Photo by Debora Miller |
A few weeks ago, a colleague and I conducted a workshop for a dozen faculty who wanted to think about how what we call information literacy, for want of a better term, fits in their courses, in their majors, and in lifelong learning for our graduates.
The participants were deeply engaged in redesigning and tweaking specific assignments, but as our focus expanded outward, it got harder to think concretely about what our students might gain from their experiences conducting research. So much of what we work to instill is how students can be more like us—either as faculty in disciplines employing concepts and methods to explain phenomena and interpret the world around us, or as librarians using tools and strategies to find and assess information so we can use it to build our understanding of a topic. It's much harder for us to turn things around and think about what the world looks like from our students' perspective and imagine which experiences, skills, and habits of mind will come in most handy, regardless of the setting.
I was thinking about this again at the American Library Association (ALA) conference, where I happened to spend more time with public librarians than academics for a change. Though unfortunately I missed the sessions on transliteracy, they were getting a lot of buzz, and I have since enjoyed catching up on twitter posts and looking at slides from the presentations.
Transliteracy refers to making sense of things and communicating that sense using whatever media works best, as opposed to merely finding and evaluating information, which (even though we know better) tends to be the primary focus on information literacy instruction. Metaliteracy, proposed as a more inclusive concept, embraces a host of causes, from digital to media to you-name-it literacy, and promises to incorporate tools and processes that haven't been invented yet. In a nutshell, it's expanding the notion of what we do, being more inclusive of what kinds of information we might use and how we might use it.
Literacy by any other name
I find I like the ideas underlying trans- or metaliteracy better than the more commonly used phrase, but I don't particularly want to spend time with faculty parsing the differences. I think they know what we're talking about even if we can't quite name what we're talking about.
The reason I think they get it is that they have always found ACRL's Information Literacy Competency Standards lacking in imagination. To be fair to those who originally drafted the standards, they were not intended as a set of rules, but as an expansion of bibliographic instruction and a prompt for discussion that might spur the formulation of locally-meaningful learning goals. Unfortunately, they seem to have been adopted (by many librarians, at least) as a set of rules as inflexible as the criminal code or the Ten Commandments.
I first shared the standards with faculty in 2000, when they were brand new. They were then—and still are—dismayed that there's no reference to creativity or to original thought. They balk at the language as being too mechanical and the steps too discrete, as if when we assess student progress, we do it by making a Tayloristic time-and-motion study, looking at parts of something that is far more integrated than the standards suggest. A student who can perform well on the individual steps may not be terribly good at original research; a gifted researcher may have trouble demonstrating competency in some of the steps. In general, the standards seem to be describing the handling of stuff, as if research is merely a process of assembling parts according to a set of directions.
"There are a lot of verbs, here," one of our faculty members remarked, "but the word 'information' is never examined." Exactly.
Defining moments
Added to this, I'd like to toss out something Catherine Ross has discussed in the context of her reading research: we don't always seek information; it comes at us, constantly. Though college students might start a project as the standards suggest, by defining an information need, very rarely do we do that in our everyday lives or in authentic research, research that is not due next Wednesday. I can't think of a time when I began research by defining an information need. More often I encounter something that makes me think, that makes me mad, that delights me or makes me curious, and that becomes the spur to inquiry.
Whatever we call it, we need to think about it as a creative process, a critical process, a social process that involves any number of technologies and skills but is much more than any of them. That's what we've always done when we're doing it right.
| Author Information |
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Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books. |
