Friday, October 3, 2014

The Limitations of Teaching Sources as Objects

Reading Holliday and Rogers' article, "Talking About InformationLiteracy: the Mediating Role of Discourse in a College Writing Classroom," has turned my brain upside down in the way I think about our information literacy instruction, and has even informed the way I work with students at the reference desk and in one-on-one research consultations.  It had never occurred to me that the very language we use in instruction actually serves to propagate students' perceptions of sources as "containers" to be "located" and "incorporated." The idea of using sources of information for the purpose of "inquiry" -- something that the new ACRL Framework is leading us to do -- gets lost as information has become a commodity to be "retrieved."

Even when faculty, with good intentions, try to guide students to "better" sources by restricting certain kinds of sources (for example, certain websites,) this only serves to emphasize to students the idea of sources as something for them to obtain, as a consequence eliminating the understanding of sources being more or less valuable because of the information they impart. This is something that I think librarians and faculty have always known and try to convey, but we are coming at it the wrong way. The use of "evaluation criteria" checklists as the predominant tools used to teach how to evaluate sources (which I personally have come to despise and refuse to use in my instruction) tops off everything else to create a complete package of denigration of the use of information.