STANLEY WILDER. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Washington: Jan 7, 2005. Vol. 51, Iss. 18; pg. B.13
This article states that information literacy remains the wrong solution to the wrong problem facing librarianship. The solution lies with the author’s idea that students are apprentices in the reading and writing of their chosen disciplines, and librarians are experts who can help them master these tasks. “Here is an educational function that creates real value within our institutions”
This is worthy of thinking about…. and this has informed my approach to teaching
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Thanks for posting this Alison – a thought-provoking read! Interesting that all the respondents (so far) strongly rebut Wilder’s attack on librarians’ advocacy of information literacy.
In my experience, it’s one thing to theorise about information literacy on an abstract, conceptual level. But at the coalface of library instruction we have no other option but to adopt a realpolitik multifaceted approach, in dealing with academics, students and other library staff.
Experience tells us that the infolit concept becomes tangible to students when applied at the subject level – to relevant database search skills, identifying good reference, primary, secondary resources, and so on.
We assume that most students (excluding the exceptional ones) need to be shown that useful stuff exists, and how to find it, before they will use it. Part of our role as purveyors of infolit is to raise student awareness about the added value of going that extra mile, which becomes increasingly important on the road from undergrads to postgrads.
I read an article at the beginning of this year, When ‘digital natives’ go to the library, which argues: "librarians need to adapt their techniques to digital natives" because they prefer to experiment with searching BEFORE being shown how.
The underlying assumption is that digital natives intuitively know how to search virtually anything that’s digital, so don’t need all the infolit teaching WE think they need. While there is some truth in this, I found (from trying to adapt my approach accordingly) that many digital native 2nd years are far from the whiz-kids they’re held up to be.
Which brings me back to infolit realpolitik: the students will continually challenge and subvert every assumption we make about their library needs whenever we try to put them into practise. At the end of the day, that is how it should be: our assumptions should never become sacred cows.