Librarians and instructors are longtime allies share goal of teaching information (IL). The IL concept, however, has been undertheorized in its relationship to pedagogy In a series of articles on and IL, Norgaard challenges librarians and instructors to engage in an conversation between and information as disciplines and fields of endeavor. Removing usual Norgaard defines writing information literacy as the notion theory and pedagogy can and should have a constitutive influence on our conception of information literacy? (1) He suggests IL theory should also have a reciprocal influence on composition pedagogy. Norgaard describes basic problem with traditional conceptions of and IL: If libraries continue to evoke, for teachers and students, images of quick field trip, scavenger hunt, generic, stand-alone tutorial, or dreary research paper, fault remains, in large part, rhetoric and composition's failure to adequately theorize role of libraries and information in its own rhetorical self-understanding and practice. (2) Norgaard places blame squarely on his own discipline, but he also suggests librarians must learn from theoretical insights from rhetoric and composition. Norgaard describes paradigm shifts in instruction have opened possibilities for teaching a more situated, process-oriented, and inquiry-driven rhetoric. Librarians have much to learn from these theoretical contributions. We also have much to learn and offer from our own theoretical tradition. In fact, both IL and rhetoric and composition draw from same intellectual well, building upon more general developments. This shared intellectual history can enliven practice of both disciplines, creating a rhetoricized IL and an informed rhetoric. If instructors have undertheorized IL in relation to writing, this is, in part, because of librarians' failure to articulate contributions our theoretical tradition can make to rhetoric and composition and, by extension, learning in general. Furthermore, many of prevailing pedagogical of IL, such as Norgaard's generic stand-alone tutorials, scavenger hunts, and dreary research papers, reinforce traditional notions of IL and writing, derailing efforts to create a richer instructional practice) This article describes several enactments of IL are based on social constructivist and sociocultural learning theory First, it explores ways in which librarians and instructors at Utah State University collaborate to counter a limited reading of IL through creative learning activities. Then it identifies some of barriers to creating a more situated IL through a brief, exploratory analysis of ways in which instructional tools shape differing, even contradictory, understandings of and These exploratory case studies are meant to be illustrative of promises and challenges of true writing IL. INFORMING RHETORIC:THEORIES OF INFORMATION LITERACY Both librarians and instructors have explicitly cited intertwined relationship between IL and writing. Three decades ago, Michael Kleine, a instructor, described horrors of night library, a place where students were merely copying and seeing their purpose as one of lifting and transporting textual substance from one location, library, to another, teachers' briefcases. Kleine saw no searching, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, selecting, rejecting, etc.(4) Nearly fifteen years later, librarian Barbara Fister identified same problem, citing Kleine's image of night library as one example. Fister writes library instruction's focus on information retrieval suggests to students that research consists of ordered use of tools to locate pieces of information from which research projects can be assembled. …
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Nov 1, 2011
Yu-Lung Wu + 3
Open Access