Information Literacy and Literary Questions

Abstract Tree working partnerships between professors and librarians can make information literacy a part of disciplinary studies. By collaborating on course design and teaching, we can integrate information literacy into introductory courses, helping students become informed and critical participants in academic and professional discourse. This paper demonstrates one way of achieving this integration. ********** In this paper, we demonstrate how our collaboration on an information literacy initiative informed our approach to teaching an introductory literature course and led to us introducing students to research strategies, discourse analysis, and disciplinary critique. Anne is a reference/instruction librarian at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and William is an assistant professor of English. Lafayette College is a highly competitive liberal arts school with roughly 2000 students and 185 faculty. Our collaboration began when William received a grant from Lafayette's Skillman Library to work with Anne on introducing information literacy skills to students in English 205: Literary Questions, an intro-level literature course that prepares some students for advanced study in English and that serves as a humanities elective for others. For students to become intelligent and active participants in their academic and professional communities, they must become aware of the rhetorical and political pressures that shape how discourse is created, disseminated, and stored. Information literacy initiatives can enable such participation, helping students become more conscious of disciplinary conventions, and thus more active in their experiences with disciplinary discourse. These initiatives can promote a new type of collaboration between instructors and librarians, one grounded in equality and shared goals, and one that could affect institutional change. Information Literacy at Lafayette College Lafayette College libraries are moving from the bibliographic instruction (task-based library exercises) model to an information literacy program. In the past, library instruction occurred in the context of a fifty-minute class period added on to a regular course. The students were shown how to use a database and then asked to complete a rudimentary exercise to solidify their understanding. Because the sessions were so closely tied to a specific course assignment, students often struggled with transferring those skills to other courses and projects. Information literacy skills (unlike library tools) cannot be learned merely through a brief demonstration in a library session for a class. Bruce offers a comprehensive definition of information literacy (IL), but in the interest of space we will include only her loose definition: "IT]he ability to locate, manage and use information" (Brace, 1998, p. 25). While this definition may sound skills-based, IL establishes a relational approach to learning and processing information, "emphasizing general principles and process of information research that can be transferred from one situation to another" (Zhang, 2001, p. 147). In moving to the IL paradigm, the librarians noted Zhang's observation that "[to] achieve effective curriculum development in information literacy it is critical for librarians to forge strong partnerships with the teaching faculty of the institution" (Zhang, 2001, p. 141). However, while the job title ("reference/instruction librarian") implies a certain amount of teaching, the librarians have not always been recognized as full partners in the education of the students at Lafayette College. To change this perception, and to begin playing a larger classroom role, the Librarians decided to seek out faculty partners. The Provost generously offered an incentive grant to encourage interested faculty to restructure their classes to include IL as an integral course component through a partnership with a librarian. Literary Questions When William was awarded the initiative grant, our challenge was to include IL in the Literary Questions framework. …