Teaching​ Information Literacy and Writing Studies

Volume 2, Upper-Level and Graduate Courses

Grace Veach

• Editore: Purdue University Press
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781612495569
• Argomento: Langues et linguistique
• Categoria: Alphabétisation

This volume, edited by Grace Veach, explores leading approaches to teaching information literacy and writing studies in upper-level and graduate courses. Contributors describe cross-disciplinary and collaborative efforts underway across higher education, during a time when "fact" or "truth" is less important than fitting a predetermined message. Topics include: working with varied student populations, teaching information literacy and writing in upper-level general education and disciplinary courses, specialized approaches for graduate courses, and preparing graduate assistants to teach information literacy.

PART I

Theorizing Information
Literacy and Writing Studies

CHAPTER 1

WRITING AS A WAY
OF KNOWING

Teaching Epistemic Research
Across the University

Phyllis Mentzell Ryder

Dolsy Smith

Randi Gray Kristensen

INTRODUCTION

Faculty teaching upper-division courses across the disciplines are often frustrated by the quality of writing and research in papers they receive from their students, yet they are unsure how to improve the outcomes, or, indeed, whether this task is their responsibility. Writing studies research has led to promising results through university initiatives such as Writing in the Disciplines. When faculty can identify how their writing and research processes are integral to their disciplines’ ways of knowing, and how those processes differ from the practices in other fields, they realize that they already have the disciplinary expertise to help students write and research within their fields. Librarians are excellent partners in such endeavors.

To give faculty and librarians tools for such collaboration, we parse the layers of disciplinary writing and research knowledge and provide examples of activities for teaching these knowledge-making processes—specifically information literacy processes. This explicit focus on processes is an integral step for students’ development as writers and researchers in upper-division courses.

AN EVOLUTION IN WRITING AND RESEARCH PROCESSES

The latest recommendations from professional organizations in both academic librarianship and writing studies focus on the recursive and rhetorical nature of research and writing. Both the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) have revised their public guiding documents to reflect research in these fields. Instead of a focus on competencies and standards, these updated pedagogies emphasize knowledge practices, processes, and dispositions.

The new ACRL and WPA documents no longer prescribe standard levels of achievement, and they no longer depict researchers as people who look for discrete pieces of information. ACRL’s 2000 document, the Information Literacy Competency Standards, emphasized assessment and served to “pinpoint specific indicators that identify a student as information literate” (p. 5). The most recent (2016) ACRL document, the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, describes research as a set of processes and dispositions, a model where researchers are understood as being in conversation with other researchers. This model emphasizes the values of discovery, collaboration, and sensitivity to context, because the rhetorical context of a given scholarly conversation proves crucial to how scholars evaluate the relevance and appropriateness of potential sources. Similarly, the 2016 WPA committee responsible for the Outcomes for First-Year Composition (3.0) explains that “where the former versions approached writing as more a stable act—even among emerging technologies—the new version embraces emerging forms of composing in a world of fluid forms of communication” (Dryer et al., 2014, p. 138).

The pedagogical implications of this shift point to an evolution in the role of librarians. The ACRL Competency Standards presented information literacy as a set of skills that could be inserted into any curricula across the disciplines. That approach positioned librarians as the experts in, and the parties primarily responsible for, teaching information literacy: either through the provision of “one-shot” instruction in disciplinary courses or, more rarely, the design and execution of standalone, credit-bearing courses (Johnston & Webber, 2003). While collaboration between faculty and librarians has been a core tenet of the information literacy platform since its inception, programmatic integration of the Competency Standards into the curriculum remained a challenge at many institutions (Lindstrom & Shonrock, 2006; Rapchak & Cipri, 2015).

The Framework for Information Literacy, on the other hand, acknowledges that librarians can often work most effectively not as experts but as what Simmons (2005) called “disciplinary discourse mediators.” This formulation highlights the unique perspective that librarians bring to collaborations with faculty, in virtue of their position as “simultaneously insiders and outsiders” vis-à-vis the practices of a given discipline (p. 298). In other words, instead of depicting these collaborations as the marriage of two distinct kinds of expertise—disciplinary knowledge and information literacy knowledge—the Framework suggests that librarians should help faculty articulate their own practices and dispositions as researchers within the context of the goals of the course (or course sequence or major). This mediated articulation may generate specific assignments and/or specific moments requiring a librarian’s presence in the classroom. More to the point, it may produce new approaches to structuring a course or course sequence.

This evolution in the role of librarians aligns with an evolution within writing studies. First-year courses in writing have also been thought of as “one-shot” instruction, courses that could inoculate students against seemingly universal writing problems such as unwieldy structure or inadequate citation. More recently, however, writing program scholars and administrators recognize that those seemingly universal conventions differ within scholarly fields. Many universities have developed Writing in the Disciplines programs to support faculty and departments as they consider how to articulate and incorporate this new approach to teaching writing (Colorado State University, 2017).

While Writing in the Disciplines programs are an important step forward, few of these programs include explicit analysis of information literacy processes. We contend that faculty from across the university will benefit greatly from collaborating with both Writing in the Disciplines programs and research librarians to make visible and to teach disciplinary ways of writing and conducting research in their fields.

DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGES

Given the historical development of research universities, rooted in the German tradition of highly specialized scholarship among researchers siloed in their fields, the defining identity within most departments is subject-matter knowledge. Departments sequence their courses to introduce increasingly more sophisticated content in the field, including careful practice of disciplinary research methods (lab work, ethnography, big data, and so on). A focus on content lends itself to one-shot approaches to writing and information literacy instruction.

Research in writing studies challenges that model. As Riedner, O Sullivan, and Farrell (2015) explain, “teaching the distinctive writing and communicative practices of a disciplinary community are inseparable from teaching disciplinary knowledge. Because writing embodies ways of knowing and values of a discipline, disciplinary knowledge and writing are inextricable from each other” (p. 10). Riedner (2015) parses out multiple kinds of knowledge that inform how scholars in different fields build knowledge and write about that knowledge. (See Table 1.1.)

TABLE 1.1 Disciplinary Knowledges

Subject Matter Knowledge	What content do you need to know? History, theories, methods, ethics.
Genre Knowledge	What types of documents do you create?
Disciplinary Discourse Knowledge	How do you speak as an insider?
Rhetorical Knowledge	How can you adjust the structure, tone, and content based on your readers and content? What are some of the rhetorical features or hallmarks of writing in your field? How have these expectations changed?
Writing Process Knowledge	What are the usual stages of writing and research?
Information Literacy Knowledge	What materials are required for meeting the various rhetorical needs in the genres?

Data from Riedner (2015).

If faculty members have been tasked with teaching subject knowledge, they may have had little opportunity to reflect on the other areas of their expertise. But they are experts in all the areas. From their initial forays into disciplinary writing in graduate school, professors internalize through practice their understanding of genre, disciplinary discourses, writing processes, research methods, and source use. As they are “disciplined,” the knowledges common in their field become naturalized as simply “good writing” and “good research” habits. However, a comparison across disciplines shows that “good writing” and “good research” vary by field. Consider how these knowledges might be manifest in a field like anthropology, for example (see Table 1.2).

TABLE 1.2 Disciplinary Knowledges in Anthropology

Kind of Knowledge	Examples
Subject Matter Knowledge What content do you need to know? History, theories, methods, ethics.	History of anthropology; key theories in the field; specific information about different cultures; ethical guidelines; best practices
Genre Knowledge What types of documents do you create?	Field notes; thick descriptions; journal articles; grant applications; IRB applications
Disciplinary Discourse Knowledge How do you speak as an insider?	What is the common terminology about cultures and rituals? What are the expected attributions for certain historical shifts in the discipline?
Rhetorical Knowledge What are some of the rhetorical features or hallmarks of writing in your field? How have these expectations changed?	How much self-reflection should the researcher include within a journal article or book about his or her relationships and interactions with the groups being studied? What is the appropriate balance between reviewing past literature and introducing the new study?
Writing Process Knowledge What are the usual stages of writing and research?	When and how to keep notes; where and with whom to share drafts; when to borrow across genres, such as expanding literature reviews from grant proposals within later drafts of a book chapter
Information Literacy Knowledge What materials are required for meeting the various rhetorical needs in the genres?	What counts as data in anthropology, and how is this gathered? How should the anthropologist think about and analyze her data so it serves as credible evidence for new arguments? How does he identify gaps in the literature and design studies to address those gaps? How does she find appropriate theories to deploy in analyzing field research?

Because most professors learn how to research and write in their field through their initiation-by-doing in graduate school, it’s not surprising that recent research “shows that faculty believe disciplinary information skills are acquired by a kind of ‘learning by doing’ (p. 580)—that is to say, through the situated information practices of the disciplines themselves” (McGuiness, as cited in Farrell & Badke, 2015, p. 324). We agree that sustained practice is essential to learning, and we propose that undergraduate students will benefit when professors can name the ways of knowing and doing that are practiced in their field and when they design activities that help students gain experience with them. Writing in the Disciplines initiatives offer faculty strategies for developing courses and department-wide curricula along these lines, but—as we will explain later—they could go farther in preparing faculty to introduce information literacy knowledges and practices.

Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines

An article we find particularly helpful for introducing this way of thinking about disciplinary knowledge is Michael Carter’s (2007) “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.” Carter argues that disciplinary writing is not just a set of techniques whereby a field communicates its knowledge, but also a way that knowledge is constituted, a mode through which disciplinary faculty can see the connection between the content of their disciplines (subject knowledge), the practices of their disciplines (quantitative or qualitative or textual research methods), and writing in their disciplines (the genre, discourse, and rhetorical knowledges). We extend Carter’s analysis to include ways of thinking about the “ways of doing” in information literacy.

Carter asserts,

The disciplinary ways of doing that faculty identify provide a direct link between ways of knowing and ways of writing in the disciplines. Doing enacts the knowing through students’ writing and the writing gives shape to the ways of knowing and doing in the discipline. So instead of focusing only on the conceptual knowledge that has traditionally defined the disciplines, facult...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Theorizing Information Literacy and Writing Studies
• Part II: Information Literacy as a Rhetorical Skill
• Part III: Pedagogies and Practices
• Part IV: Writing and Information Literacy in Multiple Contexts
• Contributors
• Index