Taken together, Vygotsky and Bakhtin create a great pedagogical tension. Both theorists emphasize the importance of voice and suggest that individuals are created by and shaped through the language they use. Creating educational environments that normalize language and enforce universal standards can greatly simplify the educational process, but at what cost? Indeed, the tension between the students’ right to use their own voice and the need to teach correct grammar and sentence structures constitutes one of the primary struggles in writing instruction, a struggle with important implications for information-literacy librarians. This struggle can be very pronounced in students whose linguistic traditions are markedly different from the academic norm. As Corson notes, “There is now much evidence about the discourse norms that culturally different people acquire from their socialization, norms that usually reflect quite different cultural values. Teachers can easily misinterpret different discourse norms when they come across them.”25 He goes on to note that when “students themselves are marked down for not understanding the messages of the school, it is really teachers who seem to be lacking in understanding. Teachers struggle to apply norms based on school-approved ways of behaving, to students whose norms they often know little about. The school’s norms are accepted uncritically.”26
In one of the earliest and most influential position statements issued by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the problem is succinctly stated:
[M]any of us have taught as though the function of schools and colleges were to erase differences. Should we, on the one hand, urge creativity and individuality in the arts and the sciences, take pride in the diversity of our historical development, and, on the other hand, try to obliterate all the differences in the way Americans speak and write?
The resolution goes on to argue:
We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language… . Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.27
Indeed, Pratt’s conceptualization of the contact zone derives more or less directly from this foundational statement and is supported in composition studies by broader theories of Bakhtin and Vygotsky.
Implications for Libraries
Envisioning the academic library as a contact zone positions the library to more effectively work with all kinds of students, but librarians and those who educate them will need to think differently for such an effort to work. The rhetoric and research that has surrounded libraries and their administration has emphasized efficiency and service. It has presumed that people who come to the library present a relatively simple set of communications problems that can be addressed through more efficient system performance. While libraries have always managed space for aesthetic and functional reasons, little consideration has gone into the ethical or pedagogical dimensions of the way libraries create and manage space. The contact zone is a metaphorical space, or rather, it is a way of conceiving the nature of shared educational space. When one enters the contact zone, one enters a kind of space that recognizes culture, language, and individual identity. Recognizing difference initiates a process of translation across boundaries for both students and academics. Students’ research questions arise from this rich mix. For authority figures, awareness of the contact zone brings increased consciousness of the way power is deployed and of the ethical demands of that power. As librarians continue to conceive of themselves as teachers and of their libraries as classrooms, it becomes increasingly important that they bring their management of the library as pedagogical space into alignment with the values of information literacy. Teaching brings new dimensions to librarianship. They do more than provide information. They challenge learners’ assumptions, and they set academic standards. They encourage learning and they challenge lazy thinking. All these activities are appropriate at the reference desk and in the information-literacy classroom, but they require an awareness of the contact zone and knowledge about effective and constructive ways of working there.
Pratt defines the contact zone as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other.” Such a definition applies well to the library, a space where divergent views are philosophically accommodated and the collection is a polyphonic, even discordant, accumulation of voices. The library’s collection, indeed, is marked by meeting, clashing, and grappling. All these voices are, however, brought under the control and direction of one dominant, monologic voice, the voice of the Library of Congress Classification System, or the voice of the Dewey Decimal System. Olson argues that Dewey’s goal in creating the classification system “was to impose a universal language to overcome individual diversity.” For Dewey, a “universal language is the answer to the confusion of diversity.”28 Berman has repeatedly argued that the classification systems we use in libraries function as linguistic obstacles, obscuring access to information that white, middle-class society finds threatening. The ultimate function of controlled language, Berman argues, is to control the language of the library’s users, to keep them from thinking naturally about their needs and desires.29 By controlling voices, the library classifies, organizes, and thereby defuses the disruptive polyphony of the contact zone.
Language is crucial to the arts of the contact zone. It is the vehicle humans use to construct thought, meaning, and, ultimately, identity. While librarians constantly negotiate between the controlled language of the catalog and the natural language of searchers, they often ignore the political and social dimensions of library language. The library is organized by subject classifications expressed in words. These words are not free words, but controlled words. Stated otherwise, to use the library, students and faculty must use the language of the library and of librarians–a language evolved precisely to reflect the white, middle-class construction of knowledge that education has always presumed to create and reflect. If students attempt to use any other kinds of language in subject searching–language that would be perfectly reasonable given their backgrounds–they will fail. Their language will then have to be converted into controlled language. Their linguistic anomalies will be corrected, their language leveled and normalized. In this process, their ownership of their own language is devalued and their cultural agency as searchers is effaced.
This process has far-reaching implications. According to Vygotsky, the connection between language and thinking demands that students work with language to make it their own. Unless librarians create a zone of development where language is encouraged to develop, the connection between language and learning will be short-circuited, and students will learn that their words do not work in the library. Many will be intimidated or lose confidence, a reasonable explanation for the age-old problem of “library anxiety”30 As Pratt argues, dead letters are a consequence of failure to negotiate the contact zone. In such cases, confusion occurs when students assume or perceive that the library rejects their culture and language. When instructional librarians insist on teaching subject searching to early undergraduates, they should understand the political and social implications of this strategy, and the likelihood that it will alienate many students. As effective as controlled language may be as a search strategy, its use may be more appropriate for students who have declared academic majors and are embarking on the journey toward academic specialization with its accompanying specialized language.
The contact zone is created between individuals and in groups where people of unequal power and status–as indicated by different linguistic traditions–attempt to negotiate academic goals. Its existence in the library is a reality articulated by Blandy, who notes,
a lot of our students have been taught that even the academic power structure can’t help them because it has been systematically denying their reality; they are caught between the need to do the assignment to pass the course and the belief that the assignment can’t be done… . Some of these students are so tense that the reference interview almost begins as a confrontation.31
Indeed, the tension comes precisely from the point identified by Blandy. Up until very recently, students have needed to learn to use the library to succeed in college. They have had no choice. Whether they have seen the librarians as facilitators of their educations or obstacles to be gotten through, they have needed to deal with the library and librarians. Blandy’s ambivalence about the situation derives from her understanding that the academic power structure really has been “systematically denying their reality,” and a justifiable pride in that same academic tradition, which is, in Blandy’s words, “a great tradition of literacy, of investigation and exploration, of the right to private and personal opinion, and of aspiration to fair play.”32 Herein lies the single most important question for libraries and librarians. How can the library best represent the great tradition of literacy and aspiration to fair play, rather than representing the academic power structure that systematically denies people their identities?
A major part of the library’s problem is in its naïve ideal of value-neutral service. This model, based on the belief that libraries should be managed by scientific, standardized principles, suggests that all people who enter the library should be treated in exactly the same way. According to this professional code, librarianship is based on scientific principles, and librarians should eschew values and focus on facts. As Weissinger notes, librarianship “embraces the fact/value distinction whenever it claims to be ‘value neutral’ or a ‘scientific profession.’”33 He points to a central contradiction within librarianship that leads to confusion: On one hand, the profession aligns itself with “value laden social advocacy … to fulfill community purposes.” On the other hand, it sees itself as “a neutral tool in providing information and knowledge.”34 Weissinger cites Dick, who has argued that this identity crisis derives from efforts by academic library and information science (LIS) programs to gain disciplinary status by imitating the value-neutral methodology of the social sciences. As Dick notes, “Pretensions of value neutrality and objectivity … have led to a greater emphasis in library and information science activities on the means of service delivery rather than their ends, that is, whether they are desirable or morally valuable.”35 This emphasis on value-neutral objectivity has deluded librarians into thinking they can avoid the sometimes difficult work of the contact zone.
A great deal of energy has gone into information literacy in academic libraries over the past few years, and public services in academic libraries are increasingly defined in educational terms. Dick argues persuasively that the future direction of the profession will hinge on “whether the library profession is essentially a disinterested social enterprise or a committed education enterprise.36 Indeed, before information literacy can become a full-fledged academic enterprise, librarians will need to articulate its values, and they will need to bring a full discussion of educational method to bear on those values. More to the point, librarians will need to articulate how information literacy’s values manifest themselves in the educational encounters librarians have with students. In order to begin this process, librarians need to explore the philosophical and pedagogical implications of the contact zone. Weissinger correctly traces the problem to the profession’s reliance on the values of intellectual freedom and privacy, values which in many cases directly conflict with the realities of the academic contact zone. At the heart of academic work is the idea of publication, the making public of ideas to be debated and challenged. Students have academic freedom to think what they like, but they must learn to have their thinking challenged, even in the library. To be truly involved in the teaching and learning process, librarians must be willing to talk in honest and authentic ways with students as they attempt to develop productive arts of the contact zone.