Bakhtin argues that speech genres create performance expectations in culturally shared space.37 Indeed, it would be difficult to navigate the day without some expectation that contextual rules govern our relations with others. Our lives are composed of generic moments that can seem baffling to outsiders. Trips to the grocery, to the theater, meetings with friends–nearly all recurring events are scripted to some extent. Some speech genres can be mere pleasantries (the way we all understand the response to “how are you?”). Others are more complex. The reference interview has been codified as a speech genre in the library literature, and its components prescribed in textbooks in LIS programs. Bopp and Smith (authors of one such text) give the following formula for the reference interview:
- Open the interview
- Negotiate the question
- Search for information
- Communicate the information to the user
- Close the interview
In the process, librarians are encouraged to pursue three goals:
- Gain the trust of the user
- Ascertain from the user an accurate understanding of the question, so that it can be answered as completely as possible
- Make sure that the user is satisfied with the answer provided38
In a relatively short list, this standard reference text has provided librarians with a generic script that defines the genre of the reference interview. The text is silent on the subject of the student’s performance in this narrative. Where do students learn their roles in this generic transaction? What expectations do librarians bring to the genre? Another reference text gives us some idea of how the process can go wrong. The author describes the standard behavioral guidelines for patrons as codified by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). The author then notes, “[n]ot all readers follow ‘standard behavioral guidelines’ and these individuals have come to be known as ‘problem patrons.’”39
Librarians have spent a great deal of energy defining the reference interview as a genre. As described in the literature and in practice, it is a crisp and formal transaction that involves, at its best, a clear channel of communication from question to answer. This simplistic approach to language and to information remains one of the principle problems with reference practice. The reference interview is, in fact, the ultimate contact zone. Librarians can see this reference-interview genre as either prescriptive (which implies that students fail when they do not perform their end of the bargain), or they can treat it as a flexible, open-ended educational conference in which language and identity are encouraged and constructive play with ideas is the goal. With genres come implicit performance expectations. When students do not understand these expectations, or when they refuse to perform their part (by practicing evasive or defensive arts of the contact zone) librarians might well be tempted to feel that somehow these students are problems. According to Bakhtin, speech genres are repressive when formal language roles are rigidly controlled and a monologic order is established. This order invokes institutional power that people must succumb to in order to play a role in the genre. When there is room for improvisation and humor, genres can be generative and spontaneous.
Integrating Theory and Practice
Contact theory’s power derives from its ability to bring theoretical perspectives to bear on daily practice. It encourages educators to see their work through the lens of the contact zone, and to animate their work with an understanding of the pedagogical and ethical implications of cultural difference. “Classroom research” has emerged as one of the major techniques for the scholarship of teaching. As a research method, it encourages teachers to see their classrooms as sites of experimentation and research and to explore questions in the context of their daily work as educators by bringing theoretical and intellectual constructions to that process.40 This practice encourages a reflective and theoretical mindset. Contact-zone theory provides an overall framework within which such questions can be generated. Librarianship has been plagued by what Budd calls the “unexamined life.”41 Contact-zone theory mandates that librarians examine their daily practice in light of educational goals and objectives, that they examine the life of academic librarianship as intellectual and educational.
Indeed, in contact-zone theory, the discourse of academia is inseparable from the intellectual content of academia. In this process, teaching is not a didactic process of conveying content, but rather a dialogic one. Bechtel has argued that conversation is a new paradigm for librarianship.42 By that, I take Bechtel to mean that by talking with students, engaging them in the discourse of the academy, librarians can create the zone of proximal development advocated by Vygotsky. By paying careful attention to how they talk, librarians can have tremendous impact on the development of young thinkers. On one hand, librarians need to be facilitators. They must to some extent represent academic standards of discourse, but they can do so as guides and supporters of student work. On the other hand, when students ask questions that imply a lack of understanding of power and privilege, librarians should be willing and able to challenge the simplistic assumptions these students make in formulating their research questions, and, indeed, in formulating their emerging views of the world. Doing so will be a radical departure for many academic librarians raised on the values of “neutral service.”
In the modern academic library, the role of neutral service has been usurped by the computer. Students ask questions and the computer provides the most neutral response imaginable. This situation will grow more pervasive with the maturation of search technologies. Indeed, this is the value of the computer in the minds of students, and as Google continues to expand its range into terrain normally managed by libraries, the role of the librarian as value-neutral “question answerer” will become increasingly antiquated. Librarians can adapt by helping students learn how to think about the information they encounter. In order to fulfill this role, librarians will need to accept their responsibility to mediate between academic discourse and undergraduates. This role may involve more intimate knowledge of research practices in the disciplines and more challenging encounters at both the reference desk and in the classroom than librarians have come to expect. Librarians will need to represent the academic community as they intervene in the research process to ask challenging questions and encourage honest engagement with ideas. Librarians will need to learn that their humanity makes them accessible and, ultimately, valuable. This idea, that teachers in the academy should bring their full humanity to the classroom, is itself radical. hooks describes the historical “objectification of the teacher … that seemed to denigrate notions of wholeness and uphold the idea of a mind/body split.” She concludes that “part of the luxury and privilege of the role of teacher/professor today is the absence of any requirement that we be self-actualized.”43 For librarians to have any credibility in the contact zone, they will need to engage themselves fully and wholly in their work as literacy educators and as human beings. In hooks’s words, “Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks.”44
The library can be seen as, in Pratt’s words, a “safe house … where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with a high degree of trust,” a place where students can go to find out what they need to know.45 To make this new model work, conversation between students and librarians should be as horizontal as possible. Information literacy seems to pull librarians in two directions. On one hand, being more involved in teaching brings increased stature to the profession, something academic librarians have long sought. Ironically, the pedagogy that most equips librarians as teachers demands that they reject this increased stature by rejecting authoritarian modes of teaching and the academic authority they bring. As librarians increasingly teach information-literacy courses that carry academic credit, the power relationship between students and librarians will inevitably shift. Such situations create Pratt’s “asymmetrical power relations” and cause students to hide their weaknesses from those who would grade them. These are the less productive arts of the contact zone that prohibit growth and prevent honest discourse. Librarians need to explore more honestly their desire to teach courses for credit. At present, the motive to impart knowledge is uncomfortably commingled with the desire for academic credibility and increased stature. The shift to assigning grades will come at some cost to the relationship with students, a fact not to be taken lightly.
Conclusion
For better or worse, the library has traditionally been perceived on campus as a place marked by silence and formality. In the intellectual constructions of many academic departments, these qualities have ideological dimensions of suppression and fear. Radford and Radford have amply described the connection between fear and power within the ideology of the library.46 The view they discuss is widely understood on campuses today. According to Bakhtin, the surest antidote for an atmosphere controlled by fear and power is laughter. Bakhtin suggests that the ritual of carnival provides an institutional means to upend the power structure and allow free and easy discourse between people who are socially unequal. Whether the library chooses to create carnival with events that flatten hierarchy, or whether it chooses to work consciously toward a lighter, less pretentious tone, it is imperative that students see the library as an accessible and approachable place. Humor is crucial to breaking down the barriers created in the contact zone.
Contact-zone theory has opened new ways of thinking in composition studies, and its central principles can be used with great effect to clarify the ways librarians and libraries work in the academy. As libraries redefine their identities for the profound changes wrought by information technologies, a great deal of effort has gone into streamlining library systems. Not nearly enough work has been done to redefine the nature of reference and instructional librarianship in light of the changing nature of power and cultural identity. If librarians are to see themselves as teachers, and if they wish to make information literacy their subject, they need to directly address the issues of the contact zone. Literacy is intimately tied to language and identity. As students learn to navigate complex information systems, they will inevitably encounter problems with their language as they endeavor to make their own words work in a system that cares little about their cultural backgrounds. In the contact zone between student and library system (in all its complexity), librarians can find their pedagogical identity. It has been argued elsewhere that the “reference desk can be a powerful teaching station, more powerful, perhaps, than the classroom.”47 Learning to productively negotiate the arts of the contact zone will be crucial to achieving the educational potential of the reference desk, and indeed, of the library.