Reference Desk Consultation Assignment: An Exploratory Study of Students’ Perceptions of Reference Service

Lisa O’ Connor, Editor
Melissa Bowles-Terry, Erin Davis, and Wendy Holliday, Guest Columnists

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Librarians and writing instructors are longtime allies that share the goal of teaching information literacy (IL). The IL concept, however, has been undertheorized in its relationship to writing pedagogy. In a series of articles on writing and IL, Norgaard challenges librarians and writing instructors to engage in an “informed conversation between writing and information literacy as disciplines and fields of endeavor.” Removing the usual “and,” Norgaard defines “writing information literacy” as “the notion that writing theory and pedagogy can and should have a constitutive influence on our conception of information literacy.”¹ He suggests that the IL theory should also have a reciprocal influence on composition pedagogy. Norgaard describes the basic problem with traditional conceptions of writing and IL:

If libraries continue to evoke, for writing teachers and their students, images of the quick field trip, the scavenger hunt, the generic, stand-alone tutorial, or the dreary research paper, the fault remains, in large part, rhetoric and composition’s failure to adequately theorize the role of libraries and information literacy in its own rhetorical self-understanding and pedagogical practice.²

Norgaard places the blame squarely on his own discipline, but he also suggests that librarians must learn from theoretical insights from rhetoric and composition. Norgaard describes the paradigm shifts in writing instruction that 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 the same intellectual well, building upon more general pedagogical developments. This shared intellectual history can enliven the practice of both disciplines, creating a “rhetoricized” IL and an “informed” rhetoric.

If writing instructors have undertheorized IL in relation to writing, this is, in part, because of librarians’ failure to articulate the contributions that our theoretical tradition can make to rhetoric and composition and, by extension, learning in general. Furthermore, many of the prevailing “pedagogical enactments” 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.³

This article describes several pedagogical enactments of IL that are based on social constructivist and sociocultural learning theory. First, it explores the ways in which librarians and writing instructors at Utah State University collaborate to counter a limited reading of IL through creative learning activities. Then it identifies some of the barriers to creating a more situated IL through a brief, exploratory analysis of the ways in which instructional tools shape differing, even contradictory, understandings of writing and IL. These exploratory case studies are meant to be illustrative of the promises and challenges of true “writing IL.”

Informing Rhetoric: Theories of Information Literacy

Both librarians and writing instructors have explicitly cited the intertwined relationship between IL and writing. Three decades ago, Michael Kleine, a writing instructor, described the “horrors” of the night library, a place where students were “merely copying” and seeing “their purpose as one of lifting and transporting textual substance from one location, the library, to another, their teachers’ briefcases.” Kleine saw no “searching, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, selecting, rejecting, etc.”⁴ Nearly fifteen years later, librarian Barbara Fister identified the same problem, citing Kleine’s image of the night library as one example. Fister writes that library instruction’s focus on information retrieval suggests to students “that research consists of the ordered use of tools to locate pieces of information from which research projects can be assembled.”⁵ Likewise, Norgaard criticizes the dreary research paper, the “‘cut-and-paste’ assemblage of material drawn from just several sources, supplemented, of course, with a padded bibliography.”⁶

While many blame technology for the current “cut-andpaste” mentality of students, there are deeper theoretical and pedagogical issues related to writing, information, and learning that help account for this consistent lament over the past thirty years. The continued resonance of Kleine’s night library stems, in part, from a gap between IL theory and practice. Many writing instructors and librarians still conceive of and practice IL from a behavioralist framework. Behavioral theories of education, dominant in the 1950s and 60s, assume that learning is based on precise, well-defined, and measurable behaviors and rules.⁷ For IL, behaviorism focuses on information sources and procedures. Librarians teach the “correct” sources and the “correct” order in which to search those sources while discouraging “wrong” approaches, much like the avoidance of “text errors” in writing instruction. Students, for example, should consult general background sources like reference books before exploring the periodical literature.

On the other hand, constructivist approaches emphasize that the prior knowledge of individual learners shape all information seeking, which is conceptualized as a recursive process, with an emphasis on strategies rather than mechanical procedures and rules. Social theories of IL emphasize students’ need to understand the social environment of academic disciplines, including disciplinary conventions and ways of knowing.⁸ Sociocultural theories recognize that information seeking and use, like learning, are socially mediated practices that occur through activity and between people in highly specific contexts. In this view, learning happens in a community of practice where novices learn to become practitioners and experts mediate the information environment, guiding them toward information that the social community values. Learning is conceived not as a mastery of formal and generic skills, but as expanded participation in a community of practice or activity system.⁹ The following case study demonstrates how these pedagogical theories can inform and reform instructional practice at the intersection of composition and IL.

Writing Information Literacy: Pedagogical Enactments Revisited

At Utah State University (USU), librarians and writing instructors have been actively engaged in a process of “writing IL.” In 2004, librarians began aligning learning goals for IL and writing with instructional strategies in freshman and sophomore composition classes.¹⁰ Like Norgaard, we concluded that course-integrated instruction was the most fruitful way to create a situated, rhetoricized IL. Building on a strong existing relationship with the USU writing program, we began the alignment process with a needs assessment of IL learning goals, but we delved into deeper collaboration and engagement with a series of conversations about writing IL. In 2005 we hired five USU writing instructors to serve as Information Literacy Fellows for the summer. Our goal was to create new instructional approaches to better integrate IL into both freshman and sophomore writing classes. The program began with discussions of teaching and learning and IL. We used Norgaard’s articles as a springboard for discussion and we created a document titled “Writing Information Literacy at USU,” which served as a touchstone during our curricular design and implementation process.¹¹

Librarians and English instructors created joint learning goals on the basis of “Writing Information Literacy.” These goals were focused on developing good questions, exploring a variety of information sources, and evaluating information not only for traditional criteria (such as accuracy) but also relevance and value to the writer’s purpose. We incorporated goals related directly to writing, such as attending to audience needs. The following remain the IL learning goals for USU’s Introduction to Writing course (English 1010).

1. Students will define their information needs in order to anticipate what they and their audience need to know and to focus, shape, and organize their ideas and writing.
2. Students will use a variety of sources to explore a topic in order to develop an appreciation of different types of information and their purposes.
3. Students will evaluate information for its value, relevance, and accuracy in order to develop the critical thinking skills of analysis and self-reflection.
4. Students will recognize problems in their own research and writing in order to get assistance and further develop their writing and information literacy skills.¹²

Instructors and librarians then collaborated to create specific lesson plans for use in English 1010 classrooms. Our primary innovation has been the use of problem-based learning to facilitate a more social and situated IL experience.¹³ Problem-based learning (PBL) provides students with authentic problems or questions to research. It focuses on the process of making meaning or extending understanding rather than producing a formally correct final product. PBL also highlights the social construction of knowledge as students learn about discipline-specific ways of knowing and communicating and as they develop understanding through collaborative group work.¹⁴ PBL also relies on authentic practice as the vehicle for learning.

One of the PBL projects was the SOS (Save Our Schools) project. For this assignment, students worked in groups to identify a problem with the U.S. education system, learn more about the issue, prepare an annotated bibliography, and present the information to the class. The process involved four class sessions cotaught by a librarian and the course instructor.

1. Session 1: The librarian visits class for twenty minutes and talks about a personally relevant myth of education, such as “girls are bad at math,” to explore preconceived ideas about education. The librarian then presents a few information sources that might address that myth to show how various people approach the issue.
2. Session 2: The writing instructor and librarian facilitate a brainstorming session to identify education problems, and the class begins to develop research questions. The librarian helps organize the questions into different groups on the basis of theme, discipline, type of resource needed, etc. The librarian and writing instructor focus the questions on something likely to be manageable for a group project.
3. Session 3: The class spends a period in a library computer lab for group work. Librarians meet with groups to go over worksheets that ask students to describe what they already know about their problem and what they need to know to understand it better. Librarians provide a brief demonstration of how to find an article. Students then break into groups, and librarians and English instructors coach the groups in selecting and searching useful search tools, depending on each group’s questions.

Many instructors scheduled an additional follow-up research day, with students working on their projects and the English instructors and librarians coaching them and checking on their progress.

We assessed the long-term impact of the PBL approach in English 1010 through focus groups. Facilitators asked students to reflect on what they learned in English 1010 and how this had or had not prepared them for English 2010. Having participated in PBL exercises, students preferred instruction focused on the real world rather than passive demonstrations. They appreciated the one-on-one help from librarians and reported that they learned a lot about library resources. But students said that they struggled with integrating and synthesizing the information they found and wanted to see a stronger relationship between reading, research, and writing.

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