Information
Literacy and the Liberal Arts Education
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Information Literacy and the Liberal Arts EducationCIC Workshop Susanne Woods, Provost Liberal arts education developed in the United States as a curriculum explicitly designed for a free people. When Yale College famously introduced science and other English-language studies into higher education in the 1820’s, it set a pattern that has made American higher education, as the saying still goes, the envy of the world. Instead of intense focus on Latin and Greek, those studies were incorporated as part of a broader view of knowledge, eventually leading to the notions of “breadth” in the general education portion of curriculum, and “depth” through majoring in a given field. If freedom is knowledgeable choice, then general education provides a range of knowledge, while the rigor of a major develops the analytical skills and judgment necessary to make good choices. Wheaton College has recently completed a three-year curriculum review process, producing some exciting changes. What has the community and the indeed the whole College so excited is a new model for achieving the traditional “breadth” component of general education. Instead of requiring a certain number of courses in an array of traditional categories, the new Wheaton curriculum will require students to take one or two sets of courses which faculty have deliberately connected across disciplinary boundaries (see Appendix A). This model illustrates, I believe, three important points: it reaffirms and reworks the traditional values of a liberal arts education by combining breadth of perspectives with disciplinary integrity; it underscores collaboration as a principal mode of inquiry in American higher education; and it invites students to explore individual, personal routes to knowledge. All of these require increased attention to information literacy, as they both demand and promote what is sometimes called information fluency. Never have librarians and information technologists been more important in higher education as we all work together to organize, access, and make judgments about an increasing quantity of information, and an increasing need for multiple ways of approaching questions. You who are librarians are more expert on the proliferation of information than I am, but I can assure you that even in my own academic field of renaissance literature – hardly new knowledge – the amount of information in print and on the web is overwhelming. The effect rises exponentially when we add the necessity of global knowledge. To be a free person in America, we must understand cultures from Pakistan to France, South Africa, Colombia, Korea – the list is almost endless. Technology both forces a global perspective, and makes it possible. But we can only manage this Everest of information if we learn how to separate the true from the false, the useful from the wasteful, the pertinent from the irrelevant. Information literacy in its simplest form is not enough – just to be able to negotiate a catalog or a web browser does not teach a discerning judgment, and discerning judgment is what we need. The National Research Council’s 2000 booklet, Being Fluent with Information Technology, many of you may recall, begins not with computer or technical skills, but with “Intellectual Capabilities,” and then goes on to “Information Technology Concepts” and “Information Technology Skills” (Appendix B). At least the first eight, and probably all ten of these essentials for “fluency in information technology,” are crucial skills for the liberally educated person who wants truly to be that most happy person, a lifelong learner. All of us, therefore -- faculty, librarians, technologists, administrators, and the students themselves – are responsible for information literacy or fluency in the liberal arts. There remains understandable concern about how we define information literacy or fluency. My first reaction is: why should it be so hard? We are all educators, professionals who have been dealing with information, its origins, pertinence and transmission much of our lives. Within the last three years we have had at least two pamphlets addressing slightly different aspects of the topic – the one from the National Research Council, and another from the Association of College and Research Libraries. Despite our expertise, however, the environment in which we produce, access, and transmit information has changed so radically in the last ten years – is changing swiftly still – that definitions feel like moving targets. The one thing we know is that information literacy is no longer the domain solely of the librarian, nor is fluency with information technology the sole property of technologists. We simply have to work together, and with faculty, to assure relevant, quality resources, access, and pedagogies for this strange new time. At Wheaton, for example, the librarians got together in 2000 to think and plan and construct an information mission statement a literacy standards based in part on the ACRL pamphlet. At about the same time the technology professionals got together to think and plan and produce a mission statement and some standards to measure fluency with information technology. Each of these were useful exercises, but the resulting documents were cumbersome, wordy, and inadequate to the task of new teaching and learning. This past year, under the leadership of Terry Metz, our new College Librarian and Associate Vice President for Information Resources, and with help from Meyers Briggs and lots of food, both groups began meeting together to begin the process of sharing language and approaches. Out of this process, and the curriculum, are emerging some common assumptions about what constitutes information fluency – a term that combines information literacy and ease with negotiating the various tools of access, increasingly electronic. Each institution, and perhaps even each discipline, needs to define information fluency in the light of its own mission. I offer the following definition, however, as a point of departure for thinking about more individualized versions. Information fluency for liberal arts study is characterized by: 1. The ability to use the library, including catalog and reference resources, and the physical structure as an intellectual resource and place to be (including the stacks). 2. The ability to use internet tools skillfully and responsibly, and with critical judgment. 3. An understanding and appreciation of intellectual property and appropriate citation. 4. An understanding and appreciation of levels of expertise and authority, and the strengths and weaknesses of specific information resources. The proliferation of information and the accelerating pace of access require that we prize and bring closer to the center of liberal arts education those professionals who are most experienced in analyzing and organizing knowledge, and those who can help define and manage effective and appropriate access. In other words, faculty and students cannot teach and learn in the twenty-first century without the full partnership of librarians and information technologists. This is a message faculty increasingly understand, but academic administrators need to help break down the traditional barriers between and among faculty, librarians, and information technologists. To stand still on this is to go backwards. The best way to achieve mutual respect and true learning is through collaborative projects. You probably have a number of these on your campuses. They will be well worth your support and involvement, and I invite you to promote them actively. At Wheaton, to give you a sample deriving from our new “connected” approach to education, we have courses or student-faculty research projects that connect or combine biology and computer science, chemistry and art, mathematics and literature, and geology and sociology. None of these would be possible without active involvement from librarians and technologists. For example, the geographic information system (GIS), which supports the connection between geology and sociology, is a relatively new technological tool with implications for many academic disciplines, offering many ways of looking at complex data, and all of those ways are supported by the expertise of librarians as well as technologists. At Wheaton we try to forge that collaboration by selecting key influential faculty and staff to model successful collaborative experiences at a variety of workshops. I find that small incentives go a long way to ward encouraging attendance. Refreshments and stipends as small as $50 per person will gather a substantial group of faculty to come and ask questions about new projects. It costs my office less than $10,000 per year to sponsor a January library and technology workshop, a series of five May workshops on teaching and learning, and four or five other workshops scattered through the academic year. At any given workshop, 40-50 faculty usually attend, which is a third to almost half of the continuing faculty. They come for the food, the collegiality, a small stipend, and to learn something that they can use. Assuming we are able to promote and support collaborative projects from faculty, information professionals, and students, how will we evaluate what students learn, and whether that learning continues to promote the ideals of the liberal arts? I am just becoming familiar with assessment tools and the evaluation process myself, but here are a few things I have found: evaluation can happen in any way that is convenient and useful. It need not depend on carefully calibrated social scientific instruments, although those are nice if you get the right ones and can get people to fill out the inevitable questionnaires. But evaluation is simply a process of finding out what you want to know, in this case about how well students are assimilating the knowledge and skills to make them effective seekers and users of information. My more specific suggestions derive from the recent experience of our curriculum review, in which we recognized that we needed to monitor our success, including information fluency. If we tie our evaluation procedures to the curriculum itself, we should be able to develop ways to review how well we are doing. For example, a random review of senior term papers or other capstone projects can give us an overview of such things as how pertinent the evidence is to the argument, whether supporting evidence is recent or dated, whether web-based evidence is authoritative or unevaluated, and how nimbly a student is able to incorporate researched material into the fabric of an argument. A second suggestion is to use focus groups. I have always assumed they
would be unscientific and therefore unreliable, but in fact I have found
them extremely useful. To gather a group of five or ten faculty and/or
librarians and ask what they think they have taught, how and how well,
and then a relevant parallel group of students and ask what they think
they have learned, how and how well, is a useful and eye-opening exercise. As a final comment, I believe that we develop information fluency best when we support faculty efforts to bring information projects to their classes, and to bring students to group or independent study projects that give them hands-on opportunities to struggle with the proliferation of information and problems of access. Learning that is collaborative and project-oriented is the best way to develop a knowledgeable, problem-solving, free citizenry for the twenty-first century. To be successful, we must have dynamic, ongoing, and respectful partnerships among faculty, librarians, and technologists. Which is why we are here. Appendix A The New Wheaton College Curriculum: Provost’s Summary (2/02) On December 7, 2001, the Wheaton faculty voted 91-3 for an exciting new curriculum that I believe will set the standard for liberal arts curricula for at least the next 20 years. Here are the principal elements of this faculty-developed, faculty-affirmed vision of liberal arts education for the twenty-first century, which will apply beginning with the class of 2007 (entering in 2003): • Foundations. We reaffirmed our belief that all students at Wheaton
should have courses in writing, quantitative analysis, foreign language,
non-Western culture, and all students should begin their first year with
a seminar in which the instructor is also their advisor. • Infusion. We committed ourselves to transforming our courses in order to meet the goals of the following statement: “The education of Wheaton students shall emphasize the study of race/ethnicity and its intersections with gender, class, sexuality, religion, and technology in the United States and globally.” • Writing. We affirmed that good writing is an ongoing process, and voted that “all departments and programs shall provide appropriate instruction in writing.” By linking ongoing writing instruction to the major, we expect that every Wheaton student will become adept at the kinds of writing appropriate to her or his career interests. • Capstone. While many of our current majors already require some sort of capstone experience (a senior seminar or thesis, a collaborative research project), this new legislation requires each major to have one. • Experiential learning. We reaffirmed that “the education of Wheaton students shall feature out-of-class learning experiences which may include intercultural experiences, student/faculty research collaboration, community services, internships, campus leadership positions, extracurricular activities, and employment.” • Evaluation. We are committed to ongoing review of the new curriculum’s effectiveness, including student learning and satisfaction, and the relative success of the curriculum’s ability to assure intellectual breadth and depth.
Intellectual Capabilities for Fluency in Information Technology (Being Fluent with Information Technology, p. 4) 1. Engage in sustained reasoning 2. Manage complexity 3. Test a solution 4. Manage problems in faulty solutions 5. Organize and navigate information structures and evaluate information 6. Collaborate 7. Communicate to other audiences 8. Expect the unexpected 9. Think about information technology abstractly.
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