There is a podcast interview with Alana Kumbier on the ACRL Residency Interest Group blog, as a part of their “Newbie Dispatches” podcast series. Alana is co-editor, with Emily Drabinski and Maria Accardi, of the Library Juice Press title Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods. She finished her Ph.D. in comparative studies last year from The Ohio State University.
There’s a good interview with Library Juice Press author and series editor Emily Drabinski by Julia West in The Desk Set blog. Emily is co-editor of Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods and series editor for Library Juice Press, with the Series on Gender and Sexuality in Librarianship.
Ron Day and Hamid Ekbia of the IU library school have an article in the new First Monday titled, “(Digital) experiences.” The article looks at three types of “digital experience” using analytical perspectives on modern “experience” coming from Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.
Day’s and Ekbia’s work gets at the roots of some of the things I have written about in Library Juice over the years. I recently read Ron’s book and plan to read Hamid’s book soon.
John Allen Paulos is a mathematician who writes books about numeracy for a popular audience. The New York Times Magazine published a brief but insightful essay by him about the dangers inherent in relying on numbers without looking at how they are arrived at (my basic issue with Wolfram Alpha). Here is the starting paragraph of that article, “Metric Mania“:
In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers. To hold teachers accountable, we examine their students’ test scores. To improve medical care, we quantify the effectiveness of different treatments. There is much to be said for such efforts, which are often backed by cutting-edge reformers. But do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’d amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.
Many librarians, when asked what is involved in being a librarian besides checking out books, will say something to the effect of, “I don’t know the answers, but I know how to look them up.” Where a doctor has knowledge of medicine, a librarian has knowledge of how to find out knowledge of medicine. (Or how to organize and store knowledge of medicine for later retrieval, and how to connect people with the medical knowledge they need.)
An overarching problem in LIS, as I’ve said before in different ways, is that we have confused “knowing how to look it up” with technical knowledge of tools.
Knowledge of the tools is important, but is worth nothing without knowledge of the materials on which the tools operate. By analogy, knowing how to drive a car is of little value when you don’t know where you are and have no map and don’t know how to read one anyway, and you’re late to an appointment. To extend the analogy, it solves nothing in that situation to make technical improvements to the car, regardless of how fast you can make it go.
We are making vast technical improvements to the tools we use to find things, making them more powerful (in some respects) and easier to use. At the same time, however, we are gradually forgetting – by way of de-emphasis and de-prioritization – the general knowledge and domain-specific knowledge that enables us to do what we do at the reference desk.
If you’re a reference librarian, consider the thought-processes that are involved in answering a challenging reference question. Knowing the tools is helpful, obviously. But knowing what to do with them, based on your knowledge of the question’s subject area, is what gives you abilities that your patrons couldn’t pick up so easily. The knowledge that enables us to find things is knowledge of what Paul Otlet theorized as “the biblion,” the bibliographically interconnected world of information in documents and books. (The knowledge that enables us to interpret users’ information needs hermeneutically is another kind of knowledge altogether, but I won’t go into it here.) We can start with a couple of clues, infer a couple of different clues, and move from there into a rich inroad of relevant material, because we have knowledge of the field and the historical and conceptual relationships within it.
Actually, the initial exposition of the idea of knowledge of something versus knowledge of how to find something out, or at least the one our tradition goes back to, had nothing to do with knowledge of tools and was all about bibliographic knowledge, the ability to follow a thread from one place to another in the web of science and culture. It was a conversation between Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1775. As well as we know it, it went like this:
“No sooner,” says Boswell, “had we made our bow to Mr. Cambridge, in his library, than Johnson ran eagerly to one side of the room, intent on poring over the backs of the books. Sir Joshua observed (aside) ‘He runs to the books, as I do to the pictures; but I have the advantage. I can see much more of the pictures than he can of the books.’ Mr. Cambridge, upon this, politely said, ‘Dr. Johnson, I am going, with your pardon, to accuse myself, for I have the same custom which I perceive you have. But it seems odd that one should have such a desire to look at the backs of books.’ Johnson, ever ready for contest, instantly started from his reverie, wheeled about, and answered, ‘Sir, the reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it.”
(This conversation was quoted by Andrew Keogh in his address to the American Library Association Annual Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1907, and is reprinted in Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book.)
I have an ambition to do some research that lays out the thought processes involved in answering complex reference questions, the knowledge and creativity that we bring to the table, over and above our understanding of search interfaces and index structures. If you would be interested in helping with research along these lines, please let me know.
There is a hot issue in librarianship that I think has great significance in terms of how society and the institution of libraries is changing. The issue is how the profession will deal with claims by native cultural groups who desire that their cultural works, documents, and artifacts be kept in public libraries, but with special access restrictions that respect their cultural traditions. ALA Council is presently debating a policy document on these “traditional cultural expressions” (TCE’s), but the topic needs attention from theorists who can see the issue for what it is: a site of postmodern, multicultural challenge to to the European Enlightenment foundations of librarianship and, and the changing reality of the public sphere.
I asked Wayne Bivens-Tatum, who is working on a book for Library Juice Press about the Enlightenment foundations of librarianship, for his take on the ALA’s draft TCE document, and he posted his thoughts on it today.
The big theme in the current era of librarianship is to be user-centered. Being user centered is the key to maintaining relevance, changing with the times, and erasing the barriers to access that turn many people off to libraries. In the background of the idea of user-centeredness are two parallel but very different theories: critical pedagogy and market-based democracy. The theory that underlies a call to user-centeredness is often obscure or not worked out fully. The difference between the two theoretical foundations concerns, among other things, conceptions of the user and of the user’s surrounding structures – what is to be taken as a given.
There are a number of different theoretical problems underlying the idea of user-centeredness, but I want to make note of an idea concerning just one of them, and that is the way assumptions about who the user is serve to determine the conclusions about what will work best in “user-centered design.”
Take the new “next generation catalogs,” for example. They are designed to work better for “the user,” and librarians who find it more difficult to do the things we are used to doing in a catalog are told to keep in mind that the catalog is serving our users better than the old one. These catalogs have discovery tools built into them that enable undergraduate students to find resources on their topics without having to mess with subject headings or reason from a known lead to a title or an author. What reference librarians are good at is less relevant in the environment of the next-generation catalog, because it has the smarts to make it easy for students to “find stuff” on their own.
The success of these catalogs in “finding stuff” for users can only be measured against an idea of what the users are looking for and what kind of research they are doing. The research that supports these new catalogs tends to assume a user base of millennial undergrads, rather than non-traditional students, faculty members, grad students, or librarian intermediaries. This research tends to gloss over rather than justify the choice to focus on a subset of users in creating a more “user-centered” service design. Therefore, it seems that the definition of a user profile that gets applied in a “user centered” redesign can be a way of achieving goals of the designers that aren’t necessarily related to serving users better. In this case, one outcome of the “next gen” catalogs is to increasingly bypass the mediation of a librarian. This means that the market for a next gen catalog is shifting from the librarian to the undergraduate student, which is as a group is going to be less critical and “more available” in terms of the effectiveness of branding, advertising, alternative business models, etc. If vendors’ products are going to be built increasingly on open standards, as promised, then librarians and other researchers should be able to hack together new tools that will allow us to do the kinds of power searching we have always done in OPAC’s; however, it is important to keep in mind how we are being cut out of the loop in the name of “user centered” design.
I think most librarians can count a number of occasions when vendors or administrators have told them about changes that are based on “what users want” where the idea presented to us of “what users want” is contrary to our own experience with students. When we offer our own insights about users they tend to be discounted as moldy preconceptions rather than authoritative information about the users at our own institutions. I think there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical, critical, and inquisitive about the way the user is defined and characterized in “user centered” solutions that we don’t create ourselves.
This is a new idea for me that I plan to write about at length later. If you find it interesting and want to help, please comment with useful citations or concepts. Thanks!
LACUNY is sponsoring an event tomorrow on Critical Library Instruction at the Brooklyn College Library. The organizers are Alycia Sellie and Jonathan Cope. Ira Shor will be the featured speaker. Wish I could go…
Arcades Collaborative is a new academic group blog, started by Patrick Keilty, on what could be called critical information theory. Ron Day and a number of really sharp doc students (and a couple of sharp practitioners) are applying critical social theory and philosophy to questions in information studies (or more accurately, using theory to raise new questions in information studies).
Here is the blog’s introductory statement:
Welcome to Arcades Collaborative, a group blog that examines and critiques social and cultural information issues.
The authors of this blog are scholars of information studies and related fields.
As critical researchers, we aim to change society as a whole by raising awareness and promoting alternative and liberatory visions, particularly with regard to social and political inequalities.
Our research attempts to understand the structures, functions, habits, norms, and practices of information and its attendant networks of communication within our society and culture.
We rely on a broad range of scholarship, including philosophy, cultural studies, science and technology studies, communication, library science, museology, archival studies, design, law, sociology, anthropology, computer science, and economics.
This blog provides a forum for scholars to highlight critical information issues and serves as a resource for scholarly communication.
We welcome all comments and look forward to a dynamic exchange of ideas.
I hope to publish work coming out of the Arcades Collaborative, but I know I will have competition.
Maria, Emily, and Alana met in Google Chat, as they did often over the course of this book project, to reflect on the process and product of Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods.
Alana: Hello!
Emily: Morning, y’all!
Maria: Hi!
Emily: How’re we all doing?
Maria: I’m doing okay. Nervous about my presentation at noon today. I’m talking about Critical Library Instruction for our library’s “A Little Knowledge” series. It’s a monthly event the Library hosts, where we invite someone on campus to talk about their research in an informal, conversational lunchtime session. Faculty, staff, and students are all invited. I’m starting by talking about critical pedagogy, and then information literacy, and then putting those together, which is where the book was born. And then I focus, like my chapter, on assessment.
Emily: When you say you’re talking about ‘critical pedagogy,’ what do you mean by that? I know that my own definition has sort of changed over the course of the book.
Maria: Well, I define it first in Freirean terms, and then i explain how other critics and theorists and etc. have expanded upon it and so on. For me, bell hooks is my inspriration. I have a slide up there with some quotes from “Teaching to Transgress.”
Alana: Is there a part of hooks’ work that’s especially significant to you, Maria?
Maria: Yes. She cares about students. Learners are people with souls, and we should teach in a manner that respects and cares for their souls.
Alana: I feel there’s also a strong emphasis in her work on teaching as a practice of living, a part of everyday life — especially in her work on engaged pedagogy. This connects with our shared interest in thinking about the selves & embodiments we bring to the classroom, and how we interact w/our students’ (whole) selves, their personhood?
Emily: Part of what’s helped my perspective has been moving from Sarah Lawrence to LIU-Brooklyn, and working with two very different student populations. I just don’t see how we can do anything but start with who is sitting right in front of us–not the ACRL Standards–when interests, needs, and experiences are so different.
Maria: Exactly. Standards erase difference– “pasteurized processed student product” is the phrase i used in my chapter.
Alana: They also erase context.
Emily: Exactly. I’ve been doing some work lately on the Greek idea of kairos, which means ‘the right moment for speaking.’ What it’s possible to say and what it’s possible to hear depends entirely on a complex set of intersecting factors. That’s one of the reasons I really loved the Smith and Eisenhower chapter (”The Library as ‘Stuck Place’:Critical Pedagogy in the Corporate University”). It addresses these factors directly. While it says some scary things about the context in which we work, it’s helpful to have a sense of what limits what we can do.
Alana: I love the way those authors move well beyond the classroom, and beyond the institution, to situate our practice in broader contexts of neoliberalism & global capitalism, emphases on flexible labor, and creating flexible laborers. They give us a model for how to think-through our situation.
Emily: And it’s a challenging perspective–what are we supposed to do under so many constraints?–but the fact that we might actually find real freedom in our marginality was an interesting perspective.
Maria: But still, there are things we can do, which the book makes clear.
Emily: Yes–we have methods! Like problem-posing instruction, student-centered instruction, etc. Then again, much of this is pretty standard in the instruction approaches recommended by ACRL. Do you think having a politics around this stuff–which we and our contributors do–makes a difference?
Maria: Well, it makes a difference to me!
Alana: It makes a difference to me, too, especially since learning activities are just one part of teaching and learning. There are cases when, if I’m taking power-sharing seriously, I might step out of my role as Expert, and that doesn’t seem like part of the ACRL approach.
Emily: Yes. It also requires changing the way I teach things like ‘authority.’ That’s probably the biggest thing that has changed for me since we started putting this book together.
Maria: Yes. Authority is complicated.
Alana: It also means, as some of our contributors show, that what we teach — in terms of resources, critical approaches to library tools themselves, nontraditional/alternative resources — matters, too.
Emily: And that commitment, for me, comes entirely from my political commitment to acknowledging and making clear the constructed nature of all knowledge.
Alana: Right. For me, it comes from an investment in paying attention to how knowledge is produced.
Maria: Yes. Yes to all of the above.
Alana: Were there other things from our contributors that surprised you?
Emily: I worked with one author (Margaret Torrell, “Negotiating Virtual Contact Zones: Revolutions in the Role of the Research Workshop”) who is a composition teacher. She wrote very clearly from the other side of the fence much of what librarians struggle to articulate about questions of authority. It was a real reminder to me that we need to be talking to our comp friends!
Alana: And I was pleased to work with Lisa Hooper (”Breaking the Ontological Mold: Bringing Postmodern and Critical Pedagogy Into Archival Educational Programming”) on her chapter. Somehow, even given my own interest in critical archival studies, it hadn’t occurred to me that we should collaborate with archival educators, too.
Maria: I found it exciting to work with Troy Swanson’s chapter, especially. I’d read his previous work so it was pretty cool to get to correspond with him personally. His exploration of personal epistemology was really thought-provoking. As critical teachers, we resist the banking method model of teaching. But what happens when students prefer it? Troy takes this up in an interesting way.
Emily: One thing that really amazed me was how on time our authors were, which is more than just a hey-we’re-lucky! thing. I had the sense that people were really anxious for a place to put down the incipient ideas and practices that many of us are working through in isolation. I heard a lot of “I’m so grateful for this project” from my writers.
Alana: And I was so happy with how willing everyone was to really respond to our questions, to elaborate their arguments, to really revise
in ways that meant re-thinking or re-visiting initial arguments. I think this was a tricky collection to contribute to, in part because we’re interested in both theory and practice, trying to bring those two together, creating space for ideas in ways that we don’t usually see in the literature on instruction. It’s hard work!
Emily: I was so grateful to get some of those heavy-theory chapters, too. Practitioners are rarely asked to think very hard, which is a real shame. For me, the book has been like finding a home. As a thinker who goes to work every day, having a place where those two identities can exist has been really amazing.
Alana: And it’s been a reminder that it’s okay to take time to think, to question.
Maria: It is! It has been like that. Working with my authors challenged my thinking. It helped me realize that I wasn’t the only one thinking about these topics, that there is a conversation happening, and that we were helping to facilitate it.
Emily: It’s not a perfect book.
Alana: I’d be really worried if it was the perfect, definitive volume on critical library instruction.
Emily: I’d really like a more extensive discussion of critical library instruction and service learning, and I’d like to see more stuff along the lines of institutional/global critiques.
Alana: I’d also like to see more critical engagements with race,
Emily: and queerness,
Alana: and disability.
Maria: It’s a conversation starter, I think.
Emily: Yes, and one of the core themes in this book is learning as a dialogue, that knowledge doesn’t ’settle,’ isn’t ‘final.’ We don’t offer a Top Ten Critical Pedagogy Tips and Tricks. It’s about having conversations, between students and teachers, students and students, teachers and teachers, and everybody else.
Alana: And this is why we need more, better instruction about instruction at the level of LIS programs.
Emily: I didn’t have a single instruction class. Not one. Nothing about pedagogy.
Alana: Me neither. Well, one-half of one of my reference class sessions addressed instruction.
Maria: Neither did I. The one class Pitt offered didn’t fit with my schedule.
Alana: I got my training and experience at Ohio State, where I experienced critical pedagogies from the position of teacher and learner, in my Comparative Studies courses and through working with the first-year writing program.
Emily: I’m getting it now in my composition and rhetoric program.
Maria: I first learned to teach in the writing center and then the composition classroom in my MA program at the University of Louisville.
Alana: I was so hungry for examples of classroom practice when I started learning about critical pedagogy.
Emily: Me too. I was in a conversation with faculty recently about this book, and I said, with no guile whatsover, “I believe this book could be a game changer.” It elicited huge laughs! I mean, the book is about library instruction! But I really think it could be, if it invites people to step away from ‘mastery’ and towards discussion and engagement with critical teaching practices.
Alana: That approach feels aligned with what happens in our individual teaching — we experiment, make mistakes, find some things that work super-well on one context & not in another…
Emily: We have to be able to struggle and fail, which is all political work is anyway, or the work of life.
Alana: Right on. Excellent connection.
Emily: I made the shittiest yam and bean stew over the weekend, but I’m having it for lunch because it’s what I have to eat. But now I know for next time–fewer chipotles.
Alana: And you’ll make other soups.
Emily: Many many others, probably a new one tonight. And that hooks back up with hooks–this is all part of the wholeness of us as instructors, right?
Maria: Yes, we are imperfect creatures, soft animals, even when we are teachers.
Emily: I have to go to a desk shift in a minute, so can I ask one last question? I always say in my classes, “If you take one thing away from this session, it’s that.. You can do this/you can come see me/you have a right to succeed here, etc.” What’s the ‘one thing’ you hope people take away from this book?
Maria: I hope people will take inspiration from the book to try something new, to rethink their practice.
Alana: For me I think it’s what we’re already talking about: what happens when we create spaces of possibility — by taking time to think, to experiment, to take risks in (thought-out, reflective ways).
Emily: I guess I would hope people would read the book, or even part of the book, and then turn to the librarian next to them and tell them what they thought. I hope we start conversations.
We hope you’ll join us in talking about critical approaches to library instruction. Maria, Emily, and Alana will be making room for these conversations at http://librarypraxis.wordpress.com.
I’d like to thank Wayne Bivens-Tatum of Princeton University Libraries for his thoughtful review of André Cossette’s Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on Library Philosophy. I’m pleased to read that he and I have the same disagreements with Cossette, and that, like I do, he finds the book useful and interesting despite those points of disagreement. Bivens-Tatum links to a related article of his own that looks very interesting.
Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods
Editors: Emily Drabinski, Alana Kumbier, and Maria Accardi
Price: $35.00
Published: March 2010
ISBN: 978-1-936117-01-7
Bringing together the voices of a range of practicing librarians, this collection illuminates theories and methods of critical pedagogy and library instruction. Chapters address critical approaches to standards and assessment practices, links between queer, anti-racist and feminist pedagogies and the library classroom, intersections of critical theories of power and knowledge and the library, and the promise and peril of reflective instruction practices. Rooted in theoretical work both from within the profession (James Elmborg, Cushla Kapitzke) and without (Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, Deborah Britzman), contributions are complemented by stories of critical approaches put into practice in institutional settings ranging from the community college classroom to large urban research universities to virtual worlds. The intention is to begin a conversation among librarians who teach, library instruction program coordinators, faculty and instructors interested in bringing librarians into the classroom, and librarians interested in developing liberatory and anti-oppressive professional practices.
Critical Library Instruction is available directly from Library Juice Press, from Amazon.com and other online booksellers, through vendors of books to libraries, and in electronic form through ebrary.
The talk I gave in Alberta on February 5th was recorded. The recording is now on the web in mp3 form. Toni Samek’s introduction feels a bit grand, but the real me will be on the mic shortly. The recording itself came out all right. Not all of the audience questions are audible, but as a whole I think it works well enough to post:
Notice that I am not using the word “ontology.” I’ll get into why later, but if you’ve read any Heidegger you can guess…
Hope Olson, Sandy Berman, and many others who have done work based on theirs, have shown how classification systems tend not to represent all users well. Hope Olson has described the problem in terms of its philosophic roots by deconstructing classification systems using methods that come from Derrida. I think it is clear and very interesting the way classification systems reflect positivistic assumptions about reality that lead to a presumed “view from nowhere” that reflects the dominant culture. I’m glad that there is a lot of work being done in this area right now, and especially the way people are tying these ideas to new topics like folksonomies and contemporary identity issues.
However, I can’t help thinking that an unjust “official” classification system is not a big problem as long as it is transparent to the user. Let’s say I’m deviant in some way, and I want to find information that is relevant to me using institutions that are connected to the Library of Congress through its standards. Am I really going to expect the Library of Congress to be hip to my understanding of things? No, I am not going to expect that. I am going to do what I am accustomed to doing as a deviant person, which is my choice anyway: I am going to translate the official language, in which I am fluent, into my own deviant street language. That kind of translation skill is part of daily life for anyone who negotiates between formal and informal contexts, streets and offices, subcultures and dominant cultures. The official classification system may reinforce a sense of alienation, but as long as it is transparent to the user, I would not agree that it presents a barrier to access. The cognitive skills involved in making use of an imperfect classification system are very interesting to me (whether we’re talking about reference librarians or end users).
The next plateau of information technology, which we are beginning to reach, is, as I see it, presenting a new problem concerning these issues. Simplified interfaces with artificial intelligence under the hood are “freeing” the user from having to understand either the mechanism of the search or the underlying organizational system, but one thing that this means is a loss of transparency. The user is expected to trust the virtual helper to understand his or her information needs, and it is likely that this virtual helper is going to make assumptions about the user and the context that stem from the assumptions that are embedded into the official classification structure. Without access to the official vocabulary or the mechanism of the search, the user is less able to adapt the tool to his or her needs. Without access to the original text, the user doesn’t have the opportunity to do a translation…