Chapter 11. Up the Mountain without a Trail: Helping Students Use Source Networks to Find Their Way

Abstract

When we began discussing our vision for a collection on information literacy (IL), our initial conversations revolved around the incredible amount of scholarship and practice that already existed in both Writing Studies (WS) and in Library/Information Science (LIS). Yet, while librarians, writing faculty, and other disciplinary faculty had presented and/or published together, there was still not enough cross-over in disciplinary literature addressed to both faculty and librarian audiences.One of our goals for this collection, then, was to bring together the rich scholarship and pedagogy from multiple perspectives and disciplines to provide a broader and more complex understanding of IL in the second decade of the 21st century. Further, we hoped that a collection that bridged the disciplinary divide would advance the notion of shared responsibility and accountability for the teaching, learning, and research of IL in the academy: faculty, librarians, administrators, and external stakeholders such as accrediting agencies and the businesses/industries that employ our graduates.As we issued the call for contributions for the collection, our view of IL was guided by the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education (IL Standards) which defines IL as the ability to "determine the extent of information needed, access the needed information effectively and efficiently, evaluate information and its sources critically, incorporate selected information into one's knowledge base, use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose, understand the economic, legal and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information legally" (ACRL, 2000). Widely cited since its formal approval by the ACRL Board, the IL Standards has seen widespread acceptance by librarians, faculty, administrators, and accrediting bodies. As a result, librarians and faculty have created strong partnerships to develop pedagogy related to IL and the IL Standards have been adapted to meet disciplinary contexts.However, the IL Standards also have faced considerable criticism as both research and practice began to highlight and illustrate the shortcomings of a standards-and competencies-based approach. Critiques of the IL Standards, theoretically and research-based, have focused on the de-contextualized nature of standards that potentially emphasize a prescribed set of skills. ResearchThe Framework for IL draws upon both threshold concepts (foundational concepts within a discipline that serve as portals to thinking and practice) and the concept of metaliteracy (Mackey & Jacobson, 2011;. Metaliteracy presents a vision for IL as an overarching literacy that places students in the role of both consumer and producer of information within today's collaborative information environments. Metaliteracy also emphasizes four domains of engagement within the information environment: behavioral, affective, cognitive, and metacognitive with metacognition as particularly important for...