Today's post comes from Alison
Hicks, Romance Languages Literatures and
Cultures Librarian at the University of Colorado.
I
hope you will enjoy reading Alison’s work!
This
post was originally published to the Hybrid Pedagogy journal under the title “Libguides:
Pedagogy to Oppress?”
-
You
have to be a pretty tenacious researcher to find any criticism about LibGuides,
the practical and convenient tool that librarians use to create online guides
to research. My search for “LibGuides and critique or criticism” taught me a
great deal about how to interpret literature, while keying in “LibGuides and
problems” merely returned information about the occasional scheduled downtime.
It was not until I limited my search to wordpress.com and then traced a bunch
of links and pingbacks that I could even start to gather a sense of the
conversation round the topic. Yet, ironically, it is exactly this twisting,
infuriating and (occasionally) joyful process of research that is stifled by
the way that most librarians structure and organize their LibGuides. Web-based
research guides have helped to bridge the gap that the growth of online
resources has put between the library and its patrons. However, their typical
focus on librarian-defined notions of value and authority conceals an
industrial-era adherence to library-centric, behaviourist learning theories and
provides a textbook example of Paulo Freire’s banking model of education. In
short, while librarians have started to think about the nature of critical
pedagogy in the classroom, a failure to subject instructional materials to the
same processes of reflective, critical thinking serves to dehumanize both our
students and the nature of research and inquiry.
What is a LibGuide?
If you have never seen a LibGuide before, a
quick browse of the LibGuides
Community site will turn up a typical example of how
librarians employ this proprietary software. Most simply, librarians use
LibGuides as a guide to relevant or recommended sources and sites that students
can use to search for information on a topic. Mirroring typical research
assignment prompts that may ask for 5-10 scholarly articles, guides are
typically created for courses or for general topics such as criminology or art
history and organized by source format, for example, databases or images.
Today, 78,000 librarians from nearly 5000 libraries have produced over
400,000 LibGuides. Providing an easy way for even the most non-tech savvy
librarian to produce or highlight content on library websites that are often
heavily locked down, or poorly designed and cluttered, LibGuides have now
expanded beyond their original research guide design, and are marketed as a
core instructional tool for academic, public, school and special libraries.
Simple and practical, LibGuides are deservedly popular. However, by failing to
consider LibGuides within the context of broader pedagogical practices,
librarians run the risk of misrepresenting both the nature and the scope of
research and inquiry.
Understanding the Nature of Research
One of my major issues with LibGuides centers
on how they are used to represent the nature of research. For example, my
search for criticism about LibGuides formed part of the broader research for
this article: as my writing has unfolded I have drawn upon my understandings
and experiences of librarian communication habits and tools in order to engage
with the resources that constitute information and knowledge within this
community. Yet, as Olof Sundin
points out in his analysis of library tutorials, in
using LibGuides to create decontextualized lists of key (textual) resources in
the field, we isolate tools and resources from critical considerations of the
contexts and practices in which they were created. This is problematic because
it removes research from its sociocultural context, or from the processes of
knowing that give information and knowledge its very meaning and legitimacy
within a specific community. It also, in Freirian terms, moves the focus of
inquiry from creation to listening, and from problem posing to consumption.
This positions LibGuides as a tool to acculturate students into the current
system’s logic rather than to help them question what they are becoming as they
deal creatively with these new worlds.
My research for this article has also formed
a highly iterative process. As my thoughts have developed, I have had to chase
new references and interrogate my original sources in different ways while I
engaged in a maddening and seemingly never ending quest to marshall my
arguments meaningfully. Yet, when we design LibGuides around the key search
tools in a field, we isolate research from reading and writing processes. This
is troublesome because it positions research as static and linear and makes it
sound like the point of research is, as Barbara Fister eloquently puts it,
to engage in a one-stop shopping process for “solid nuggets of truth.”
Furthermore, in listing the authorized knowledge that, as Freire puts it,
students must consume, memorize or bank in order to be successful, it
privileges the librarian’s carefully built up “expert” researcher model over
the student’s tentative meaning making process, even though it’s through
reflection and self-experience that we become what we are.
In order to create a LibGuide that doen’t
fall prey to these problematic assumptions, we must think more holistically
about the nature of research. One effective way is to design LibGuides around
research processes, an approach that was adopted by Annie
Armstrong and Kimberly Pendell in their psychology
research guide and refined by Kathy Shields in
her English guide. While this approach still positions inquiry as an individual
rather than a social practice, it at least centers on the user rather than
information. Alternatively, librarians can move beyond the typical organization
by format towards an arrangement that is organized by
student assignment, need or habit. A better solution, however, would be to look
to the inspirational work of Buffy Hamilton,
who helps students create their own LibGuides. This focus
on developing personal
learning environments engages students in today’s rich information landscapes,
as well as situating them as active participants in broader conversations about
research and inquiry. Of course, LibGuides are not the only tool that can help
accomplish this, with the social bookmarking tool Diigo,
a wiki or even class blogs forming alternative options. AsRosen and
Smale point out, the use of open digital platforms such as
these explicitly work against the banking model of education.
Expanding the Scope of Research
My other major issue with LibGuides is linked
to the way that we present the scope of research. To return to the research
that I undertook for this article, my inquiry carried me throughout today’s
cluttered and dynamic information landscapes — and forced me to make a variety
of evaluative judgements on the go as I moved from scanned copies of paper
articles that live in my personal library to tweets, blogs, hashtags and more.
Yet, when we organize our LibGuides solely around peer reviewed, textual,
library resources with a cautionary tab on the end for “internet resources”, we
ignore the broader processes of meaning-making that characterize our
understandings of research. In other words, when we organize LibGuides by
format (books, articles, databases, etc), we fail to account for the
development of personal information strategies, or engagement with the social
and physical sources that Annemaree
Lloyd argues constitute today’s information landscapes.
These designs are problematic because they appear to be more interested in
protecting the librarian’s traditional tools rather than engaging with the
nature of research.
More worryingly, LibGuides that are
structured by librarian-defined understandings of the “best sources” move the
focus of research away from the rhetorical evaluation of evidence. In effect,
we privilege concepts of value and authority that are based on what Barbara Fister
calls “oversimplified external signs” rather than a
critical interrogation of argument. In addition, as Amy Mark
highlights, we position librarians as the “arbitrators”
of useful knowledge, or the people who have the power to make judgments about
the “rightness” of information. In other words, the student is placed in
opposition to the authority of knowledge even though, as James Elmborg
makes so clear, “the only judge of ‘aboutness’ is the
person who seeks to be informed ‘about’ something.” In creating LibGuides that define
research through its resources, we unconsciously reinforce academic power
dynamics, limit dialog and marginalize the student voice from the very academic
conversations that surround them. This also centers the professional
librarian’s existence on an assumption of student ignorance, a particularly
insulting observation.
One way that librarians can move beyond these
problematic understandings about the scope of research is to work more closely
with faculty and instructors. Research paper requirements that ask for five
academic sources, with nothing from Google or Wikipedia, make it hard for
librarians to design instructional materials that don’t rely on banking models
of education. By working with faculty and instructors, we can move beyond the
idea that research papers are the only way that students can experience
inquiry. Alternatives, which include multimedia, critical
textbook or digital curation projects
can often provide a dynamic way to move the focus of research from the final
product to the more important intermediary ideas, conversations, and
connections. As Kris Shaffer
notes, these alternative approaches are useful because
they move beyond an understanding of research as “a fixed expression that is
both physically and legally prevented from being altered” to challenge the
inherent binaries within the scholarly research process. Engagement with
faculty should also focus on the way that we talk about research in class, with Joseph Bizup’s BEAM
model providing an interesting rhetorical perspective for research-based
writing, as well as the design of the research assignment handout, which, as researchers from
Project Information Literacy found, tend to dedicate more
space to margin widths than to the nature of research and inquiry.
Ultimately, when we construct LibGuides
around the resources that the librarian thinks the student should know about in
order to ace their research paper, we attempt to simplify the processes of
research. Yet, as Freire points out, this is problematic because it positions
research as a transferral of information, rather than as an act of exploratory
and liberatory meaning-making. In effect, when we fail to engage critically
with new technologies such as LibGuides, we run the risk of perpetuating
banking-model pedagogies that deny learner agency and position inquiry as a
procedural skill instead of a rich, sociocultural practice that forms an
integral part of human activity. While this lack of conversation about pedagogy
and design is not unique to LibGuides, librarians
have a long commitment to social justice, critical praxis
and liberatory teaching. Let’s make sure our instructional materials don’t let
us down.
No comments:
Post a Comment