Welcome to another round of our CSI: Distance Learning Blog, where we are closely examining best practices in distance learning and beyond. The January 6th Insurrection in the Capitol laid bare many of our problems and failings as a nation. The teacher in me was immediately strategizing about how I would address it with my students the next day. The librarian in me wanted to get on the roof and shout, “See why information literacy matters?!”
Why Information Literacy
In my view, one of the most meaningful aspects of being a teacher in America is that we are preparing citizens to be active in a democracy. Our system of government requires the participation of the people and teachers and school staff are charged with training the (young) people in the skills they’ll need to engage, including reading, writing, basic numeracy, empathy, and critical thinking. It is this last category that I want to spend some time on today. Critical thinking and information literacy go hand in hand.
The American Library Association says that "To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” Let’s zero in on the verbs in that sentence: recognize a need, locate, evaluate, and use.
Recognize a need for information: The humility and empathy involved in this step shouldn’t be discounted. This is admitting you don’t know something or that you might have incomplete information.
Can you imagine if more politicians did this? Or if that one uncle at your family dinner suddenly said, “You know, I don’t know much about this topic. Maybe I should learn more before giving an opinion.”
Locate: When we are locating information we can be as lazy or active as we want. We can defer to our first search engine result, or we can look deeply into a topic. Many people don’t stop to consider that the search results that come up for me might be very different from the search results that come up for you. Although search engines algorithms are kept secret, our locations and our previous search histories are both known to affect the results. This makes it extra easy for things like confirmation bias to creep in without us even noticing.
How diverse are the sources you consult online? How diverse are the sources that one uncle consults?
Evaluate: In the information landscape, not all sources are created equal. This moment in the information seeking process is an incredibly important gatekeeper when the questions we ask about a source can be transformative in our understanding.
Are you aware when you are reading straight news coverage vs. punditry? How easy are they really to tell apart?
Use: When we use the information we have found it is the fulfillment of all the previous steps in this cycle. We cast our votes, we call for change. Our views remain unchallenged, we fail to recognize that we are being manipulated.
Two No Prep Things You Can Do to Center Information Literacy in Your Class TODAY!
Maybe that feels like a lot. Maybe right now you are thinking, “Information literacy is important, but I already have to do X, Y, and Z and I don’t have the time!”
But take heart, here are two low/no prep ways to center information literacy in your class today.
Talk about the texts you use.
Whether it’s a video, an article, an image, a graph, or a textbook take a moment to regularly talk about the texts you are using in their class. Who made it? Why? What did they leave in or out? Model this AND invite students to participate in the conversation. This might look or sound like:
I got this article from The Chicago Tribune. It’s straight news, which means that it shouldn’t express an opinion on the topic, it should stick to the facts.
I noticed that this headline used the word coup instead of protest, what does that choice make you think about what we will read? What other words could they have used?
I see that this image shows police shouting at protestors. Why do you think the editors chose this image? How does it confirm or contradict other things we know about this event?
2. If you don’t know, say so and then find out.
Several times a year a student asks me a question I don’t know the answer to and I LOVE it. Instead of pretending I do, I simply say “I don’t know, let me find out.” And then I project and narrate my search process to the class. This does two things I think are extremely important:
It normalizes saying I don’t know, even for a person with “authority.”
It provides an opportunity for you to show what a thorough and thoughtful search looks like. Talk about what you choose to click on and what answers you choose to accept.
Information literacy might seem abstract, or like an extra thing to teach if you have the time, but really it is more a stance than a skill. An information literate person is a lifelong learner who pursues questions about which candidate to vote for or which computer to buy the same way: with humility, curiosity, and critical reflection.
References:
American Library Associatopn. (2019, March/April). Evaluating Information: Information Literacy. Retrieved January 14, 2021, from https://libguides.ala.org/InformationEvaluation/Infolit
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