From a “Crusade Against Ignorance to a Crisis
of Authenticity”: Cultivating Information
Literacy for a 21st Century Democracy
Andrew Battista
Information Literacy & Reference Librarian
University of Montevallo
2012 LOEX Annual Conference, Columbus, OH
May 4-5, 2010
#LOEX2012
Engaged
discussion:
28 minutes
Me talking:
22 minutes
 Librarians should help students become sustainable learners,
citizens who cultivate networks of information that compel
them to pursue fairness, equality, and human rights.
 Many prominent information literacy metrics do not
correspond with the challenges of living and learning in our
“swirling vortex of information.”
 Information literacy instruction that directs students to
curate content on social media platforms is an essential
component of a democracy-centered education in the 21st
century.
#LOEX2012
Information literacy should be
understood “as a new liberal art […] as
essential to the mental framework of
the information-age citizen as the
trivium of basic liberal arts (grammar,
logic, and rhetoric) was to the educated
person in medieval society.”
Shapiro & Hughes (1996)
#LOEX2012
“…strong emphasis on undergraduate liberal
arts studies [designed for] intellectual and
personal growth in the pursuit of meaningful
employment and responsible, informed
citizenship.”
#LOEX2012
“Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against
ignorance; establish and improve the law for
educating the common people. Let our countrymen
know that the people alone can protect us against
these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for
this purpose is not more than the thousandth part
of what will be paid to kings, priests, & nobles who
will rise up among us if we leave the people in
ignorance.”
--Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to George Wythe 1786
Thomas Jefferson, Rembrant Peale, ca. 1800
#LOEX2012
“Over the past decade, we have seen a
crisis of authenticity emerge. We
now live in a world where anyone can
publish an opinion or perspective,
whether true or not, and have that
opinion amplified within the
information marketplace. […] Our
Nation’s educators and institutions of
learning must be aware of—and adjust
to—these new realities.”
 Barack Obama, National Information
Literacy Awareness Month, October 2009
Barack Obama, Hampton University Commencement, May
9, 2010. Source: whitehouse YouTube channel
“Public education is a
scheme dreamed up by
the captains of industry to
incubate servility and
ultimately sabotage
anything like a real
democracy”
-- Erik Reece, “The
Schools We Need,” Orion
September/October 2011
#LOEX2012
Since World War II,
education has
“increasingly been
decoupled from the life
and practice of
democracy.”
--Benjamin Barber, A
Passion For Democracy
“Despite their reputation of being
avid computer users who are fluent
with new technologies, few students
[use] a growing number of Web 2.0
applications for collaborating on
course research assignments.”
Head and Eisenberg (2010), Project
Information Literacy
Colleges and universities, for
all the benefits they bring,
accomplish far less for their
students than they should.”
Our great universities have “lost
sigh of the essential purpose of
undergraduate education”
Harry Lewis, Excellence Without
a Soul
Derek Bok, quoted in
Academically Adrift: Limited
Learning on College Campuses
(Arum & Roksa 2011)
The organizational structure and
operating principles that have
formed the foundation of higher
education for more than two hundred
years no longer function effectively.”
--Mark Taylor, Crisis on Campus
#LOEX2012
“Online, kids have to make choices among
seemingly infinite possibilities. There’s a
mismatch between our national standards of
testing and the way students are tested
every time they sit by themselves in front of
a computer screen.”
--Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How
the Brain Science of Attention Will
Transform the Way We Live, Work, and
Learn
#LOEX2012






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 surround the
use of information and access and use information ethically and
legally
Phrases from ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards
for Higher Education
#LOEX2012
A Fresh Rhizome of Cimicifuga Racemosa
John Uri Lloyd and Curtis G. Lloyd, The Drugs and Medicines of North America, ca. 1884-87
#LOEX2012
Literally…
“Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything
other, and must be.”
“A rhizome may be broken, shattered at any given spot,
but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new
lines”
A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it
will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.”
Theoretically…
“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between
semiotic chains, organizations of power, and
circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social
struggles.”
 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia
#LOEX2012
Social Media
destabilizes existing
information hierarchies
and allows students to
make real changes in
the world.
Social media create “framing
mechanisms for how people understand
politics” and allow students to “actually
create a culture in which questions of
dialogue, dissent, critical engagement,
[and] global responsibility can come into
play.”
Henry Giroux, interview with Al
Jazeera (October 8, 2011)
#LOEX2012
Social Media encourages
students to integrate diverse
kinds of evidence into their
writing, especially evidence
that is publically important.
“[E]very year, I become more and more
convinced that having first-year students
use peer-reviewed literature in their
research is a terrible idea that takes the
focus away from what is important for
them to learn.”
Meredith Farkas, Information Wants to be
Free (blog)
#LOEX2012
Social media presents an
alternative to sources of
information (i.e., scholarly
communication contained
on proprietary databases)
that are probably not
financially sustainable.
“Many large journal publishers
have made the scholarly
communication environment
fiscally unsustainable and
academically restrictive. [...]
major periodical subscriptions,
especially to electronic journals
published by historically key
providers, cannot be sustained:
continuing these subscriptions on
their current footing is financially
untenable.”
Harvard University memorandum
to Faculty Advisory Council, April
17, 2012
#LOEX2012
Social media allows students to
present themselves publically and
become engaged with discussions
that take place in the public
sphere.
#LOEX2012
Assignment: Curate a Twitter List
Basic Elements



Curate a list over a semester
Establish the organizing principle of the list
Be prepared to talk about the logic of the list
Basic Learning Outcomes
 Encourages students to organize information into
meaningful categories and reign in the challenge of attention
 Students evaluate the quality and source of information
 The class is able to crowdsource knowledge and present
information to others
 We begin to understand that the process of information
seeking is always ongoing and lasts even after the class ends
#LOEX2012
“This is the most extreme and long-term hope
Detroit offers us: the hope that we can reclaim
what we paved over and poisoned, that nature will
not punish us, that it will welcome us home—not
with the landscape that was here when we arrived,
perhaps, but with land that is alive, lush, and
varied all the same.”
- Rebecca Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the
Post-American Landscape.”
James D. Griffioen, The Disappearing City ,“Feral Houses”
#LOEX2012
#LOEX2012
Protests for Mary Catherine Ferguson School
“...a school with a 90% graduation rate
and a 50% college acceptance rate for
its pregnant students sounds like a good
thing to me. Students are taught to grow
their own food, build, and they even have
farm animals which they have learned to
take care of. Instead of being praised for
their actions, the school is being shut down
entirely (it’s pretty sketchy if you read the
whole article).
- Lauren Tinchey, class blog
Task-based Information Seeking
Professor assigns project and requires defined amount of sources.
Student locates requires sources
and integrates them into project.
Student turns in project, gets a
grade, and moves on with life.
#LOEX2012
Fluid Information Discovery Facilitated by Social Media
Process of discovery
begins by reading
curated sources. Twitter
assignment supports
this goal.
Student starts curation of Twitter
feeds without a specific goal in
mind, other than cultivating a
useful network of information.
#LOEX2012
Student writes and makes
connections enabled by a Twitter
account. Writing is motivated by
the desire to essay and participate
in public process of democracy.
Student reads and learns about
social problems in Detroit
through class discussion.
#LOEX2012
Selected References
Barber, B. (1998). A Passion for Democracy: American Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Bivens-Tatum, W. (2012). Libraries and the Enlightenment. Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press.
Dabrinski E., Kumbier, A. & Accardi, M. (Eds.). (2010). Critical library instruction: theories and
methods. Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press.
Davidson, C. (2011). Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We
Live, Work, and Learn. New York: Viking.
“Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education” (n.d.) Association of College and
Research Libraries. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency
Jefferson, T. (n.d.). “A Crusade Against Ignorance”: To George Wythe, Paris, August 13, 1786. Electronic
Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Retrieved February 28, 2012, from
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccernew2?id=JefLett.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/en
glish/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=47&division=div1
Kopp, B. M. & Olson-Kopp, K. (2010) “Depositories of knowledge: library instruction and the
development of critical consciousness.” In Dabrinski, E., Kumbier, A., & Accardi, M. (Eds.), Critical
library instruction: theories and methods. Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press.
#LOEX2012
Kvenild, C., & Calkins, K., Eds. (2011). Embedded librarians: Moving beyond one-shot instruction.
Chicago:Association of College and Research Libraries.
National Information Literacy Awareness Month, 2009 by the President of the United States of
America: A Proclamation. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/2009literacy_prc_rel.pdf
Pawley, C. (2003). Information literacy: a contradictory coupling. Library Quarterly, 73(4), 422-452.
Shapiro, J. & Hughes, S. (1996). Information literacy as a liberal art. Educom Review, 31. Retrieved
fromhttp://net.educause.edu/apps/er/review/reviewArticles/31231.html
Solnit, R. (2007). Detroit arcadia: exploring the post-American landscape. Harper’s Magazine. July.
65-73.
Tinchy, L. (2011, June 8). Michigan farming high school shutting down. ENG 230 Introduction to
Literature.Retrieved November 4, 2011, from http://thepastoral.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/michiganfarming-high-school-shutting-down
Zimmerman, J. (2011, June 8). Amazing urban farm school for teen moms will be shut down. Grist.
RetrievedNovember 4, 2011, from http://www.grist.org/list/2011-06-08-amazing-urban-farm-schoolfor-teen-moms-will-be-shut-down
#LOEX2012
More Information
You can download a copy of this presentation and a draft of
the essay, with the Twitter assignment attached.
http://tiny.cc/crusadeloex
http://tiny.cc/twitterassign
An extended version of this essay is slated to be included in
the forthcoming collection, Information Literacy and Social
Justice: Radical Professional Praxis, edited by Shana
Higgins and Lua Gregory (Library Juice Press).
Contact Information
Andrew Battista, Ph.D.
Information Literacy & Reference Librarian
University of Montevallo
E mail: abattista@montevallo.edu
Twitter: @rawdeal85
Hash tag: #curationculture
#LOEX2012
Questions
What are some ways that we’ve had success collaborating with
teaching faculty to integrate social media tools into the narrative
arcs of courses?
I think the advantages of social media are evident, but what are
some of the challenges of bringing social media tools into
information literacy instruction?
How can we can use social media tools to facilitate the discovery of
traditional sources of information?
Is the issue of publicness something to be concerned about when
we ask students to participate on social media networks?
Can social media tools work for “one shot” instruction contexts, or
does the involvement of the librarian have to be much more
substantial than that?