“Writing Information Literacy” Revisited: From Theory to Practice in the Classroom

Librarians and writing instructors are longtime allies that share the goal of teaching information literacy (IL). The IL concept, however, has been undertheorized in its relationship to writing pedagogy In a series of articles on writing and IL, Norgaard challenges librarians and writing instructors to engage in an "informed conversation between writing and information literacy as disciplines and fields of endeavor." Removing the usual "and," Norgaard defines "writing information literacy" as "the notion that writing theory and pedagogy can and should have a constitutive influence on our conception of information literacy?" (1) He suggests that the IL theory should also have a reciprocal influence on composition pedagogy. Norgaard describes the basic problem with traditional conceptions of writing and IL: If libraries continue to evoke, for writing teachers and their students, images of the quick field trip, the scavenger hunt, the generic, stand-alone tutorial, or the dreary research paper, the fault remains, in large part, rhetoric and composition's failure to adequately theorize the role of libraries and information literacy in its own rhetorical self-understanding and pedagogical practice. (2) Norgaard places the blame squarely on his own discipline, but he also suggests that librarians must learn from theoretical insights from rhetoric and composition. Norgaard describes the paradigm shifts in writing instruction that have opened possibilities for teaching a more situated, process-oriented, and inquiry-driven rhetoric. Librarians have much to learn from these theoretical contributions. We also have much to learn and offer from our own theoretical tradition. In fact, both IL and rhetoric and composition draw from the same intellectual well, building upon more general pedagogical developments. This shared intellectual history can enliven the practice of both disciplines, creating a "rhetoricized" IL and an "informed" rhetoric. If writing instructors have undertheorized IL in relation to writing, this is, in part, because of librarians' failure to articulate the contributions that our theoretical tradition can make to rhetoric and composition and, by extension, learning in general. Furthermore, many of the prevailing "pedagogical enactments" of IL, such as Norgaard's generic stand-alone tutorials, scavenger hunts, and dreary research papers, reinforce traditional notions of IL and writing, derailing efforts to create a richer instructional practice) This article describes several pedagogical enactments of IL that are based on social constructivist and sociocultural learning theory First, it explores the ways in which librarians and writing instructors at Utah State University collaborate to counter a limited reading of IL through creative learning activities. Then it identifies some of the barriers to creating a more situated IL through a brief, exploratory analysis of the ways in which instructional tools shape differing, even contradictory, understandings of writing and IL. These exploratory case studies are meant to be illustrative of the promises and challenges of true "writing IL." INFORMING RHETORIC:THEORIES OF INFORMATION LITERACY Both librarians and writing instructors have explicitly cited the intertwined relationship between IL and writing. Three decades ago, Michael Kleine, a writing instructor, described the "horrors" of the night library, a place where students were "merely copying" and seeing "their purpose as one of lifting and transporting textual substance from one location, the library, to another, their teachers' briefcases." Kleine saw no "searching, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, selecting, rejecting, etc."(4) Nearly fifteen years later, librarian Barbara Fister identified the same problem, citing Kleine's image of the night library as one example. Fister writes that library instruction's focus on information retrieval suggests to students "that research consists of the ordered use of tools to locate pieces of information from which research projects can be assembled. …