Mapping Power and Privilege in Scholarly Conversations

When students are assigned annotated bibliographies and literature reviews, they are required to mimic traditional forms of scholarly writing. These assignments represent and reinforce the gatekeeping mechanisms maintained by academic discourse: undergraduate curricula that acknowledge only Standard English and argumentative formats of writing, the gauntlet of credentialing required to reach faculty status and participate in the discourse, and the peer-reviewed, pay-walled model that still governs publication. As a result, the act of producing an annotated bibliography or literature review positions students as intruders at the margins of the academy—and while students might have negative feelings about this position, they are rarely prompted to discuss or critique their experiences in a classroom setting. When an instruction librarian uses a one-shot solely to demonstrate the skills students need to construct a literature review, they are implicitly supporting and perpetuating this exclusionary model.†