Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Heidi Yarger, Health Sciences Librarian at Baylor University, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2024-2025 year here at ACRLog.
In the spring of 2021, I was lucky enough to be one of four M.A. students accepted into Indiana University’s Folklore & Ethnomusicology Department. During my first week of classes, as I introduced myself to my new colleagues the department, I explained that my research interests surrounded community archiving initiatives and community scholars’ programs. These interests, which I saw as expected entry points in the overlap of library science and folklore, were met, to my surprise, with skepticism and raised eyebrows by my professors and more experienced peers. Be careful how you use the word “community,” I was warned.
But…why? Over my first year in the program, my professors taught me that the word community is often used to express an idealized, homogenous image of a group of people, while obscuring complex power dynamics and conflict within those communities. Moreover, “community” is such a powerful symbol that empirical judgement is extremely difficult. I left these conversations unsettled, challenged, and called to examine the concepts that I had uncritically associated with positive change for most of my twenties.
So, why am I writing about this experience now? Because the same call to examination has been itching at my consciousness since starting my first professional academic librarian position a few months ago. More specifically, it’s been bothering me ever since I first engaged with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (referred to here on as the Framework).
Before you discount me or roll your eyes due to my inexperienced status, I want to make the statement that I believe the Framework is a useful, meaningful, and thoughtful guide for patron engagement in higher ed, especially for librarians that spend a significant amount of time in the classroom, like me. However, I’d like to set that statement aside momentarily and instead spend some time unpacking the concept of a literacy framework and what might be missing. Overall, I want to think about what power dynamics might be obscured if we do not engage in reflexive thought practice about the Framework, and what opportunities might arise if we do.
On a base-level, literacy is a key component of the modernizing project that has been occurring in Western academia since the Enlightenment era. The call for literacy is a call to lift the masses out of their religious traditions, superstitions and all manners of “backwards thinking” and towards a bed of knowledge produced and verified by scientific rationalism. However, this process of culling the wheat from the chaff, separating the scientifically verified knowledge base out from the so-called superstitious nonsense, did not pan out so smoothly.
As it turns out, modernism and tradition are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the two run alongside one another, twisting and melding together through our own personal experiences in unique yet interconnected ways. The percentage of adults aged 25 and older with a Bachelor’s degree in the United States has risen over 7 percentage points in the last decade, yet the percentage of people in the United States who believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world is estimated at 81%. As a society we are both getting more educated and (it seems) getting more spiritual.
While the Framework touches on concepts that intentionally challenge power dynamics like the Information has Value frame and the Authority is Constructed and Contextual frame, the main qualm I feel arise is that it is based on a simplistic view of what information can give us. Either information is factual, rational, and true, or it is misinformed, disinformed, or fake. Surely, it can’t be so simple. I wonder what it would be like to reimagine the “Information has Value” frame as “Information has a story to tell?”
In a few weeks, I will be teaching a seminar on what we can glean from listening to people’s ghost stories and taking them seriously. We will be reading ghost stories recorded from people local to our town of Waco, Texas, from the 1970s up to the present day. Rather than considering whether these stories are true or false, we will closely read these personal accounts to consider what we might learn about values, identity, and power when we challenge ourselves to look at these resources with compassionate analysis.
While developing the skills to evaluate the veracity of an information source is an essential skill that we support as librarians, what might we learn if we challenge ourselves and our students to continue analyzing a resource beyond the “fact-checking” stage? As a health sciences librarian, I’m interested in what might be learned about social values, identity, and power when we closely analyze an anti-vaccination website, or when we ask our students to consider how someone uses communicative tools from both scientific and spiritual traditions when a medical experience evades categorization.
In a cultural moment when polarization seems to be at a crisis level, what might we be able to impart to students by engaging beyond the Framework? Yes, verify whether something you read online is true or not. Yes, think critically about authority, relevancy, purpose and timeliness. But once you have done so—keep thinking. Instead of dismissing a source as “quackery” or “fake news” and moving on, we can consider questions that arise regarding the origins of the information. What complex stories of modernism and tradition might unravel through this inquiry?
This complication of literacy towards a compassion-centered approach may not always be possible, realistic, or intellectually satisfying, but I believe if it can help foster connection in a disconnected information-scape, it is worth considering.