Effusive Praise and Information Literacy

During class last week, we spent a considerable amount of time building on instructional issues that were raised the previous week, especially the differences between formative assessment and summative assessment as well as the type of teaching you apply to novices versus experts. In our conversations, I really appreciated the reminder that U-M students are not the “typical” library patrons we will come across in our professional lives. This means our instructional strategies have to be different for someone who does not have the resources or privileges to think critically about the information they come across. I also was fascinated with our conversations around giving praise to reinforce behavior as opposed to acknowledging effort. Being told “you’re so smart!” for accomplishing something, whether that praise is sincere or empty, fails to account for the future moments when you fail. Being told “I noticed how hard you tried and I appreciate that” applies to successes and failures in the learning process and fosters encouragement. Over time, being excessively praised can hinder opportunities where you learn something new, because not being good at something discourages you to continue. I think it is important as emerging professionals seeking to gain instructional skills to know these practices that reinforce behavior and to adjust them for the purposes of sustained learning.

For our readings this week, we dove into the concept of information literacy and its relation to the mission of librarians. Some of the broad themes that I perceived included this striving away from passivity in learning. A lot of the words used in these frameworks of information literacy like “empowering,” “collaborative,” “participatory,” etc., encompassed this idea that a person cannot simply be a consumer of information, but they must also be a critic, a creator, and a team-player in the way we engage with information in today’s world. Two of the six anchoring concepts of information literacy, authority is constructed and contextual and information has value, also reflect this idea of being an active agent in verifying how this information came to be. Another theme that I noticed was mentioned by Barack Obama in his information literacy proclamation, when he said that libraries can “help separate truth from fiction and signal from noise.” [1] The characterization of librarians and libraries as the great deciders in society that can determine what is good information and what is bad information is both reverential and slightly dangerous. In the Mackey and Jacobson reading, they quote Christine Pawley as saying that the term “information literacy” is inherently “contradictory” because it creates “a tension between conflicting ideals of, on the one hand, a promethean vision of citizen empowerment and democracy, and, on the other, a desire to control “quality” of information.”[2] It sets up the dynamic of the librarian as the paternal “expert” that can navigate any platform and always knows the truth in any matter, which in turn, disempowers the citizens who are learning to make the right decisions with the information they come across. My lasting question from these readings is: in an era of “fake news”, do librarians still have the authority over interpreting reality as we claim we do?

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[1] Obama, Barack. 2009. "National Information Literacy Awarness Month: A Proclamation."

[2] Mackey and Jacobson. 2011. "Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy."