Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 1

Say ―Information Literacy, Critical Thinking, Critical Literacy, and

Library and/or Information Anxiety,‖ and You‘ve Said a Mouthful!

Matthew C. Micka

LIS204: Introduction to Library and Information Science

April 23, 2009

St. John‘s University

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 2

Say ―Information Literacy, Critical Thinking, Critical Literacy, and

Library and/or Information Anxiety,‖ and You‘ve Said a Mouthful!

Some variety of acute anxiety had all but overwhelmed the writer of this paper, upon

undertaking the task of writing a research paper on information literacy. As I began my search by

placing information literacy AND critical thinking in the database search (desiring to focus on

the other than technological/search aspects of information literacy), I was soon having rather

uncharitable thoughts, something along the lines of, ―It‘s all very well that PhDs at universities

wish for their students to be as information literate as they are, they‘re paid to be information

literate, their jobs depend upon research (publish or perish), and what‘s more, their daily lives

consist of little more than teaching two or three classes a week, keeping ‗hours‘ for student

consultations, and pursuing research and writing.‖ As an all-of-a-sudden graduate student out of

the university routine for thirty years, I at least felt like I felt hardly any different than any

―information anxious‖ college freshman likely feels, confronted with an academic library, or

merely the library website.

Then, my searching unearthed ―library anxiety.‖ In an article subtitled ―One Librarian's

Rant,‖ Atlas (2005) feigns being flabbergasted that students can possibly find librarians, of all

people, to be intimidating or frightening. But library anxiety isn‘t funny, to those plagued by it.

While ―information illiteracy‖ might seem to be the antithesis of information literacy, library

anxiety, which I hadn‘t realized existed, as a phenomenon for study, could be conceptualized as

information literacy‘s opposite as well. Gross and Latham (2007) find interesting correlations

between information literacy skill levels, perceived skill levels, and library anxiety, while

Onwuegbuzie and Jiao (2004) inversely correlate information search performance and library

anxiety.

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 3

Drawing on the work of Facione and colleagues, Kwon (2008) points out that a positive

affective state, necessary for manifesting open-mindedness, is essential to critical thinking, and

that library anxiety adversely affects this affective state, thus adversely affecting information

seeking. Kwon, Onwugebuzie and Alexander (2007), meanwhile, once again referencing

Facione, point out that critical thinkers are possessed of affective dispositions such as willingness

and inclination to think critically, as well as consistent inquisitiveness, and that these dispositions

are adversely affected, if not totally nullified, by library anxiety.

While Thompson (2007) posits that information poverty might be perceived as

information literacy‘s opposite, I wondered whether I was perhaps coining a phrase, and, in the

process, naming a phenomenon for study, when it occurred to me that ―information anxiety‖

might better describe the opposite of information literacy, since, at this point in time, the physical

library has only so much to do with students suffering from library anxiety. In 2009, after all, one

doesn‘t need to approach a librarian, or a library computer, or books in the ―stacks,‖ to feel

overwhelmed by information, in this the digital age.

It was amusing, then, to see that Dale (2001) briefly believed that he had coined the term

―information anxiety syndrome,‖ only to realize that Richard Wurman had published a book in

1989, over a decade earlier, entitled Information Anxiety, and, what is more, had just published

an updated edition, Information Anxiety2 (and the numeral 2 belongs right where it is, flush up

against Anxiety). In his review of that book, Conhaim (2001) points out that Wurman is not only

the founder of the TED Convention, but that he considers himself to be an ―information

architect.‖ Wurman roughly conceptualizes information anxiety as existing in the gap between

what one knows, and, what one thinks one should know. I quite like the expression, but it never

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 4

caught on, at least in library literature, at least not according to the Wilson Library and

Information Science Literature Database.

The struggle to bring information literacy to the world‘s billions is waged on many

fronts, and, in many countries. Canada, progressive in so many areas, promotes information

literacy for all. Julien and Hoffman (2008), for example, detail the manner in which information

literacy is being addressed by that nation‘s public library system. In a public library context, the

praxis of conveying information literacy skills is often one on one. In the U.S., Galvin (2005)

writes of the many subtle opportunities that a reference librarian might have in conveying

information literacy methodologies to her customers, while, in Great Britain, Hauxwell (2008)

demonstrates that even the circulation staff can dynamically promote information literacy from

behind the service desk, if they feel so impelled. If information literacy is construed as both

―learning how to learn,‖ and, a method promoting ―lifelong learning,‖ so too is the promotion of

information literacy a lifelong calling, and not at all something that is accomplished in a brief

period of time.

Information literacy is both studied and promoted in the workplace as well, as evidenced

by Crawford and Irving (2009), who demonstrate that, in many workplaces, the concept of

information literacy often incorporates very nonacademic exchanges of information, such as

conversations between co-workers. As for those workplaces that themselves contain libraries,

Rader (2002) points out that in special libraries, intense information literacy orientation for staff

is often a large part of the special librarian‘s job.

In primary and secondary education, school media specialists, or teacher-librarians,

propagate information literacy, as best as they can. McPherson (2005), in writing about

information literacy in pre-university education, posits still another critical literacy, that‘s

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 5

incidentally called ―critical literacy,‖ which amounts to information literacy that is implicitly

skeptical of any given source of information, most especially on the internet. School media

centers tend to be chronically underfunded, in public schools, especially, but it‘s obvious that

many media center specialists set their sights very high indeed when it comes to the skills that

they seek to convey to their young constituencies.

Given the perennial problem of the low level of information literacy with which freshmen

usually arrive at universities, Islam and Murno (2006) studied information literacy pedagogy in

secondary school media centers, and determined that underfunding, plus a high level of

ignorance about information literacy on the part of secondary school instructors, was more to

―blame‖ for the situation than negligence on the part of school media specialists, who, like many

or most librarians, tend to be information literacy zealots. Applin and Roberson (2002) detail an

academic initiative initiated to educate aspiring school principals about the importance of

information literacy for students bound for universities, while Asselin and Lee (2002) examine a

program designed to teach information literacy skills to those studying to become secondary

school teachers.

Skipping over undergraduate university education, for the moment, which is where the

remainder of this paper will be concentrated, there is then the curious state of information

literacy instruction within the nation‘s post-graduate library and information science programs.

Both Julien (2005), and Sproles, Johnson and Farison (2008) are in agreement that, while

roughly half of North America‘s library and information science programs now devote courses,

or at least substantial units, to the teaching of the teaching of (the repetition is no mistake)

information literacy, this means that roughly half of them still do not. This is no optimal

situation, as academic librarians, especially, are bound to be devoting a very substantial amount

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 6

of their time to instructing students in information literacy, and to constantly be striving towards

cajoling professors from myriad disciplines into information literacy collaborations, by coming

off like the teachers that they are quite capable of being, in addition to being mere librarians.

Whether you pity or envy the poor incoming university freshman, it is likely that it is she

who will be the primary target of the most dynamic existing information literacy efforts, at this

moment in history. To the degree that universities, ideally, strive to instill critical thinking skills

in their graduates, as a foundation for lifelong learning, most universities have come to recognize

the critical importance of information literacy, and what‘s more, of information literacy‘s

inextricable linkage to critical thinking itself.

While Grafstein (2007) persuasively argues that there‘s nothing new or ―cutting edge‖

about information literacy (it used to be called bibliographic instruction, and was promoted in

the 1880s.), and asserts that information literacy isn‘t primarily about the technology, or digital

information per se, Owusu-Ansah (2003) resoundingly posits that the time for arguing about

what information literacy is or isn‘t has long passed—there‘s overwhelming general agreement

on its basic parameters, ergo, enough is enough.

Both Albitz (2007) and Allen (2008) agree that what librarians tend to call information

literacy, academics have traditionally termed critical thinking, because the location and retrieval

of information is just the very first stage of applying information literacy praxis, which involves

evaluation and distillation and synthesizing and effectively utilizing information. Weiler (2004),

citing psychologist William Perry, points out that critical thinking is a high level intellectual

stage developmentally, a progression from the tendency that young people, indeed most people,

have, which is to conceive of information dualistically, as being right or wrong, one way or the

other, either ―with them or against them,‖ for or against their ―position,‖ when in reality, the

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 7

phenomena and problems of life tend to be quite maddeningly multi-dimensional, and not at all

binary. Critical thinking always takes pains to take into account life‘s incredible complexities.

In an academic context especially, but in ordinary life too, I would argue that information

literacy/critical thinking, as a continuum, essentially amounts to the assimilation of the

intellectual proficiencies and protocols of scholarship, and of academia in general. A less

intellectually rigorous sounding assertion would be that information literacy/critical thinking is

required for a student, indeed, for any person, to be able to begin to participate in the ―scholarly

conversation,‖ as posited by Deitering and Jameson (2008), first by ―listening in‖ on the

―conversation,‖ by focused but broad reading, and then hopefully, tentatively and modestly, at

least initially, ―joining in‖ on that conversation, by contributing knowledge, i.e. by writing

papers/articles themselves.

Indeed, it is in freshman writing programs, especially, that collaboration between faculty

and librarians has flourished, and, as rhetorician Norgaard (2003), demonstrates, the teaching of

writing and the teaching of information literacy complement one another to an extraordinary

degree. And in fact, as per Galvin (2006), information literacy has been incorporated into

university-wide Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives. And yet professors in all

academic disciplines, when they assign research papers, are expecting their students to be, or, to

somehow become, information literate, whether or not the term information literacy enters their

minds. And academic library literature is full of accounts concerning at once the criticality, yet

as well the difficulty, of establishing library/faculty collaborations for propagating information

literacy. While Alfino, Pajer, Pierce, and O‘Brien (2008), in the United States, and Reed, Kinder,

and Farnum (2007), in information literacy progressive Canada, attest to the positive outcomes

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 8

of such collaborations, Scales, Matthews, and Johnson (2005) acknowledge that the

multitudinous day to day details of any such collaboration remain problematic.

Library literature is bursting with accounts of the lengths to which academic librarians

seem willing to go in order to establish such library/faculty collaborations. A relatively early

paper on the subject, by Beaty, Glover and Westwood (2000), employs the vocabulary of a

military campaign, right in its very title, ―Infiltration and Entrenchment: Capturing and Securing

Information Literacy Territory in Academe,‖ which gives some indication of the implicit

challenges. And, it‘s a given, in most of these articles, that it‘s an uphill battle, if not a losing

battle, striving to establish such collaborations, as evidenced in the primary title of an article by

Moore (2003), ―If You Build It, Will They Come?‖ Interestingly, a not dissimilar intimation of

futility is expressed in the primary title of yet another paper, by Blakesley Lindsay, Cummings,

Johnson and Scales (2006), ―If You Build It, Will They Learn?,‖ which concerns itself with

online tutorials, another method of information literacy instruction addressed no further here.

Another commonly used term in library/faculty collaboration literature is the word

―embedded,‖ which itself suggests military expeditions, as when reporters were ―embedded‖

with army units during the invasion of Iraq. The term invites librarian punning, as with the title

of an article by McLaurin Smith and Presser (2005), ―Embed with the Faculty: Legal

Information Skills Online,‖ but is further demonstration of the lengths to which librarians are

willing to go in order to advance the cause of information literacy. Indeed, Hall (2008) describes

an ―embedded‖ situation, in which the academic librarian literally enrolls in a professor‘s class,

and, as a student—albeit one possessed of two masters‘ degrees, one in library/information

science, another in an academic subject, which is the case for all academic librarians, as pointed

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 9

out, justifiably if immodestly, by Owusu-Ansah (2004) —assists her classmates in the pursuit of

acquiring information literacy.

Academic librarians seem to demonstrate a willingness to learn, and to adapt, and I

daresay, even to sacrifice, in order to become better librarians, which generally translates into

being of greater service to their constituents, their university‘s students. Certainly, since the onset

of this the third millennium at least, librarians have proven themselves willing to ―immerse‖

themselves in the subject of information literacy, which has routinely included spending part of

their hard-earned summer vacations attending weeklong ―immersions‖ in information literacy

praxis. A parade of chronological article titles through the years humorously demonstrates this:

―Immersion 2000: Making Learning Happen‖ (McAndrew, 2000), ―Those Immersed Resurface‖

(Toth, 2003), ―Being Immersed‖ (Kaplowitx, 2004), and, best of all, ―Your Brain on Information

Literacy: ACRL Immersion ‘05‖ (Scamman, Kinder and Coulter, 2005). A title can be worth an

entire article‘s worth of words.

As per Elmborg (2006), academic librarians are increasingly called upon to serve as

instructors, particularly by their university‘s administrations, which have enshrined in their

institution‘s goals the pursuit of information literacy, and yet have been severely constrained in

reality from teaching that which they are so willing to teach. A not uncommon mode of

instruction goes by the rather distasteful sounding term ―the one-shot.‖ As implied by the name,

and described by Montelongo and Brar (2008), in one-shot scenarios an academic librarian is

―granted,‖ by an academic course instructor, literally ―one shot,‖ often of one hour‘s length (!),

to convey to the instructor‘s students the barest mechanics of information searching, never mind

even the barest rudiments of approximate information literacy. Instead of getting the chance to

experience true ―immersion,‖ these students are scarcely given a chance to ―get wet,‖ even,

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 10

which could likely reinforce their sense of information incompetence, their information anxiety,

and, worst of all for librarians, their negative impressions of libraries and librarians!

Frustrated by a balance of power situation that results in the ludicrous one-shot,

McGuinness (2007) makes a powerful case for abandoning the model of collaborations with

―academic champions,‖ in pursuit of information literacy initiatives, and switching to a strategy

that targets university higher-ups, in other words, those best situated to effect institution-wide

change. By ―academic champions,‖ the author doesn‘t mean medal-laden ―champion‖

academics, but those very academics who actively champion and embrace collaborations with

academic librarians, since even these actually collegial colleagues, an academic librarian‘s

greatest allies, are in no position to propagate information literacy outside of their specific

classes, which, like the professors, themselves, come and go, ebb and flow, according to shifting

departmental priorities and changes in leadership.

At the other end of the spectrum is the ideal of required or elective information literacy

courses given for credit, as described by Burkhardt (2007), and numerically advocated by Badke

(2008), who gives ten reasons why ―credit bearing‖ courses merit consideration. Owusu-Ansah

(2004) envisions a long-term goal of what would seemingly amount to a whole new academic

department within universities, the mission of which would be to teach information literacy, to

students within every discipline. Which isn‘t fundamentally far-fetched, perhaps, utopian though

it might seem, because, implicit in the strategies for teaching information literacy/critical

thinking, is that most fundamental pedagogy, teaching learners how to learn, as argued by Berger

(2008), and termed ―a life relevancy,‖ even for students of hospitality management, who

mightn‘t otherwise be considered to be the most scholarly of student constituencies.

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 11

(One method of Berger‘s pedagogy involves ―tricking‖ students, who are first uncritically

impressed by a company‘s flashy website, but then learn about what the website leaves out—the

company‘s filing for bankruptcy. Similarly, Mathson and Lorenzen (2008) resort to such Socratic

subterfuge, in an article entitled ―We Won‘t Be Fooled Again: Teaching Critical Thinking via

Evaluation of Hoax and Historical Revisionist Websites in a Library Credit Course,‖ a title that

also reveals the authors‘ likely baby-boomer roots, by so referencing The Who. (Discernible in

much information literacy literature is the once-upon-a-time hippy counter-culture‘s dismay over

the seemingly less communitarian, and less ―cultivated ,‖ proclivities of Generations X and Y.)

It‘s most remarkable, too, that, even with only ―one shot‖ at getting across information

literacy to a group of students, the methodology of ―problem-based learning,‖ as per Ferrer

Kenney (2008), might just succeed, where more traditional, lecture-centered methods fail. It is in

the very nature of learning information literacy that students work with a specific ―problem,‖ for

which they seek information, to arrive at some ―solution,‖ addressing their problem. Ferrer

Kenney describes a learning paradigm where students work in teams of two or three, in pursuit

of acquiring information, and, in complimentary fashion, Wang (2007) demonstrates the proven

pedagogical value of collaborative learning schemes, where students work together to locate,

evaluate, and utilize information in order to complete an assignment. In this progressive

educational schema, instructors serve more as ―coaches‖ than as ―authorities,‖ and librarians who

promote information literacy have long advocated just such a ―guiding,‖ as opposed to an

authoritative, role for themselves as facilitators of information retrieval and utilization.

In an article pointedly entitled, ―Beyond Preaching to the Choir: Information Literacy,

Faculty Outreach, and Disciplinary Journals,‖ Stevens (2006) makes the case that librarians, by

publishing information literacy manifestos overwhelmingly within library and information

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 12

science journals exclusively, aren‘t very likely to reach faculty, who only read journals within

their specific disciplines. In a not dissimilar vein, McGuinness (2006) maintains that, while there

exists voluminous literature on the frustrating uncooperativeness of faculty, when it comes to

librarian-initiated collaborative efforts to instill information literacy, there hasn‘t been so very

much literature on what faculty actually thinks about information literacy initiatives, if someone

bothered to ask. McGuinness, who is based in Dublin, therefore set about asking such faculty in

Ireland.

McGuinness‘ admirable article brings this paper to its Eureka! moment, which is the

moment when its author, likely suffering under the delusion that he‘s had an original thought,

one not glimpsed in the literature—although it probably exists there, somewhere, if he searched

hard enough—that might ―entitle‖ him to actually join, and not merely listen in on, ―the

scholarly conversation.‖ (This isn‘t unlike the ―moment,‖ at this paper‘s onset, where the author,

exactly like still another author, momentarily believed that he‘d thought up the term ―information

anxiety.‖) In the article, McGuinness reports several responses commonly given by the faculty

she interviewed, which duly ―got me thinking.‖

First of all, they universally esteem the goals of information literacy initiatives—and how

could they not, given the fact that information literacy is what they require of their students,

when writing papers? Secondly, they tend to attribute the success or failure of a student

becoming information literate to their level of intrinsic motivation, as opposed to any formal

instruction that they may or may not receive. This results in a most unfortunate state of affairs,

anyway it seems to me, whereby faculty highly esteems a small percentage of their students,

their ―pets‖ you might say, and are correspondingly both disappointed by, and ultimately rather

dismissive of, a substantial majority of their students, whom they deem to be lacking in the

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 13

intrinsic motivation necessary for a student to think critically, and to ―get‖ the protocols of

research, and, of scholarship itself. Thirdly, they seem to feel that information literacy/critical

thinking, call it what you will, is picked up over time, essentially by trial and error, almost by

osmosis, which summons to mind the title and implied conclusion of an article by Weetman

(2005), ―Osmosis—Does It Work for the Development of Information Literacy?‖ The answer for

librarians would surely be a resounding no!

Still more critically, the author posits that for most of the academics interviewed, their

beliefs concerning this well nigh miraculous ―picking up‖ of information literacy are based upon

their own experiences as undergraduate and graduate students. If they themselves struggled

blindly towards information competence, learned by failing, or, alternately, discovered that they

simply ―had a knack‖ for dealing with information in an academically proscribed manner, well,

then, their students either would or would not do the same. What was ―good enough for them,‖ in

other words, was good enough for their students. My Eureka! moment consisted almost of a

vision, whereby those who became academics, and who mastered critical thinking, and scholarly

protocols, consisted of those special people, and of only those people, who had either doggedly

pursued mastery well beyond the point where most other people—perhaps ―healthier‖ people,

less ―neurotic‖ people, conceivably—would give up, or on the other hand, those people who, for

whatever reasons, simply ―had a knack‖ for scholarship, such that attaining the highest heights of

academia amounted, practically, to an eccentricity—yielding the scholar as ―character.‖

The world has many problems, and needs all of the smart, and information literate,

critical thinkers it can get. The commitment to critical thinking on the part of academics is a

wonderful thing—were it only so that more people approached issues as committed to examining

the evidence, before reaching any critical decisions, without being influenced by prejudice, or

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 14

what their ancestors believed. To whatever degree information literacy initiatives can lessen the

information anxiety experienced by so many, in and out of universities, to the same degree there

will be more truly well educated people, prepared to spend the rest of their lives continuing to

learn what needs to be learned, and the world needs them. Whatever it takes, the efforts of

information literacy advocates, in the academic and general library communities, are critically

needed, in order for universities to truly do their jobs, in order for all libraries to fulfill their

commitment to the betterment of mankind, by enabling mankind to better help itself.

Is it ironic, is it humorous, that the psychological dispositions that best lend themselves to

critical thinking—a vibrant inquisitiveness for example—lend themselves as well to

serendipitous, ―incidental‖ information acquisition (Heinström, 2006)? I doubt it. Intellectually

curious people are disposed towards learning, and whatever help they can get, in acquiring and

utilizing knowledge, should be at their disposal, so that their numbers might multiply far beyond

the academic departments of universities, or well-funded, but ideologically-driven, ―scholarly‖

think tanks. Information literacy offers such help. My survey of information literacy brought me

into contact, too, with literature concerning information seeking per se, and information

behavior, generally. Two such studies, one by Williamson, Bernath, Wright and Sullivan (2007),

another by Berryman (2008), inquire into how researchers determine when they‘ve acquired

sufficient information to effectively accomplish their ends, which is usually writing papers. A

good rule of thumb, often repeated by several interviewees, was to stop when you started coming

across information that was mostly repeating the knowledge contained in information that you‘d

already acquired. So, before I commence repeating myself, I‘ve determined I‘ll end here.

Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 15

References

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Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 16

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Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 18

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Say ―Information Literacy‖ – 19

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