Librarians and writing studies faculty have long acknowledged the need to devise more robust information literacy curriculum. Teaching “information literacy” has often meant guiding students though using technologies in order to gain access to particular kinds of information and cite sources in ways that align with convention (e.g. How does one find a peer reviewed article? A government report? How does one cite an interview in APA format?).
But such traditional approaches to teaching information literacy – those that have focused tightly around accessing and citing particular academic genres of information – have historically excluded broader, critical questions about information itself: considering what information is in the first place, how it circulates, how we critically evaluate it, and how we can position different kinds of information in our own research to have various kinds of social, cultural, and political effects. Moreover, our current approaches to information literacy often exclude questions of power, privilege, and access – how particular kinds of information are more likely to be represented and disseminated than others.
A more critical approach to information literacy insists on seeing our students not just as passive consumers of information, but as active agents who already circulate and produce information as members of the culture – most often by using digital platforms and tools within online environments. Notably, it is what has long been relegated to the margins of our higher ed information literacy curricula that our culture most needs. When we lament the poor information literacy skills of Americans, it is typically a critical understanding of information (and the technologies that produce and circulate such information) that we find most lacking. And currently, our American social landscape seems more riddled than ever with misinformation and conspiracy theories – theories often born, nurtured, and set loose to roam free in online environments.
Beyond addressing our missed opportunity to take a more critical, holistic approach to information literacy – one that is so very needed, this chapter details how the convergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic alongside the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement created new priorities in developing better information literacy instruction that both occurred online and fostered space for students to critically analyze digital contexts. In short, we need information literacy curriculum that acknowledges the fundamental truth that technologist Marshall McLuhan declared decades ago: “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964).
McLuhan and whole bodies of scholarship across fields responding to his work point out that information is inextricable from the environments where it lives. To teach information literacy in robust, dynamic ways today – and in socially responsible and just ways – our students must understand how information is inherently linked to the networked technologies that produce and distribute it, and they must understand the inherent biases braided into the binary used to fashion those technologies.
The chapter details how our first-year writing program at a small, highly diverse, private university in the midwest responded to the pandemic and the social unrest of our time by engaging in a wholesale revision of our information literacy curriculum.
Our recent revisions set out to accomplish two goals: 1) to devise information literacy curriculum best suited for a digital context (that is, instruction that occurs online and instruction that asks students to critically examine online environments; and 2) to craft online information literacy curriculum for a highly diverse student population – curriculum that we could consider “anti-racist” in its own right. We wanted to build a pedagogical framework that would acknowledge the power, influence, and lure of digitally but simultaneously would trace its complex biases.
In sharing our curriculum that aims to recoup central critical questions – a more holistically imagined, digital curriculum designed to bolster anti-racist pedagogy – this chapter will answer the following questions: What does digital, anti-racist and culturally responsive information literacy curriculum look like in this moment? And: What kinds of methodologies for teaching information literacy might we follow to help make space for the continual evolution required when teaching through an anti-racist, culturally responsive lens?
Undoubtedly, teaching during the pandemic presented higher ed classrooms across the country with obstacle upon obstacle. And yet, the convergence of the pandemic with increased attention to social justice and inequality through the BLM movement demanded that we turn our attention toward the complexities of information and the politics and policies that surround it.
I argue that the digital, anti-racist approach to teaching information literacy that we devised in a relatively short timeframe was not simply yielded in response to our times, but because of our times. And yet, it’s true that good information literacy curriculum is always evolving. Our work to holistically update and revise our program’s approach to information will situate us to emerge on the other side of the pandemic as savvier guides for our students. As we all learn to more adeptly wade through the vastness of available information, we know that teaching information literacy today is truly riveting work. Social change is tightly bound not merely to how we consume or even understand information, but to our ability to be active participants in shaping and reshaping social, cultural, and political dialogues. In sum, our ability to posit “facts” and “truths” in the online environments that we inhabit is directly correlated with our ability to shape and reshape our collective reality, our collective future. It is this set of possibilities, the lessons that circulate in this orbit, that we are exploring with our students and to share with readers here.