Instruction Committee Article Club: February

The CARLI Instruction Committee invites you to join the spring edition of our article club!

We’re excited to continue building the CARLI community while engaging more deeply with the academic literature that impacts our teaching practice.

The Instruction Committee has selected the following article for discussion. If you’re interested in participating, please read the article in advance. Instruction Committee members will moderate the discussion, and there will be prepared questions to guide our conversation. We hope you will also come with your own perspectives and queries to offer.

We’re excited to share that author Stefanie Bluemle will be on hand to participate in our discussion and answer questions about her work.

Please register using the link above.
We will hold the discussion in Zoom; the connection URL will be sent to registrants on 2/25.

When: Wednesday, February 26 at 1pm (central)
Article Title: Post-Facts: Information Literacy and Authority after the 2016 Election
Author: Stefanie R. Bluemle, Augustana College
*Winner of ACRL Instruction Publication of the Year
Abstract: “This article addresses the challenge that post-truth politics poses to teaching authority in information literacy. First, it isolates an element of the post-truth phenomenon, an element it calls post-facts, to elucidate why teaching source evaluation is not, by itself, an antidote to fake news or other evidence of Americans’ media illiteracy. Second, it addresses the implications of post-facts politics for the concept of authority as defined by the “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education,” drawing on the work of Patrick Wilson and Max Weber to illustrate which elements of authority librarians must rethink due to recent events”
Link: https://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/libscifaculty/10

Questions to start discussion:

1. How often do you get to teach source evaluation? What do you hope your students “get” out of your instruction when you teach this?
2. When teaching or assessing source evaluation, have you seen your students “fake it” as Bluemle describes on p. 273 (or p. 15)? Do you see yourself as striving to make them “competent citizens of [the] regime” (p. 276 or p. 20)?
3. How do you see yourself personally relating to the authority that is ascribed to the academy? Do you see yourself as an authority or a granter of authority?
4. The article highlights the ways in which notions of authority are inherently political, but also personal. What strategies can academic librarians employ to interrogate and explicate personal, disciplinary, and institutional notions of authority?
5. Are there ways to balance the democratizing impulse, that allows everyone to have their say, and a belief in the value of expertise when discussing authority within an information literacy session? How can we help build, what Farrow and Moe (2019) refer to as “new forms of trust” (para. 6)?