“The iSchool Equation”
Discussion questions for reading groups

PIL Provocation Essay #3: “The iSchool Equation,” June 9, 2021 (3,648 words)
Author: Kirsten Hostetler, Staff Writer, PIL Provocation Series
Read the author's reflections on what inspired this essay, June 9, 2021

Questions prepared by the PIL Provocation Series Team: Steven Geofrey, Alaina Bull, Barbara Fister, Alison Head, Merinda Kaye Hensley, and Margy MacMillan, Project Information Literacy (PIL) Team, June 14, 2021.

About the “iSchool Equation” essay

Project Information Literacy’s Provocation Series essay by Kirsten Hostetler focuses on a startling disconnect: As the effects of mis- and disinformation take a toll on social cohesion, librarians are often positioned as experts who can guide their communities toward a better understanding of our confusing information landscape, and yet, the graduate programs that prepare librarians for the field continue to neglect the teaching role most graduates will be expected to take on.

Why do iSchools continue to ignore the fundamental importance of teaching information literacy, especially now? How has that affected the graduate student experience and the practice of librarianship? This essay explores those questions and offers ideas for reform.

Purpose and intended use of this resource

Project Information Literacy’s Provocation Series essay by Kirsten Hostetler offers a wide variety of lessons to educators and librarians about reassessing the value of iSchool education, both the curriculum offered and the professional development that graduates will need to pursue long after they have graduated.

This essay (as do other essays in our occasional series) makes an argument grounded in research while posing questions for the future: What haven’t we considered about educating and preparing new librarians for the field as the information landscape grows more complex? What new directions in information literacy and higher education should we be exploring? What fundamental aspects of student experiences with navigating information spaces have we overlooked? What fresh ideas can we advance to inspire librarians, educators, researchers, students, journalists, and policy-makers?

These OA prompts are designed to provoke discussion around the themes in the essay, suggest ways to advance teaching and learning in your institutional context, and open up new avenues for inquiry and experimentation.

Questions or comments? Drop us a line at: projectinfolit@pilresearch.org.in

Discussion questions

1. The essay argues that most iSchools aren’t providing students with the teaching skills they’ll need to succeed in their professional careers. Reflecting on your own experience working in libraries, what would you say you really learned in iSchool?
   1. What value did the iSchool curriculum have for your professional career today?
   2. What do you wish you’d learned in your curriculum but did not?
2. The essay alludes to many ways graduates supplement their education to become more effective teachers.
   1. What was your first teaching experience like?
   2. How have you developed your teaching knowledge and skills? What experiences were the most significant to developing your teacher identity?
   3. Could those experiences be effectively incorporated in grad school/iSchool curricula? If so, how?
3. In her essay, Dr. Hostetler claims that “librarians are being called upon to compensate for the failures of many of the technologies we embraced.” Likewise, in her PIL Provocation essay, Barbara Fister argues that many instruction librarians are finding there is much more that they need to teach beyond using library databases, including the architectures, infrastructures, and fundamental belief systems of connected networks:
   1. Should iSchools “grow their curriculum” to meet the demand for librarians’ expertise that’s coming from faculty, administrators, and students who are looking to them for solutions to the “misinformation wars” raging throughout the country?
   2. Should iSchool programs be longer than the two years that they often are?
4. Studies have shown that much of the research on information literacy is conducted by practicing librarians who have the advantage of direct experience with instruction programs in libraries but who may have limited time and resources available.
   1. If the research agendas of full-time iSchool faculty neglect information literacy, what impact might that have on the field’s literature?
   2. Is there a similar practitioner/academic divide in other disciplines?
   3. If you could set an IL research agenda for iSchool faculty, what would you include?
5. The essay points to the many ways that librarians are often ambivalent about their identity as teachers, even as teaching has become an increasingly important aspect of library work.
   1. How have you seen that ambivalence affect your teaching experiences?
   2. How important is the instructional role librarians play to you and to your library organization?
   3. Do you feel faculty in other disciplines understand the role librarians can play in student learning?
6. In the essay, Dr. Hostetler writes, “faculty often struggle to understand librarians’ teaching domain, creating a disparity between what librarians want to teach, and what faculty want them to teach.”
   1. From your own experience, where does this disparity in expectations come from, and how does it manifest practically in your relationship with faculty?
   2. What might be some strategies to reduce this disparity, in terms of communicating clear expectations about librarians’ domain expertise in the context of discipline-specific classrooms, or in terms of curricular or structural changes at your institution?
7. In the essay, Dr. Hostetler notes that concerns about mis/disinformation have led to increasing demand for information literacy instruction.
   1. Has concern about “fake news” or about the role of opaque algorithmic systems in sharing and amplifying disinformation led to people in your community turning to librarians for guidance?
   2. Has it influenced your instruction programs?
   3. Did you receive an intellectual foundation in your graduate education that prepared you to teach about information the way we experience it today?
   4. What can be done to “upskill” both practicing librarians and the communities they serve to address the critical issues of our current information environment?
8. The essay provides four recommendations for addressing the gaps in supporting librarians’ development as teachers: expanding the curriculum, providing opportunities for authentic practice, improving advising, and incorporating SoTL (scholarship of teaching and learning) to provide tools and common language that may facilitate discussions with faculty in other disciplines.
   1. How might each of these have affected your iSchool and early teaching experience?
   2. What other recommendations would you make?
9. Opening with the question, “What is the value of a graduate degree?,” the essay responds to this question by saying, “It’s a calculation: time plus tuition minus the chance of getting the right job after graduation.”
   1. To what extent do you think this calculation captures the risk of a graduate degree, from your own experiences?
   2. Are there other factors that you might include in this calculation, and have those factors changed as you have moved further away from graduation and into the profession?
10. In your experience, and factoring what the essay argues, is the graduate degree from an iSchool worth the trade off?

Thank you to Sheila Webber for suggesting these additional questions:


11. Dr. Hostetler’s essay addresses gaps in the iSchool curriculum in the United States.
    1. If you are an iSchool student or graduate outside the U.S., how does your experience compare with the one described in this essay? Do you recognize the same shortcomings?
    2. If you teach in an iSchool outside the U.S., what are the differences and similarities between your context and the one described in the essay?

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