“Principled Uncertainty: Why Learning to Ask Good Questions Matters More than Finding Answers”
Discussion questions for reading groups

PIL Provocation Essay #6: “Principled Uncertainty: Why Learning to Ask Good Questions Matters More than Finding Answers,” February 16, 2022 (5,066 words)
Author: Barbara Fister, PIL Scholar in Residence, PIL Provocation Series
Read the author’s reflections on what inspired this essay, February 16, 2022

Questions prepared by the PIL Provocation Series Team: Alaina Bull, Steven Geofrey, Barbara Fister, Alison Head, and Margy MacMillan, Project Information Literacy (PIL) Team, February 16, 2022.

About “Principled Uncertainty: Why Learning to Ask Good Questions Matters More than Finding Answers”

In this essay, Barbara Fister makes a case for helping students deal with uncertainty by developing curiosity as an everyday life habit. Drawing on the infodemic surrounding Covid-19, she shows how news organizations, public officials, popular search platforms, and even science have failed to deliver the clear-cut final answers we seek. Fister demonstrates how a state of “not knowing” has been weaponized against us, especially in an increasingly divided society. In order to prepare today’s students for dealing with information in their everyday lives, she contends students must be able to ask and seek answers to open-ended questions of their own, rather than being taught to gather ready-made evidence for crafting win/lose arguments in their academic assignments.

Purpose and intended use of this resource

“Principled Uncertainty” exposes the limitations of research assignments that constrain curiosity and reward a binary approach to assembling evidence. In a world where search technologies compete to provide the single, simple, and quickest answer, we need to work on asking better, bigger, and more difficult questions with our students and ourselves. What classroom activities could provide students with experience in framing questions that open avenues for exploration? What do students already know, and how can we give them permission to bring themselves into the process of making meaning as a social act? How can we help students overcome the assumptions about research, arguments, and their roles within information networks that they may have absorbed through schooling that inhibits their creativity and curiosity? How can we address students’ anxieties and insecurities as we connect this scaffolding for inquiry not just for college, but in the world?

This essay makes an argument grounded in research while posing questions for the future. 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 as librarians and educators? What fresh ideas can we advance to inspire librarians, educators, researchers, students, journalists, and policy-makers?

These OA prompts are designed for an audience of librarians and educators 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. The questions posed here are meant as a starting point to use and draw from in developing discussion questions that work for your context.

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

Discussion questions

1. How do you practice curiosity in your own academic and everyday life?
   1. What questions and contexts entice you into research?
   2. What shuts down or hinders your curiosity?
2. As educators or instruction librarians, how do we reward students’ curiosity?
   1. When do we welcome it, or even ask for it?
   2. When do we constrain it?
   3. When have you seen students’ curiosity sparked – what kinds of topics, activities, and contexts encourage exploration and curiosity (“finding out about”) vs. finding a “right” answer?
3. In her essay, how does Barbara Fister apply the concept “principled uncertainty” to information literacy instruction and helping students “stumble toward understanding?”
   1. How can students be taught to think about “knowledge as a social act”?
   2. What types of learning exercises would be useful for this learning outcome?
4. How would you say the majority of the research assignments on your campus are structured? Do they tend to encourage students to find ready-made answers or encourage open-ended inquiry?
   1. According to Fister, what’s the cost to intellectual curiosity with this approach?
   2. What’s the key difference between asking students to “find out” rather than “find sources”?
5. This essay focuses primarily on teaching and learning in higher education. The author criticizes first year college instruction for teaching an artificial sort of “research” which focuses on quoting sources. What parallels might be found in K-12 settings?
   1. Where does creativity fit in K-12 media and information literacy instruction?
   2. If K-12 teachers were free to teach media and information literacy without feeling the need to prepare students for these kinds of college-prep assignments, what would it look like?
   3. What would true K-12 information literacy look like? How is that similar or different to information literacy in higher education?
6. What do ethical research practices look like in your everyday approach to information tasks?
   1. When is it more important to maintain an approach of open curiosity?
   2. What makes it challenging to maintain an approach of open curiosity?
   3. What strategies do you use to counter these challenges?
7. What are the ethical research practices students use in their everyday information tasks?
   1. When are they pursuing knowledge for the advancement of understanding?
   2. When do they ask open-ended questions?
   3. When do they seek out a diversity of approaches and voices?
   4. How can assignments support these approaches to research?
8. How do you teach students about ethical research practices beyond the narrow instruction about plagiarism?
   1. If you teach disciplinary research methods and practices, how do you draw connections to the ethical handling of information in other situations?
   2. How have your students responded?
   3. How does it impact students’ understanding of what research is when discussions of ethical research practice focus only on plagiarism?
9. Fister points to changes in the Google interface that might work against open exploration by presenting short, preselected answers to user queries. Think about the tools you search with and teach:
   1. How do their interfaces support or constrain exploration?
   2. Do they have tools that you could use (thinking of mind maps, ‘related sites’) to foster curiosity?
   3. If they constrain exploration, are there ways you counter this through instruction?
   4. More generally, what role do you think design plays in the responsibility that technological systems hold for encouraging deeper modes of inquiry, rather than transactional exchanges of search terms for knowledge?
10. Fister discusses how uncertainty has been weaponized to drive people to the false certainties of conspiracy theories, to foster distrust in authorities and cloak misinformation campaigns in the guise of humor. How can we alert learners to this without further increasing their cynicism about all information?
11. Fister concludes her essay by providing some fairly straightforward suggestions for first steps to combating instruction around finding simple answers. Given your own teaching environment and style, what are things you can integrate into your own lessons to embrace uncertainty?

Sponsored by the Ohio State University Libraries*