In this Issue

When I worked at a college library’s reference desk, there was nothing more crushing than hearing a student who was doing research for a well-formed, intriguing question say something like this: “Since I can’t find a source that says what I want to say, I’ll have to change my topic.” It’s not that these students were unable to find good information related to their subject. They simply thought it was against the rules to have ideas of their own.

I was thinking of those students when I wrote my essay for the Provocation Series, “Principled Uncertainty.”

Why do we continue to send the message that school is not the proper place to propose original ideas, to make connections that haven’t already been made by someone else, or to have an insight that’s new? These aren’t aptitudes students lack. They are just discouraged in school-based assignments, where authority is located in scholarly sources, not in themselves. It’s why the PIL finding that most graduates think they didn’t learn to ask questions of their own in college rings so true and is so troubling.

Though I’ve long been bothered by the faulty messages we send students (including the notion that research is something you do to “prove” a preconceived opinion; my second-most spirit-crushing reference desk encounter was being asked for help finding sources to cite after a paper was written), my frustration with the assumptions embedded in the way we teach writing and information literacy came to the forefront when I was pondering how we think about gaps in our knowledge when uncertainty is inevitable. During our current public health crisis we all want solid information, and we’re upset when it isn’t available, even though we feel as if we’re drowning in a daily flood of news and advice. That anxiety can be used as a wedge to divide us. Yet, the most interesting places for exploration are those spaces where we don’t already know all the answers.

How does this moment of profound uncertainty connect with what we do in the college classroom, especially in those courses where information literacy is in the forefront? The fact is, none of us, including students, need much help finding information these days. It finds us, relentlessly. It’s not even that we need lessons on how to discern good information from bad. Sure, that’s important, but good information can turn out to be wrong after all, and bad information may be purposefully designed to sow distrust and solidify allegiances. Under the circumstances, calling our lessons for finding and evaluating peer-reviewed sources “information literacy” seems mendacious. What we’re actually teaching is a set of survival skills for students asked to perform a kind of writing that has limited value beyond college.

Why is it so hard to get the academic community to ask what it is we want students to learn from the research papers we assign so routinely? What are we doing to link curiosity with integrity, to link writing for school to composing meaning in the world? This is especially frustrating given the decades of work writing studies scholars and librarians have dedicated to solving this problem. We know better.

Will we do better? I can’t be certain, but that’s no reason to stop trying.

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