Looking In By Looking Out: The DNA of Composition in the Information Age

Introduction

With recent technological advancements in the creation, publication and distribution of information, the list of skills required to be academically successful has expanded to include information literacy. Over the past few years, professional governing bodies responsible for establishing program guidelines have been adopting these types of skills as part and parcel of core instructional content in general education and discipline specific curricula. By examining the instructional paradigm emerging from the confluence of subject content and information literacy standards, a developmental framework for English composition curricula can be constructed.

Although information literacy skills are readily applicable to any discipline or subject area, students often experience difficulty in adapting these skills from one discipline or subject area to another. Consequently, it is self-evident information literacy instruction must be “vertically and horizontally” structured to intersect with program and course content as suggested by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) guidelines for best practices (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2003). One means of addressing and negotiating this instructional challenge is to correlate information literacy standards. Before attempting to do so, however, key differences in the various components of instruction, specifically the distinction between curriculum guidelines and student learning outcomes, must be acknowledged.

Whereas curriculum guidelines represent proscriptive or recommended instructional goals and objectives, student learning outcomes identify specific knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes as measurable end products of instruction and are conversely prescriptive. Failing to make this distinction can result in disconnecting the link often shared between proscriptive and prescriptive assessment measures, yet this disconnect does not have to be an end result when correlating standards. It can and did in our situation segue way into the development of opportunities for various stakeholders to collaborate on instructional and assessment strategies for information literacy. Despite the apparent advantages of collaborations such as our librarian-writing program administrator partnership, the question of whether triangulation or correlation of standards represents an evolutionary hallmark in instructional practices or is only one of many strategies for exploring and evaluating instructional and assessment strategies has yet to be fully answered.

Collaborative efforts though focusing on the acquisition of research and critical thinking skills do serve the dual purpose of providing a foundation for developing general education curricula such as that found in first-year composition courses and a forum for lively discussion. As implied above, collaborative efforts often promote pedagogical exploration and in our case have resulted in identifying alternative strategies for the delivery of information literacy instruction and the assessment of that instruction. To ensure a measure of success in our collaboration, it was and remains essential to acknowledge the importance to establish a commitment to develop and implement shared goals, actively engage in acquiring knowledge of discipline specific jargon and technical terms, engender a respect for fellow collaborators and their expertise and provide opportunities for all collaborators to contribute (Lindstrom & Shonrock, 2006). The significance of these ground rules or measures came into sharp focus when a collaborative effort to reconcile standards—the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (proscriptive in nature) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (prescriptive in nature)—was attempted.

Identifying a single factor that set into motion the chain of events leading to our collaborative effort in redesigning the composition course is difficult, but if pressed that factor would be students’ inability to adequately identify, evaluate, synthesize and communicate source information. The attendant frustrations and disappointments experienced by faculty when students are unable to engage in a level of research and critical thinking commensurate with college level coursework has provided an impetus to redesign information literacy instruction. To that end, what follows is a documentation of the collaborative process for redesigning a first-year composition course to address information literacy in the digital age. Readers are invited to become familiar with and follow the parallel and intersecting points of orientation for the chief collaborators participating in the course redesign. Although the collaboration included five faculty members—a librarian, writing program administrator, instructional designer, and two Library Media Education faculty—this text examines information literacy instruction only from the perspectives of a university librarian and writing program administrator. From both our perspectives, students in first-year composition courses typically lack the critical thinking and information analysis skills needed to be competent researchers and, more importantly, effective writers.

This concern is not a localized one, as the dissatisfaction and alarm that many composition instructors and librarians have with first-year students' abilities to locate and analyze sources of information not only is common in their personal experiences but also is evident in the literature, especially the literature of Library and Information Science. For example, two recent essays published in journals familiar to librarians cite the concern and call for increased collaboration between composition instructors and librarians. Sult and Mills (2006), librarians at the University of Arizona, describe their collaboration with composition instructors as a “partnership developed in response to the desire of both units to actively work together to better support novice researchers” (p. 371), and their essay details the development of this partnership, especially from the perspectives of participating librarians. Reyes (2006), also a librarian at the University of Arizona, refers to her and her fellow librarians’ ongoing collaboration with composition faculty; however, she focuses her essay on the argument that “changes [in higher education] have created an environment in which librarians can partner with faculty to create content to support students’ development of information literacy skills” (p. 302). Many of the changes Reyes cites should be all too familiar to compositionists, including funding cuts, technology initiatives, new accessibilities to and conversions of information to digital forms and emphases on transformative pedagogies.

The literature in Composition Studies also has begun to recognize this mounting information literacy need. A nationwide study of first-year student writing recently conducted by Andrea A. and Karen J. Lunsford (2006) analyzed more than 1,800 essays written by first-year composition students for patterns, including but not limited to patterns of error and teacher response. In comparing the patterns of error with the last study of this size conducted by Robert J. Connors and Andrea A. Lunsford (1988), Lunsford and Lunsford note three new patterns of error including "problems with sources, quotations and attributions," with "incomplete or missing documentation" as the third most common error in student writing today (2006). This recent study validates other recent claims in the literature of Composition Studies (Austin, 2000; Tolar Burton and Chadwick, 2000) that students are struggling with the processes of conducting research and using and documenting sources of information, especially now in the digital age.

Therefore, this collaboration embarks on determining ways to assist students with these processes. Before suggesting alternative pedagogies or classroom strategies, however, it is critical to formulate an understanding of the standards for information literacy and the learning outcomes for composition as they have been established by national organizations. Only then can an approach for soundly integrating information literacy into the composition curriculum be posited. Until now, unfortunately, only articulations of the problems that first-year students face with identifying, analyzing and using information seem to garner the attention in the literature of Composition Studies. Certainly, effective solutions will vary by institutional and other contexts to some degree, yet these solutions need to be informed by the convergence of national standards and outcomes. Until such time, the error patterns in source use that Lunsford and Lunsford identify will only continue to amplify.

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