‘Philosopher librarians’ v. ‘Practical librarians’: anti-intellectualism? pragmatism? other?
Most of the time when I introduce myself to people I’m meeting for the first time and they inevitably ask me what work I do, I respond that I’m a librarian and they make some kind of crack about:
Working in a such a nice, quiet environment
Libraries are going away, aren’t they? / Everybody just reads online, don’t they? / Your jobs are on their way out, yeah? / You should probably just go throw yourself off a cliff because nobody even goes to libraries anymore, right?
This is a mild exaggeration of actual exchanges.
But one time [and this is where I perform the bait-and-switch of this post, since I won’t be talking about any of the above -- that was just an entertaining opening to grab attention, like what happens in a Simpsons episode] when I introduced myself to an academic (some kind of economist, I think), he very sensibly and interestedly asked, “So if I go to one of your professional conferences, what are some of the main issues that are being discussed in your field?” It was such a great question that I’ve committed it to memory so I can ask others when I know nothing about what they do [if their profession has conferences].
Well, to answer that question a bit, after working in public libraries for two years I transferred to academic libraries, where the environment and work is different in so many ways. This transition took place in the middle of 2014, when the tides were starting to turn for academic / instruction librarians. This is what they were talking about at conferences:
The Association of College & Research Libraries’ [ACRL] Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education
This document was a bit of a phoenix arising from the ashes of ACRL’s previous guiding document for the instruction aspect of our academic librarian profession, 2000′s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education -- what ACRL did was form a task force / committee / what-have-you to review the Standards and update them (consider the technological changes we had between 2000–2014 and how those impacted college students). But instead of updating the Standards, the task force just started writing new guidelines and slowly burning the old ones until they were eventually put to bed in June 2016.
As with anything anywhere that’s been around 10+ years you can probably imagine that many folks really enjoyed the old Standards and were hesitant about changing them. But there were others who embraced change! [You can imagine what happens next.]
The biggest difference between the two sets of guidelines for me -- and recall that I didn’t even really get to give the Standards a fair shake: I came into the profession assuming the Framework would be the main thing going forward -- is that the Standards were a little checklist of outcomes that everybody could feel pretty good about achieving and the Framework was a big, squishy thing that sort of threw this kind of existential doubt onto the prevailing model of education in America. Both documents attempt to address the same topics, just in a difference of educational philosophy / approach / worldview.
The Standards seems to suggest a worldview where we can deliver a set of prescribed outcomes (even the word “Standards” sounds fairly rigid and militaristic, right?) for students when we’re trying to teach them information literacy. It sort of assumes that they come in not knowing anything about the subject -- they’re just blank slates -- and we can show them everything they need to know and tick all the boxes along the way. The language that stands out to me is “The information literate student...,” as if this is some level of achievement: there are information illiterate students and then they do some stuff and then there are information literate students. It’s a transformation, an achievable level of being, a beneficial progression. This progression, and this achievement is highly measurable and it feels like it’s something we can give every student if we just do what the Standards say. And if our students are not information literate when they graduate and move on in their lives, then it’s our faults for simply not doing what the Standards told us to do. It’s like having a list of things to pack, packing those things, and checking them off the list. If you don’t bring your swimsuit then you obviously can’t swim.
The Framework seems to suggest a worldview where information literacy is a sticky business: some students will know some things, others will know others. There’s misinformation, there’s real information misconstrued. The process is not straightforward in terms of “you came to us information illiterate, we did our thing, and now you are information literate!” It’s pretty messy, recursive, hard to pin down. Like dipping into a swimming pool, getting wet, learning how to swim a few different ways, getting out of the pool, drying off, kind of remembering vaguely how to swim, but not really.
Even though they address the same topics, the Framework and Standards take fundamentally different approaches. This has created a bit of an “either this way or that way” [binarism] mentality and argument amongst academic librarians, many of whom want to hang onto the Standards since they were so invested in them and they seemed to work so well for them. [And even though the Standards have been put out to pasture -- or, in the official (?) language, sunsetted -- there is actually not much stopping people from still using them... until maybe accreditation boards move onto officially using the Framework...] These are arguments we can’t really easily dismiss. The rollout of the Framework took a while, and when it had been reviewed a few times and progressed through various drafts it was first “filed” long before it was finally accepted by ACRL. “Filed” meaning something fairly specific and bureaucratic, but essentially giving it approval without formally adopting it as the way of tackling information literacy going forward. So it felt like the Framework was a thing edging its way into our teaching terrain, hanging out in the shadows. Then, after a while, the Standards were summarily dropped and the Framework was officially adopted. There were no lessons, assessments, or other supplementary materials supporting the Framework that came with the decision.
So then there’s a backlash, of course, immediately and vehemently on email listservs, blogs, other places. Among these: “The Framework is Elitist” by Christine Bombaro and a response to it, “Is the Framework Elitist? Is ACRL?” by Meredith Farkas. Bombaro’s opinions generally represent those of the librarians who want to hang onto the Standards -- the Framework is squishy, it doesn’t provide measurable outcomes, and there has been very little support from ACRL in trying to get the Framework to be a practical tool in our academic librarian arsenal. Which is fairly true. The whole Framework approach being a step away from the “education as commodity/product” approach that the Standards basically represented -- the Framework kind of pulls the rug out from under us and expects us to gain our footing.
In my opinion, the Standards do represent the prevailing educational model in America: students are empty vessels, we fill them with knowledge, we work through a course based on a structured textbook with a structured set of learning outcomes that we can check off along the way. It’s the kind of math teaching that trains students to memorize formulas and apply them to certain problems but doesn’t explain the why of applying the formulas. I remember calculus in high school: every question that asked me to measure the flow of a liquid or something is where I just used that one formula. I couldn’t really tell you where that formula came from (other than “from my textbook”), why I would want to use that formula over any other approach to solving the problem, or really anything about the relationships that any knowns or unknowns in that formula had to each other (e.g., why are we multiplying/dividing/adding/subtracting rate of flow and whatever instead of doing some other operation?).
I was a very good student in the standard educational model we have -- but that doesn’t automatically mean I learned a lot or I know a lot. I can memorize stuff pretty well, but then I can dump stuff pretty well, too. I figured out how to read instructors and determine what they would focus on for the tests, and I was generally able to play that game pretty well.
The Framework is a whole ‘nother ball game, I think. It sort of removes that security of “here are the 25 things we do to make someone information literate.” It kind of interrogates the notion of information literacy as a whole. It’s a scary thing because it’s different from how most of us learned and progressed through elementary, secondary, and higher education. It’s not perfect -- I still can’t really delineate “Knowledge Practices” or “Dispositions” for you, the whole thing only pays lip service / makes passing reference to technology and digital literacy (despite the widespread consumption of information online these days), the number and scope of frames doesn’t seem wholly balanced, and yeah there are no instantly recognizable ways of measuring this as a tool. But I think it’s a step in a neat direction.
What Bombaro thought was that it was a step in an elitist direction. I understand her motivation for saying this -- the Framework seems to privilege academic librarians at huge institutions who have the time/education luxury of engaging deeply with theoretical frameworks. But her tone and examples smack of anti-intellectualism. She labels pro-Frameworkers as “philosopher librarians” and pro-Standardsers as “practical librarians,” and although she qualifies these labels by saying that “any librarian can fall into either category or both depending on what day or time of year it is, or what discussion or task is at hand” she goes on to define each label as being a distinct set of librarians. She then presents quotes from listserv discussions and directly mocks one for what she considers highfalutin language. She writes:
Social Constructivism? Postmodernism? Pragmatism? Enduring Questions in upper case letters? I started feeling, frankly, stupid. Did I really need to get myself advanced training in theories related to sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism in order to adopt the Framework successfully?
The answer to her last question is no, she doesn’t need advanced training in other fields to apply the Framework. I don’t really have any concern that she doesn’t know these terms and doesn’t feel like she can entirely understand or engage with them (immediately after the above quoted passage she writes, “When I found myself opening some online encyclopedias to try to figure out what these messages meant -- and promptly closing them, though not with as much satisfaction as would have come with slamming a paper tome -- was when my opposition to the Framework cemented and when I started thinking of it as elitist.”) My main concern is that none of these terms -- social constructivism, postmodernism -- are actual language in the Framework. These are terms coming out of a discussion of the formation of the Framework because Bombaro was calling into question the legitimacy of the Framework and the supporters of it were justifying it via theories, research, and yes, higher-level language.
Sorry, but you can’t attempt to call out the Framework for its approach and ask why it was created so differently from the Standards and then shut down when someone attempts to explain it to you. I’ll be the first to say that I think we academic librarians are sometimes puffing ourselves up in the guise of “professionalism” in order to get others to respect what work we do, but this is not an example of that. The Framework is simply a new approach to educating students on information literacy. Bombaro’s other quizzical attack on the Framework comes in the form of her showing it to an academic economist, who in turn called it “stupid” but wouldn’t (or couldn’t) explain to her why it was stupid: “When I asked him to elaborate, all he offered was that the library community’s use of the Threshold Concept theory did not conform to its original intent.” (Her point here being, “See!? One person outside of our field who knows about threshold concepts thinks it’s stupid too!”)
I think it’s entirely legitimate to petition ACRL for smoother transitions in the future, to propose developing practical applications for theoretically based documents before they’re adopted, to work to cater to the needs of all academic librarians. But there will be updates and changes in our field on a regular basis -- some that we have no control over -- and we should seek some kind of community with our peers and not foster divisiveness over these kinds of issues. I have no doubt that in the coming months a bunch of creative librarians will come up with practical applications for the Framework -- since many already have. And really, I’d rather have a fluid, guiding document [like the constitution?] that is open to being interpreted and adjusted rather than a rigid set of standards that we’ll have to see ourselves going through the process of updating every time our field changes.
