Authority, Meaning Making, and Information Literacy

Warning: Very emergent thinking on my part!!!

It was with great interest that I read and reread Thomas Mackey and Trudi E. Jackobson's (2011) Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy and would recommend the text to you. The authors provide a critique of several frameworks for literacy (information literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, visual literacy, cyberliteracy) and suggest that a metaliteracy framework is necessary as these former definitions of literacy/ies are challenged "based on the emergence of new social technologies" (p. 69).

The authors contend that:

Metaliteracy reinforces stronger connections between information literacy and other literacy frameworks. This approach looks at the foundation principles that unite information and technology, rather than focusing on differences based on discrete skills, distant technologies, or media formats (p. 70).

The authors wish to ensure that a broader definition than information skills be employed.

As I read, I wondered: What do we mean when we characterize something as information?  Do we carry with us an understanding that information is stable? Static? Singularly authored? Is information limited to what we explicitly know? In Mackey and Jacobson's critique, they write about the need to think:

beyond information as a commodity, and instead (focus) on the production of knowledge in collaboration with others (p.68).

Screen shot from Minecraft.

Yet when offering examples of metaliteracy, they situate "information" as a bounded entity; that which can be found and retrieved. And certainly there is information that fits that definition--information based on explicit knowledge.  Yet, what happens if instead of thinking of information as a bounded matter, we situate information along a knowledge continuum that stretches from bounded (a thing you could hold in you hand such as a bus schedule) to unbounded (that which cannot be contained nor is complete, such as an emerging idea)?  Perhaps it is the practice of referring to all of those possibilities as information that is so thorny, especially when we may well think of information as that which is bounded.  In some ways the tensions remind of Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory in which efferent and aesthetic ways of reading represent a continuum of responses to text.

I wonder if the tensions the authors describe might also be influenced by how knowledge is (in)formed: explicitly and tacitly.  It is easy to identify explicit knowledge. It is external and codified and schools of the last century (and many would argue this century) have build curricula on explicitly known information. Explicit knowing is something I can hand to you using a single symbol system.  Tacit knowing is inherently different and less likely to be seen at school. Tacit knowing is bodily-known, experiential, and not yet codified. Additionally, tacit knowing, cannot be represented via a single symbol system.  In fact I would suggest that it is through transmediated representations (multiple symbol systems) that tacit knowledge begins to be codified.

Tacit knowledge is about knowing and at the same time not being able to clearly explain how and at times what one knows. Earlier today I was reading Roger Martin's essay, How To Make Companies Think Long-Term and stopped when I read:

Eliminating stock-based compensation would help reduce the incentive for executive leadership to focus on the short term. But there is a residual problem which has long frustrated me. The answer finally popped into my brain (funny how that works).

Martin's characterization of knowing as the answer popping into his brain suggests a possible bridge between tacit and explicit knowing that occurs when that which you have known but could not name begins to be codified. I wonder if codification of tacit knowledge isn't heightened via the connectivity to and collaboration with so many potential others through social media and online communities.

This idea feels important. How? I'm not sure I can name it as of yet.  But here's my first go at it.

Perhaps the emphasis in redefining information literacy as metaliteracy and expanding the definition to include the participatory nature of producing and consuming information is secondary to understanding the emerging importance of tacit knowledge and how such knowledge becomes codified.  I am not suggesting metaliteracy isn't important.  I think the authors do a fine job at exploring the differences and arguing well for the expanded framework. But I think the tensions the authors describe are more a symptom of the need in social institutions to shift from privileging explicit ways of knowing to privileging tacit ways of knowing.

Here's my working thesis: Through participation and collaboration with others via social media and online communities as well as the development of transmediated (multiple symbol systems) representations, learners' feelings, intuitions, and impressions emerge rhizomatically and collectively. These tacit ways of knowing among people disrupt what it has meant to know, to author, and to consume.  It is these disruptions that signal tension, disequilibrium and creation.

Colonizing Classrooms: ASCD

I was angry and disappointed by the time I finished reading Susan Ohanian's recent blog post about ASCD receiving and accepting a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help "districts and states realize the capacity of the new standards to fundamentally change the learning experience of students."  

Ok, let's take a minute to dissect that intention.  Think agency and ask yourself, Where is the teacher's and students' agency in ASCD's intention?  

There is no agency by teachers or the students. 

ASCD is the actual agent.  Everyone else is a receiver (district, states, and students). Teachers are missing. I would surely agree that ASCD and its agents who carry out this task may well learn.  But know this: There is no positive learning without agency, be it by the teacher, administrator, or student. As Maxine Greene (1988) so wisely reminds us "A teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own" (p.14).  It is the educator acting and the student acting that leads to meaningful learning.

Transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1978) allows us to know that the standards are nothing more than marks on a page.  They, like any other marks on a page, have no meaning, until they are acted upon by a reader.  That transaction is where meaning happens and such transactions cannot result in the same meaning being composed by x # of individuals. Meaning, contrary to what ASCD says it is planning, cannot be packaged and sent ahead, like some manifest destiny run amok.  

ASCD says that it is "committed to translating high-quality research about how students learn into practical professional development for teachers".  Hmm. Translating.  Does ASCD believe that translation and meaning making are the same thing?  Meaning is made at points of utterance (Bakhtin, 1984). It is dialogic. “Language,” Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (1981, p. 294). 

It is simply foolish to believe that an utterance will mean the same thing for everyone, and more importantly that marks on a page have a set meaning that remain static. What these core content standards mean is ALWAYS dependent upon the speaker's intentions.  If we eliminate the speaker, or in this case the teacher, and ship the standards ahead, we have nothing left but an empty law that district administrators will be expected to ensure happens through imposed practices and policies. These attempts will only create more division among educators. Consider William Carlos Williams who in The Desert Music told us:

The law?  The law gives up nothing
but a corpse, wrapped in a dirty mantle.
The law is based on murder and confinement,
long delayed...(p.109)

These understandings of meaning are fundamental.  As such, this is not a semantic argument, but rather a philosophical and theoretical one.  If we believe that the marks on the page someone has named as standards are that which will "fundamentally change the learning experience of students"--we have situated learning and learners as epic. An epic is a place where everything has been predetermined. It is a time not of the present where one singer sings of that time and no one including the singer can alter the events of that past.  They are sealed from the present moment where meaning always exists.  Epics cannot be a metaphor for learning, classrooms, or schools.

 Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) suggests that meaning: 

only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue...Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched (p. 7, emphasis in original).

We want schools where administrators, teachers, and students retain their "own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched."  We do not want what ASCD states it will do: "translate the standards into multiple instructional techniques to ensure teacher understanding of the underlying concepts targeted in the common core standards". We know that meaning is made in classrooms between and among learners, that there are no "best practices" that exist outside of the context of teachers, students, school and community--no matter the intentions of ASCD who earns its money selling such promises through membership, books, DVDs, and packaged professional development.  Meaning cannot be sent ahead via the implementation of standards, no mater how one attempts to define that reality. 

Let us not be fooled into dressing up ASCD's attempt to colonize United States classrooms as professional learning. Learning requires agency, not translation. 

 

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The dialogic imagination. (Michael Holquist, Ed., & Caryl Emerson, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

------------------------. 1986. Speech genres & other late essays. (Vern W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Greene, Maxine. 1988. The dialogic imagination. New york: Teachers College Press. 

Rosenblatt, Louise. 1978. The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Williams, William Carlos. 1962. Pictures from Brueghel and other poems. NY: New Directions Books.