Information Literacy and Community College Students - Using New Approaches To Literacy Theory To Produce Equity

Information Literacy and Community College Students: Using New Approaches to Literacy
Theory to Produce Equity

Author(s): David Patterson
Source: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3 (July 2009), pp. 343-361
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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INFORMATION LITERACY AND COMMUNITY COLLEGE
STUDENTS: USING NEW APPROACHES TO
LITERACY THEORY TO PRODUCE EQUITY
David Patterson1
Librarians in community colleges have engaged in information literacy (IL) for

decades, but their theorizing of IL has never taken equity as a starting point. This
article asserts that IL theory radiating from equity requires the animating dynamics
that conceptual advances in literacy theory offer. By examining early moments in
librarianship to understand librarians’ relationship to equity and drawing on Jean-
Luc Nancy’s contrasting notions of globalisation (globalization, resulting in misery)
and mondialisation (world forming, resulting in a just society) as a framework for
reenvisioning IL, I identify new approaches to IL that are particularly well suited
to producing more equitable educational outcomes for community college students.
Synthesizing concepts from researchers who have applied new thinking about lit-
eracy to their conceptualizations about information literacy, I celebrate approaches
to IL in which students, critically engaged in creating meaning, are positioned as
producers of information.
Introduction
How might information literacy (IL) be animated by new approaches to

literacy theory to make concerns about equity its point of origin and the
production of equity its central function? What begins as a broad question
of the theoretical underpinnings of finding, evaluating, and using infor-
mation intensifies when placed at the junction of community college stu-
dents and higher education, since this intersection is harrowing, indeed—
as fraught with obstacles to accessing further higher education as are paths
to accessing information, a more traditional librarian concern, with tech-
nological, political, and economic barriers. Students in community colleges
1. Doctoral student, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley,

and librarian, Cañada College, Redwood City, California; E-mail davidjaypatterson@
berkeley.edu.
[Library Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3, pp. 343–361]

2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0024-2519/2009/7903-0003$10.00
343

344 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY
need libraries in which the theory undergirding information finding, eval-

uating, and using addresses what Jenny Cook-Gumperz has called the cen-
tral “problem of distribution of opportunity” [1, p. 42]. Given the abysmal
rate of community college students transferring to four-year institutions,
a flawed but useful measure of equity [2, 3], nothing less than this radical
endeavor seems worthy of attention.
To be more precise, although the specifics of information literacy (IL)
are of vital importance, without a framework concerned with improving
equity, the specifics do not seem consequential enough to realize any sort
of substantial result. In other words, community college instructional li-
brarians spend a great deal of time analyzing how to teach the use of a
catalog, how to maneuver through a database, or how to find credible Web
sites [4]; these inquiries, while essential for all students, might lead to
more equity for community college students by widening the scope of IL.
For example, the specifics of an information interaction—a young Latina
and a community college librarian using a database to find an article on
César Chávez for a reading class—can be understood most completely by
asking the following: What theoretical inquiries must we undertake to see
what is going on here? And, in what ways does a librarian’s theory of IL
enable or disable this young women’s ability to get information on Chávez
(retrieve it), “get” this information (understand and evaluate it), and get
from (use) her finding and evaluating of it something that will get her
capital (equity)—meaning, meaning-making practice, a well-chosen quote,
a reference to a piece of scholarship with high capital, an elegant research
paper, an A in the class, a ticket to further higher education? In summary,
the questions that urgently need answering concerning the role of com-
munity college libraries in what students do and don’t do, know and don’t
know, and feel and don’t feel about information might yield more fruitful
answers if they issue from a focus on equity and a resistance to inequity.
In this article, I first identify conceptual advances in literacy theory that
have contributed to vitalized theories of IL, theories that might lead to
more equitable educational outcomes for community college students. Fol-
lowing this, the concept of equity, specifically as it applies to community
college students, will be discussed. I then describe Jean-Luc Nancy’s frame-
work of globalisation and mondialisation [5] and apply it to moments in
ancient librarianship history with the hope that librarians who are critically
aware of their vocation’s history will be better positioned to think expan-
sively about IL. In order to better understand how community college
students’ equity might be furthered, I intersperse among these historical
examples some reconceptualizations of IL that have the potential to con-
tribute to the production of equity, particularly for community college
students.

IL IN COMMUNITY COLLEGES 345
Information Literacy, Conceptual Advances in Literacy, and Equity

Information literacy, a topic of immense consequence over the past decade
in academic libraries, has been discussed, defined, and debated by LIS
scholars in over 5,000 articles since the term was coined in 1974 [6]. Why
has IL gained such momentum? As librarians have become more and more
interested in instruction over the past thirty years, their interest in IL has
grown [6–9]. Understood as a product of the confluence of change in
technology, in the ways in which college students interact with information,
in society’s perception of the nature of knowledge, and in the way librarians
view their role in higher education, definitions of IL tend to include three
elements: “resource-based learning, critical thinking, and life-long learn-
ing” [8, p. 423].
Taking into account that one of the main reasons for IL’s rise to prom-
inence is that librarianship has felt a strong need to proclaim its relevance,
it is not surprising that in the literature of librarianship, IL has often run
the risk of being understood as a silver bullet, as a monolithic and generic
set of skills that transforms students [10]. At times it seems to promise too
much—to be the key to lifelong learning, the antidote to humanity’s all
too human record of hoodwinking itself politically and economically, and
the conduit for social justice [11].
Yet many applications of IL seem quite limited. Community college li-
brarians spend vast amounts of their instructional time devoted to the
mechanical aspects of IL, teaching students how, for example, to cite their
sources in correct MLA, APA, or Chicago style. But if information literacy
as it is currently understood is lacking in a number of ways both theoret-
ically and practically, then how might community college librarians refocus
their attention toward addressing issues of equity for their students? How
might community college librarians, who frequently claim interest in pro-
ducing more equitable results for their students, theorize IL more effec-
tively? To better understand how new theoretical perspectives on literacy
might link IL to equity in community college libraries, a precise description
is needed of what these perspectives entail as well as what is meant by
equity.
Brian Street has identified several contested, complex, and interrelated
approaches to literacy that have emerged since the 1980s in response to
an earlier, less fruitful understanding of literacy [12]. This older view was
“a reified autonomous notion” of literacy “which had a big ‘L’ and a little
‘y’” (12, p. 370). Novel perspectives on literacy that have led LIS researchers
to think anew about IL include
• Emphasis on explicit instruction of how specific discourses are
constructed

• Critical literacy, which foregrounds “social change, cultural diversity,

economic equity, and political enfranchisement’’ [13, p. 1]2
• A sociocultural understanding of meaning as socially created
• Student engagement in the research process early in the semester
• New conceptualizations of the nature of reading
• An approach to IL as a practice rather than as a set of skills
• Foregrounding of the role of power in thinking about literacy
• A broadening of IL to encompass insights from workplace information
literacy
What do these approaches have in common? When applied to IL, these
conceptual advances in literacy seek to produce, directly or indirectly and
with varying degrees of explicitness, an understanding of literacy that is
more and more equity centric.
These equity-centric perspectives on literacy have been employed by
researchers of IL in invigorating ways that will be explored throughout
this article. Although all college students profit from IL that is infused
with characteristics of these new ways of conceptualizing literacy, com-
munity college students, who are, on average, least likely to succeed in
higher education [15], especially need IL that is vitalizing and that leads
toward equity. But what is meant by equity? The first step in linking such
a view of IL and equity is to delineate which area of equity, with its vast
theoretical, economic, and political implications, instructional librarians
in community college are positioned to address.
In defining equity specifically in the context of community college stu-
dents, it is important to differentiate between, on the one hand, educa-
tional equity as it is framed in community college research and, on the
other hand, librarianship’s long history of research on information equity,
which has examined such topics as the “information rich and the infor-
mation poor,” “the knowledge gap,” and “the digital divide.”3 This article
will focus on educational equity for community college students, which is
often measured by looking at the extent to which students’ persist in en-
rolling semester after semester, transfer rates of community college stu-
2. For an overview of the impact of critical literacy theory on information literacy, including
discussion of Paolo Freire, see James Elmborg [7]. Heidi Jacobs [14] also offers helpful
suggestions for using Freireian approaches to thinking about theory undergirding infor-
mation literacy.
3. The very long history of research on equity in librarianship has tended to focus on infor-
mation equity, which Leah Lievrouw and Sharon Farb define as “the fair or reasonable
distribution of information among individuals, groups, regions, categories, or other social
units, such that those people have the opportunity to achieve whatever is important or
meaningful to them in their lives” [16, p. 503]. Readers wishing to gain an understanding
of this line of research will find their review very useful [16]. Research done before the
1990s is more thoroughly reviewed by Ronald Doctor [17].

dents to four-year institutions, and degree or program completion rates.

These dependent variables are usually analyzed in terms of such indepen-
dent variables as advising, remediation, social and academic integration,
transfer support, and financial aid [18]. One promising line of research
on educational equity in community colleges has contrasted equity with
the related concepts of diversity and inclusion [19]. In this approach, equity
is gauged by comparing the outcomes of a target group, students in com-
munity colleges desiring a baccalaureate, for example, to an appropriate
reference population, such as all students who obtain a bachelor’s degree
[20]. This framework then shifts the emphasis from individual students as
the unit of analysis and, instead, asks what role the community college
faculty, staff, administrators, and institutional structure play in creating
inequitable outcomes.
This shift in focus is also evident in the research of Jim Cummins, who
offers a theoretical framework stressing educators’ “personal redefinitions”
as one antidote to the repeated failure of educational reform for minority
K–12 students [21], many of whom eventually attend community college.
He asserts that truly equitable educational reform requires “personal re-
definitions of the way classroom teachers interact” with their students and
surrounding communities [21, p. 649]. While insisting that political ap-
proaches to equity are necessary, Cummins insists that “implementation
of change is dependent upon the extent to which educators, both collec-
tively and individually, redefine their roles with respect to minority students
and communities” [21, p. 649]. As minority students are much more likely
to enter higher education through community college than by going di-
rectly to four-year institutions, [22, 18], any attempt to further equitable
outcomes in higher education for them must carefully examine the af-
fordances and obstacles that community college libraries offer in the ed-
ucational pipeline.
But equity in community college libraries is not simply about improving
educational outcomes for students of color. Community college students
as a group are more likely than other students in higher education to be
from all other historically underserved segments of the population—the
first generation in their family to attend college, low-income students,
English language learners, newcomers to the United States, and students
with physical and cognitive disabilities [22, 18]. Michal Kurlaender de-
scribes community colleges as “important vehicles for moderating inequal-
ities in educational attainment because they offer noncompetitive access
to higher education to socially, financially, and academically disadvantaged
students who otherwise would not be able to enroll in college” [15, p. 7].
Discussions of educational equity by community college researchers have
never explored the role of the library. Similarly, a thorough search of LIS
literature on educational equity and community college IL instruction

retrieved no results. The goal of this article is to begin to bridge this gap
by identifying ways in which IL, infused by conceptual advances in literacy,
while important for all students, is crucial for furthering community college
students’ educational opportunities—in other words, for opening up chan-
nels for community college students’ equity.
All librarians profit from considering the transformative aspects of their
work, but community college librarians in particular, who tend to serve
historically underserved students, might consider new ways of thinking
about IL that contribute to more equitable educational outcomes for their
students. Naive assumptions that a reimagined theorizing of IL is somehow
sufficient to produce educational equity for community college students
are less than helpful—approaches to lessening educational inequity that
overlook political and economic factors at macro levels could result in less
equitable outcomes. For example, misplaced hope that equity is achieved
simply by reenvisioning community college students as producers rather
than as consumers of information could potentially hinder students’ equity
by distracting attention from community college libraries’ chronic issues
of understaffing and underfunding. However, while acknowledging that
complex, interrelated, and stubborn social, political, and economic factors,
most of which are beyond the control of librarians, contribute to inequi-
table educational outcomes for community college students, librarians can
exploit their limited but potentially pivotal role in furthering their students’
equity by reconceptualizing IL.
Linking educational equity for community college students to IL theory
requires a study of “power at its extremities, where it becomes capillary”
[23, p. 96]. Where “power . . . becomes capillary” is a fitting description
of a community college library in which the decisions of those holding
economic and political power are transformed into resources and policies
for students whose families have generally been on the short end of the
bibliographic stick for generations. Likewise, here at this capillary level is
where librarians are positioned to transform new theories about literacy
into IL that creates equity. Institutional capillaries are ideal for studying
these transformations of power into policy and theory into equity, but how
are we to understand either of these processes when they both are so
microscopic and diffuse? A useful starting point involves placing IL in
historical context. Christine Pawley encourages such a historical analysis
of IL, asserting that “even an innovative professional practice carries with
it the marks of its inheritance—its genetic imprint—although the impli-
cation of these characteristics may be poorly recognized” [8, p. 425]. Ex-
amining early moments in librarianship at a capillary scale—considering
ancient libraries’ catalogs, for example—may help to explain how students’
education equity is hindered in community college libraries. Such a his-

torically expansive examination at such a minute level requires a powerful

conceptual framework.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Globalisation” and “Mondialisation” and the

Catalog of Nippur
Jean-Luc Nancy, in describing two contrasting directions in which history
might be currently unfolding—globalisation (globalization), which he sees
as the death of the world—and mondialisation (world forming), which in-
volves “the creation of the world” [5, p. 29], offers an enormously gen-
erative theoretical framework within which to consider the tension inher-
ent in IL between the librarian’s aspiration to aid in finding, evaluating,
and using information (mondialisation) and the librarian’s desire to sup-
press this impulse by declaring certain knowledge as off-limits (globalisa-
tion). A radical theorizing of IL requires contextualizing it in this dynamic
tension between library as an aid to accessing information (mondialisation)
and library as a barrier to access (globalisation). Catalogs and indexes, the
same tools for using the library, for gaining access, for facilitating circu-
lation of materials, for the consumption of information, are also the marks
of certification and of authority, literally the list of holdings. Jacques Der-
rida explains this authority through etymology [24]. In tracing archive to
arkheion, a house in which superior magistrates, archons, both guarded and
interpreted official documents, Derrida sees the archive as a place of pa-
triarchal guardianship and “hermeneutic authority” [24, p. 3].
According to Nancy’s framework, globalisation results in a homogenized
and unjust world, where hermeneutic authority is oppressive and total—
a world in which librarians see their role primarily as guarding and vetting
information. Mondialisation, on the other hand, would require librarians
to redefine their primary task as contributing to the creation of an equi-
table world by conceptualizing information as something that is created
and to undertake this personal redefinition with a sense of urgency: “To
create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening each possible
struggle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global
injustice against the background of general equivalence” [5, p. 54]. Just
as Jacques Derrida’s linguistic excavation of the word archive “reopens” our
understanding of hermeneutic authority, so might an attempt to link
Nancy’s framework to archeologists’ physical excavations of ancient li-
braries open possible ways of conceptualizing IL.
Excavation of the earliest known library, near Nippur in southern Mes-
opotamia, unearthed what might be thought of as IL’s founding text: a
rudimentary catalog. Consisting of two tablets, “dating to around 2000
B.C., both inscribed with a list of Sumerian works of literature—various
myths, hymns, laments” [25, p. 4], how does this catalog, etched in clay,

offer us insights into the ways freshman and sophomore college students
interact with information?
The catalog of Nippur offers at least two understandings simultaneously:
first, it is evidence that, at the moment that collections grew too large for
easy access through browsing, a retrieval tool—an aid to access—was in-
vented, even if the tool was a simple list. It is, in the jargon of librarianship,
the first known finding aid, and aids for finding are, indirectly, aids for
using, for creating, for participating in the discourse, ultimately for the
furtherance of democratic processes, for mondialisation. Second, the catalog
signifies hindrance, the library’s authority, priestly authority, and, to the
extent that it is interpreted as objectified, total and unified knowledge, a
tool of globalisation. The catalog is an inventory of the library’s holdings,
thereby a description of the sanctioned knowledge—literally sanctioned,
if one considers that many of the ancient libraries were physically con-
nected to sanctuaries [25]. As both an aid for using and for the production
of knowledge, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as an aid for
keeping, for keeping order (in library terms, bibliographic control) and
for demarcating certified knowledge, the tablets of Nippur indicate li-
brarianship’s central contradictions: sharing and holding; aiding and hin-
dering; furthering research and, by designating certain information as
privileged, obstructing it.
Information literacy has conventionally been theorized to explain cat-
alogs, indexes, tables of contents, and database search boxes, the descen-
dants of the Nippur catalog, as aids for finding and using information, but
how would theory about IL change, and how would community college
students’ educational equity be furthered, if the tablets were acknowledged
by librarians—and explicitly presented to students—also as tools for keep-
ing: keeping from, keeping separate, keeping safe, keeping the status quo?
Rather than trying to overcome this tension, Pawley wisely describes the
tension as being “between conflicting ideals of, on the one hand, a pro-
methean vision of citizen empowerment and democracy, and on the other,
a desire to control ‘quality’ of information that has the potential to result
in—albeit unintended—procrustean consequences” [8, p. 425].4 Advocat-
ing “understanding it and laying it open for inspection and discussion,”
Pawley also embraces this tension as “creative and helpful” and asserts that
4. Pawley explains her intriguing two mythological allusions, which resonate powerfully with
mondialisation and globalisation, in a helpful footnote: “In the Greek myth, Prometheus, son
of a titan, takes pity on humans and gives them fire. He thus empowers them to improve
their lives by stimulating their creativity and enabling the development of the arts and
sciences. Procrustes, on the other hand, is a robber who waylays travelers and forces them
to lie on a terrible iron bed. If they are too short to fit the bed exactly, he stretches his
victims. If they are too long he chops off their legs. Either way, death is the result” [8, p.
425].

“we can achieve and maintain a balance between constraint and liberality
that will promote the most emancipating—promethean—institutional and
professional practices of IL” [8, pp. 425–26]. How might this tension,
apparently as old as libraries themselves, be further theorized? Nancy’s
philosophy needs further exploration.
It is important to emphasize that an application of Nancy’s mondialisation
to IL would not result in a kind of riotous information free-for-all, a res-
olution of the dissonance inherent in librarianship between encouraging
discovery and encouraging discernment. Rather, following Pawley’s advo-
cacy for an acceptance of the tension as fruitful, mondialisation would be
operationalized as theory supporting IL that fosters careful yet adventurous
sense making. At first, this stance may seem excessively and unproductively
conservative; it is tempting to align mondialisation with absolutely free in-
formation interaction. However, just as I associate Nancy’s globalisation with
unjust discrimination and not with astute discernment, I also align mon-
dialisation with judicious freedom in research, avoiding the theorizing of
IL that would teach students to see information as undifferentiated. Un-
packing Nancy’s densely constructed argument will help to explain why
an acceptance of librarianship’s ancient contradiction is congruent with
both Nancy’s philosophy and with equity-centered IL theory.
Central to both the misery caused by globalisation and the justice pro-
duced by mondialisation are contrasting understandings of meaning.
Nancy’s globalisation is associated with a globe in space, with “totality as a
whole” [5, p. 27], and with an unjust global network of agglomeration—
unrelenting conglomeration mixed with accumulation resulting in wealth
for a few and misery for more and more [5, p. 33]. As such, globalisation
does not allow for meaning making. It is “an earth without a sky” [5, p.
47], that is, an objectified orb without a horizon that would provide a
reference point for meaning making. Such a globe leads to progressive
“enclosure in the undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality” [5, p. 28], similar
to Michel de Certeau’s depiction of an existence in which the reader is a
sheep, “progressively immobilized” and “handled” [26, p. 166]. Such a
“confinement” and “reduction,” which de Certeau declares “unacceptable”
[26, pp. 165–66], results in what Nancy calls an “un-world” [5, p. 34].
In contrast, mondialisation involves a world, such as “Debussy’s world” or
“the hospital world” [5, p. 41]. As opposed to globalisation’s objective “to-
tality as a whole,” mondialisation is “a totality of meaning” that involves a
value system constituted of knowledge, affectivity, and participation [5, p.
41]. Sharing, an important component of Nancy’s philosophy, is how one
participates in such a world. For Nancy, sharing in a world’s “value system”
or “meaningful content” means “apprehending its codes and texts, pre-
cisely when their reference points, signs, codes, and texts are neither ex-
plicit nor exposed as such” [5, p. 41]. Who better to facilitate sharing, who

better to explicate and expose codes and texts than librarians, the voca-
tional descendants of the priestly cataloger of Nippur, who acquired, clas-
sified, and sanctified the very first collection? This is a crucial point in
developing a philosophical basis for an IL theory that emanates from a
concern for equity while honoring the ancient role of the librarian as
“keeper.” No longer wishing to wear the mantle of arbiter but hesitant to
throw away such a long venerated cloth, the librarian committed to equity
shares the mantle by turning it inside out, explicitly encouraging students
to inspect the seams, to examine critically the ways in which information
is constructed.
Explicit and Critical Information Literacy for Creating Information

This shift in the role of librarian toward facilitating an explicit and critical
examination of information is of particular importance in community col-
leges. Often the first generation in their families to attend higher education
and frequently coming from poorly funded K–12 schools in which they
have been underprepared for higher education, community college stu-
dents especially would profit from librarians who see in themselves some
of the metaphors suggested by Allan Luke and Cushla Kapitzke: “critical
commentators, mediators, . . . mentors, . . . nomadic intellectuals and
cultural tourists” [27, p. 472]. Mentored to think about information crit-
ically, such students would be more likely to interact with information in
strategic ways than if they received instruction from librarians who viewed
themselves as bibliographic custodians.
Librarians who view their job as monitors of information and who prize
the conventional LIS framework of efficiency and effectiveness are probably
the least likely mentors for promoting the idea that knowledge is con-
structed, an idea that is both crucial to Nancy’s thoroughly constructivist
concept of mondialisation and essential to the intellectual development of
all college students. Because students often arrive at a community college
underprepared, they are both especially disinclined to see themselves as
capable of constructing knowledge and especially prone to see knowledge
as “existing as a thing-in-itself, independent of mediation and interpreta-
tion” [27, p. 484]. Community college librarians need to offer underpre-
pared students’ IL embued with expectations that research is about what
Radford calls “the individual’s attempt to locate his knowledge claims
within an existing order of knowledge claims” [28, p. 485].
Such an approach to IL—an approach that authorizes students to create
meaning, to construct an argument, to stake claims, and to question others’
claims—is often full of inefficiency, doubts, intellectual circling, and con-
fusion. It is surely more efficient for both librarian and student to see
knowledge as something that can be tracked down and captured, as Luke
and Kapitzke have described [27, p. 484], but it is a kind of efficiency that

community college librarians especially need to reject. Literacy theorists

Glynda Hull and Mike Rose long ago pointed out the debilitating effects
of overrating efficiency when facilitating underprepared college students’
advancement toward college-level English courses [29]. They offer a re-
minder that is especially pertinent to community college librarians: “hes-
itance and uncertainty—as we all know from our own intellectual strug-
gles—are central to knowledge-making” [29, p. 9].
As important as it is for librarians to reconsider the value they place on
efficiency, it is equally important to rethink the chronological configuration
of the research process and to reimagine the nature of reading as an act
of discovery and creation. Early engagement of students in the research
process and regarding students as creators of knowledge from the moment
that they begin research are two characteristics of a reconceptualized IL
especially appropriate for community college libraries. Creation is con-
ventionally conceived as happening only during the third act, the “using”
act of a three-act information literacy drama, which involves a first act of
“finding” and a second act of “evaluating.” De Certeau [26] complicates
this magnificently! De Certeau asserts that even in the act of reading, the
middle act of evaluation, students are foreshadowing the third act of using,
producing “gardens that miniaturize and collate a world” [26, p. 173]. Not
when quoting, not when paraphrasing, not when synthesizing during the
writing phase, but in the very act of reading, according to de Certeau, the
reader hearkens back to the first “finding” act, like “Robinson Crusoe
discovering an island” [26, p. 173] and simultaneously prefigures the third
“using” act by producing gardens, “constitut[ing] a secret scene” [26, p.
173].
De Certeau’s potent vision of the reader is especially useful for com-
munity college librarians, who work with students having, in many cases,
limited facility in reading. To pretend that de Certeau’s reenvisioning of
the nature of reading could somehow erase the fact that a significant
number of community college students lack basic reading skills is fruitless.
However, de Certeau offers librarians an alternative image of reading—a
vantage that emphasizes readers’ capacities rather than their shortcomings.
Information literacy founded on de Certeau’s conceptualization of reading
and on Nancy’s sense of urgency—“immediately, without delay”—would
attempt to engage community college students as early as possible in mean-
ing making. A community college library in which all phases of research
were regarded as creative acts could contribute to equity. When distributed
throughout the research process, the act of creating might lead students
to see their roles as creators, librarians interpreting their jobs as mentors
of creators, and IL pedagogy that would be more like a glass-blowing class,
combining technique, aesthetics, risk, demonstration, and practice, and
less like a workshop on Microsoft Excel.

These effects would tend to increase academic and social integration,

important components of college success for all students [29] but of crucial
importance to students in community colleges because of the central role
such integration plays in learning, persistence, and, ultimately, in their
transfer to four-year institutions. Many community college students drop
out early in the semester before they have established a sense of belonging
to the college. Hull and Rose argue that “the real stuff of belonging to an
academic community is dynamic involvement in generating and question-
ing knowledge” [28, p. 297]. Community college librarians who base their
IL theory on Nancy’s urgency to create early in the students’ experience
and on de Certeau’s view of reading itself as an act of creation might
contribute to improving students’ retention rates by structuring their ped-
agogy in ways that bind students to the college early in the term.
How could a community college library support students in viewing
information critically and seeing themselves as authorities capable of cre-
ating knowledge? How could librarians in community colleges translate
into practice what Pawley describes as “envisioning information use as a
process that involves all users in both consumption and production” [8,
p. 422]? Mining the pedagogical ore of these questions, Michelle Holschuh
Simmons advocates creating alliances among student, discipline-specific
instructor, and librarian, with the librarian acting as a “discipline discourse
mediator” who makes explicit the tacit ways in which information in a
particular discipline is constructed [30, p. 297]. She celebrates historical
instances of discipline-specific work in librarianship including the work
done in the mid-twentieth century by specialist librarians who created
extensive bibliographies in their particular area of expertise.
This work of creating bibliographies, although among the most tradi-
tional tasks of the librarian, could exemplify the best practices of a theo-
rizing of IL that is truly equity centric. If students were apprenticed in
compiling bibliographies with discernment; if they were encouraged to
seek information in all kinds of formats; if they were taught to annotate
them critically; if they were, through publishing the bibliographies online,
afforded opportunities to give and receive commentary on their choices
and annotations; and, if the bibliographies were regarded as valuable works
of creation, useful for the whole local community of scholars, then these
bibliographies could truly contribute to an IL pedagogy radiating from
equity. This approach might contribute to more equitable educational
outcomes for community college students by moving students toward a
role of authority and by moving librarians away from the idea that IL is a
set of skills. Creating an annotated bibliography that critically examines
how specific disciplines’ discourses are constructed is a complex process—
calling for exactly the kinds of qualities Diane Zabel recommends in ex-

cellent IL instruction: “integrated, relevant, ongoing, collaborative, and

applied” [31, p. 20].
Community college students, some of whom have spent years in skills-
oriented classrooms only to test into more skill building in basic reading,
writing, and math courses on arrival at college, are especially in need of
meaningful, integrated educational endeavors and of IL that involves, to
use Annemaree Lloyd’s terms from her study of workplace information
literacy, a “simultaneous and interrelated process which enacts the indi-
vidual into the discourse of the context” [32, p. 85]. Contributions toward
educational equity might be possible in any academic library where li-
brarians see their job as creating pedagogy for students in the discourses
of, for example, English, history, biology, and political science. Community
college librarians would especially profit from thinking in terms of IL for
discipline-specific discourses, since their libraries serve both transfer stu-
dents and vocational education students in such disciplines as radiological
technology, fashion design, and nursing. Next, returning to an examination
of examples from ancient libraries will show that community college li-
brarians need to conceptualize IL in ways that call into question issues of
authority and that make explicit the tension in librarianship between aiding
and hindering access to information.
The Hattusas Catalog, Hostile Encounters, and Disqualified Knowledge

The long tradition of privileging librarians as experts and information from
libraries as reliable, a tradition to this day apparent at every level of ed-
ucation, can be seen in another ancient catalog, found in a library in the
Hittite capital of Hattusas, south of present-day Ankara [25]. More elab-
orate than the two tablets found at Nippur, the Hattusas catalog includes
helpful bibliographic details: “Any priest who needed a ritual for a given
problem, instead of picking up tablet after tablet . . . had only to run eye
over the entries in the catalogues. It was a limited tool: the order of the
entries is more or less haphazard (alphabetization, for example, lay over
a millennium and a half in the future) and they give no indication of
location” [25, p. 7].
The catalog may have been, as Lionel Casson calls it, “a limited tool”
with limited possibilities for enlarging the ability of a limited subset of the
population—priests—to gain access to the discourse at hand (performing
rituals), but it is, nonetheless, an early example of how the practices in-
volving IL are situated within tension. This tension springs from the ability
of the IL apparatus both explicitly to connect priest with ritual and its
ability implicitly to identify accepted rituals acquired by authorized experts.
Like modern-day library catalogs, which save students the time and trou-
ble of searching through endless texts to find an academic “ritual” for an

academic “given problem,” the Hattusas catalog should be understood,

without question, as being very helpful for finding and using information.
However, the unspoken effect of the catalog, that of privileging information
within it, whether for a Hittite priest or a community college student, must
be acknowledged as well. All too often students’ first visit as undergraduates
to an academic library includes messages about the superiority of peer-
reviewed articles, a certain disdain on the part of their professors for en-
cyclopedias, the extremely dubious quality of the free Internet as opposed
to the proprietary databases to which the library subscribes, and the ab-
solute unworthiness of Wikipedia, even, with some professors, as a starting
point. The message given to college students must be similar to that given
to the priests of Nippur and Hattusas—here are kept the rituals, here,
etched into these tablets, are the sources of information that you can trust.
Michel Foucault seems to name this conflict between librarian and user
when he speaks of “the memory of hostile encounters which even up to
this day have been confined to the margins of knowledge” [23, p. 83]. It
is easy to observe these “hostile encounters” in warnings found on clay
tablets from the palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh: “Your lordship is with-
out equal, Ashur, King of the Gods! Whoever removes [this tablet], writes
his name in place of my name, may Ashur and Ninlil, angered and grim,
cast him down, erase his name, his seed, in the land” [25, p. 12].
We recognize present-day manifestations of these hostile memories.
Among these are the obvious instantiations: “access denied” messages for
students lacking the proper password for certain databases, denial of priv-
ileges for students who either do not belong to a library’s mother learning
institution or have fines or other blocks on their borrowing privileges,
MySpace and other “disqualified knowledges” filtered out by some cam-
puses, and the simple but dramatic inequity of Internet access.
However, the “memory of hostile encounters” central to this article’s
thesis, embedded in the discourse of IL potently, pervasively, and yet almost
invisibly, constitutes a major element in librarianship’s habitus: certain
pieces of information are authorized; certain texts are declared the prop-
erty of the “King of the Gods,” thereby excluding the rest. Foucault’s
questions, directed to the very heart of IL theory, of scholarly discourse,
and of librarianship, ask: “What types of knowledge do you want to dis-
qualify in the very instant of your demand: ‘Is it a science?’ Which speaking,
discoursing subjects—which subjects of experience and knowledge—do
you then want to ‘diminish’ when you say: ‘I who conduct this discourse
am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist’?” [23, p. 85].
This disqualification of certain kinds of information, while detrimental
to all college students, is particularly debilitating to community college
students, who frequently arrive at college underprepared to engage in
scholarly discourse but who often have had all sorts of other powerful

information literacy experiences—as immigrants persistently negotiating

a maze of community resources, as consumers shrewdly maneuvering
through complex networks to procure affordable services and goods, as
employees tenaciously seeking work and evaluating conflicting sources of
information to get ahead economically, and as individuals whose “critical
consciousness as members of oppressed groups is finely honed and who
may not be predisposed to display the competence they possess” [33, p.
291]. Such students’ success in community college depends partly on learn-
ing about IL in ways that respect the rich knowledge they bring with them
from these experiences.
Paralleling the interest among literacy theorists in literacy beyond the
walls of the school [33], IL outside of the educational context has been
identified by Lloyd, who studied IL among firefighters, as a way to trouble
the waters of IL discourse and vitalize its theoretical possibilities [32]. Lloyd
argues for expanding our notions of information literacy by examining
workplace information literacy, which “allows other voices and other ways
of knowing to be heard and represented” [32, p. 84]. While beneficial for
all students, Lloyd’s argument is especially important when conceptualizing
IL for community college students, many of whom work long hours to
support themselves and, in some cases, their families. Including workforce
information literacy in thinking about IL also foregrounds the interplay
of information with other nonacademic pursuits, what Lloyd calls “the
multiple realities of everyday life” [32, p. 84]. Multiple realities are precisely
what many community college students experience. Deeply engaged in
work, family, and social activities, community college students are less likely
than students at four-year institutions to identity primarily as college stu-
dents. These multiple realities and identities make community college li-
braries an especially appropriate space for an expansive conceptualization
of IL.
Toward an Equity-Centric Information Literacy

This article has attempted to show that, for several reasons, community
college libraries are ideal places from which to translate advanced concepts
about literacy into equity-centric IL. First, approaches to literacy that make
explicit the ways in which specific disciplines’ discourses are constructed
have led IL researchers to conceive of librarians as “discipline discourse
mediators”—insider-outsider librarians who can improve students’ chances
of educational success by teaching them how communication in their par-
ticular discipline is carried out [30, p. 299]. Community college students,
many of whom belong to family or social networks in which such expli-
cation is rare and whose previous education has not prepared them to
analyze the specifics of discourses, would especially profit from librarians
who reveal the rhetorical patterns of specific disciplines in constructing

information. Next, critical literacy theorists, with their explicit emphasis

on addressing issues involving inequity, have influenced the foregrounding
of epistemological issues in IL, such as the inherently political nature of
information. Critical IL is of special importance to community college
students, many of whom have the most to gain from penetrating inter-
pretations of information, given their generally marginalized political and
economical status. Third, theories that use a sociocultural framework to
view literacy as a practice rather than as a set of skills have aided LIS
researchers in conceiving of IL as a fundamentally complex and creative
enterprise. This widening of IL’s theoretical scope contributes to students’
educational equity by asserting their capacity as authorities and as creators
of information. Fourth, studies of power and of its implications in the
workings of literacy offer community college librarians ways to examine
critically their own IL instruction. This critical stance might help librarians
to consider how their pedagogy leads to them to disqualify subtly but
potently certain kinds of knowledge—the very kinds of knowledge pos-
sessed by the students whose equity they are trying to further. And, finally,
just as literacy researchers whose studies of literacy practices outside of
school have resulted in more nuanced understandings of both the nature
of literacy and of how to honor literacy resources that students bring to
school, LIS researchers have used workplace information literacy to expand
notions of IL in academic settings. These more expansive ways of viewing
IL could be translated into better educational outcomes in any academic
library, but in a library serving community college students, whose identities
are generally more closely tied to work than students in four-year insti-
tutions, such broad theorizing of IL is especially necessary for contributing
to educational equity.
All librarians might profit from considering how educational equity
could be furthered by thinking about their vocation as lodged within an
ancient tension between furthering access to information, mondialisation,
and blocking access to it, globalisation, but such contemplation is especially
pertinent for community college librarians, whose students are, in general,
the most vulnerable in terms of the ill effects of undertheorized IL.
To the extent that a community college student’s relationship to knowl-
edge shifts from passive recipient, whose task is to find, evaluate, and use
knowledge, to active producer of knowledge, whose enterprise is to create
meaning, equity will tend to be produced. When students view themselves
as agents—as creators of information—no longer do they see their papers
as compilations of pieces of “Truth” retrieved, evaluated, and used but
rather as created works written with the authority that flows from under-
standing information’s political, social, and economic dimensions. This,
also, might lead toward educational equity because such a project, if stu-
dents enthusiastically participated in it, might produce the crucial effects

of academic and social integration into the culture of the community

college.
What is at stake in how community college librarians theorize IL? Perhaps
the question should be posed to the many students who enter community
college with the goal of eventually earning a baccalaureate degree. Ac-
cording to statistical analysis by Mariana Alfonso: “By enrolling at a com-
munity college, instead of at a 4-year institution, students see their prob-
ability of attaining a bachelor’s degree reduced by a range between 21 and
33 percent” [34, p. 893].5 If librarians meditate on this vision of injustice,
then it becomes apparent that nothing less than equity is at stake when
we consider IL theory.
Such an urgent stance toward IL is endorsed by Derrida’s attempt to
connect archives, justice, and “hope in the future” [24, p. 74]: “I have . . .
tried to situate justice . . . in the direction of the act of memory, of resistance
to forgetting” [24, p. 76]. Nancy argues that “the only task of justice is thus
to create a world tirelessly, the space of an unappeasable and always unsettled
sovereignty of meaning” [5, p. 112]. Perhaps community college libraries
are particularly appropriate places to translate Nancy’s framework into
practices that would contribute to more equitable outcomes for community
college students. This possibility would be difficult to measure for a number
of reasons, including the need for precise ways to gauge educational equity,
the difficulties researchers generally encounter in tracking community col-
lege students after they graduate or transfer, and the many confounding
variables that might obscure the effects of an approach to IL that claims
to be equity centric. These issues might provide avenues for further
research.
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Information Literacy and Community College Students: Using New Approaches to Literacy

Theory to Produce Equity

This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

Librarians in community colleges have engaged in information literacy (IL) for

How might information literacy (IL) be animated by new approaches to

1. Doctoral student, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley,

[Library Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3, pp. 343–361]

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need libraries in which the theory undergirding information finding, eval-

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Information Literacy, Conceptual Advances in Literacy, and Equity

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• Critical literacy, which foregrounds “social change, cultural diversity,

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dents to four-year institutions, and degree or program completion rates.

This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

torically expansive examination at such a minute level requires a powerful

Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Globalisation” and “Mondialisation” and the

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This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

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Explicit and Critical Information Literacy for Creating Information

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community college librarians especially need to reject. Literacy theorists

This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

These effects would tend to increase academic and social integration,

This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

cellent IL instruction: “integrated, relevant, ongoing, collaborative, and

The Hattusas Catalog, Hostile Encounters, and Disqualified Knowledge

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academic “given problem,” the Hattusas catalog should be understood,

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information literacy experiences—as immigrants persistently negotiating

Toward an Equity-Centric Information Literacy

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information. Next, critical literacy theorists, with their explicit emphasis

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of academic and social integration into the culture of the community

This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

This content downloaded from 186.205.27.3 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:02 PM

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