Teamwork makes the dream work: Reflections on collaborations to support media and information literacies in liberal arts education

Experts and practitioners use multiple definitions of media literacy (ML). Potter’s (2010) essay on the state of media literacy captures definitions of media literacy that vary by scholar and organization. He suggests that the myriad definitions and approaches to media literacy derive from what one considers to be media, what one considers to be literacy, and what the purpose of media literacy should be. The same is true of information literacy (IL). Downey (2016) highlights what IL is not in order to aid in understanding what IL is. She writes that it’s important to understand it’s not computer literacy, information retrieval, or library literacy. She also acknowledges that what critical IL is, is still under construction. Nearly a decade later, scholars and practitioners are still negotiating the boundaries of critical IL (Smith & Hicks, 2023).

Thus, similarities and differences emerge between the domains of ML and IL. In an article from 2011, Koltay works to define the terms ML, IL, and digital literacy. He identifies overlaps between each of these concepts while highlighting distinctions, too. However, a decade later, Wuyckens, Landry, & Fastrez (2022) conducted a systematic meta-review of the literature on the very same literacies. They found little to no agreement in how these terms are defined or operationalized, which they attribute to the multiple disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds that study and apply these related concepts. They acknowledge that this is confusing because the same terms can be used to mean different things.

Although some may see the convergences and divergences in ML and IL as messy, we—a university librarian and assistant professor of communication—propose that this conceptual ambiguity supports cross-pollination, not cross-contamination, for ML and IL education. In the following conversation, we discuss three questions based on our experiences at a small liberal arts university. First, what collaboration opportunities are available between teachers and librarians? Here, we recount working together to promote and support ML and IL on campus during National Media Literacy Week (MLW) 2022, which led us to partner to integrate IL into a general education media theory course offered by the Department of Communication in Spring 2023. Second, how might we break down academia’s silos and strengthen alliances that support each discipline’s work? We discuss the affordances of a liberal arts framework in supporting transdisciplinary applications of ML and IL. Third, what critical practices are shared and how might ML and IL promote social and environmental justice? We address future work we plan to do together that integrates critical ML and IL, including a transdisciplinary research program that questions how to engage with historical texts about eugenics, MLW events, and course collaborations.

Foundations: us and our approaches

Lisa Morrison (LM): I’m Lisa Morrison, social sciences liaison librarian at Denison University. I have Masters degrees in Political Science and Library and Information Sciences. So I’m a double scientist. Prior to becoming a librarian, I was an English teacher abroad for a better part of a decade. While teaching and managing a university foundation year program, I became infuriated by the exorbitant cost of access to academic resources necessary as much as I did about information literacy issues and issues of access and information privilege in a global context, not just, our own stateside context.

Rachel Guldin (RG): My name is Rachel Guldin. I’m an assistant professor of Communication at Denison University. I have my PhD in Communication and Media Studies. My work focuses in three areas. Those are critical media literacy, critical political economy of media and communication, and popular culture. I came to my interest in critical media literacy when I was a public school teacher, and I started to notice how media texts were valuable to my students but also how they were processing those texts when we were using some of those media texts to practice comprehension skills. With the understanding of our background, let’s set some foundations and definitions for how we individually think about these literacies.

LM: I’ll start us off with critical information literacy. So academically, there’s the Association of College and Research Libraries (2016) “Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education.” There are six frames. Each frame represents threshold concepts, which differ slightly from discipline to discipline, but they generally represent essential concepts needed to become information literate. Under each frame, there are listed dispositions and practices of the information literate learner, as well. But, the Framework overall is super vague. There’s no real criticality in it, no critical lens. However, it’s vague enough that you could read in that perspective if you really wanted to. And I do. For example, one of the frames is “information has value.” So that’s where we put learning about citations, where we put copyright, where we put fair use, and how we understand those things, but that frame’s also where critical librarians put information privilege. However, in the Framework, it’s never explicitly stated how information production and understanding is–

RG: –inherently political?

LM: Inherently political, right! The Framework is silent on how hierarchies of power are created and reified by systems of information. Critical librarianship and critical information literacy borrow from critical pedagogies and critical theory, to highlight how libraries, information systems, information organization, access, etc., are all part of systems of power and domination. They reflect that world back and they naturalize power. Further, we also have to consider our profession, how we relate to one another, how we relate to our patrons and institutions as well as the knowledge creation process.

RG: What’s the difference between a traditional or acritical approach to information literacy and how you see critical information literacy?

LM: The acritical approach, it’s a very prescriptive way to teach students to think about information. You recognize an information need, identify what kind of resource addresses the need, create a search strategy to find that information, properly evaluate found info, and ethically apply it in one’s own information production. Becoming acritically information literate doesn’t require anyone to understand issues of power in the production and dissemination of knowledge and information. Critical information literacy pushes learners to consider how the systems of information are systems of power, and what that means in their dual role of information consumer and producer. It was Foucault (1978) who discussed power-knowledge, and how they directly imply each other. This is critical information literacy. So in terms of instruction, it’s not just about showing students how to access JSTOR, but how that access illuminates the underlying political economy of the research process and our institutions, and how knowledge production and its corporatized consumption reifies power, capitalism, liberalism, etc.

RG: When I think about critical media literacy, I’m thinking in the context of televisual media, popular culture, and of course, social media, which is at the forefront of our students’ minds. Of course, film, television, and print media still matter and inform everyday experiences, whether or not our students think they do. My approach comes out of Kellner & Share’s (2007, 2019) framework, that critical media literacy is a critique of power structures and ideology to deconstruct culture and the culture industries. One of my favorite texts is Share’s (2015) book, Media Literacy is Elementary. It’s the most accessible and straightforward framework for understanding critical media literacy, which you can use at a variety of age levels and knowledge levels. I also draw into my approach Antonio López’s (2020) ecomedia literacy, which is the idea that our media have material and symbolic implications for the planet that we’re part of. In the context of a climate crisis, it’s imperative that we don’t separate our media and ourselves from the planet… because we can’t. Media and humans are from and rely on this planet, so making that invisible connection visible is an important part of how I see critical media literacy. To sum that up, critical media literacy allows us to question and critique power in our media, in our information, both in terms of symbols and structures, representationally and materially. And we can use those questions and critiques to speak back to and through media, challenging what students see, becoming creators of media, taking action to change their interactions with media. Like you were saying with information literacy, it’s not just about what is being consumed, but also the potential to produce.

What collaboration opportunities are available between teachers and librarians?

RG: We’re operating at a small liberal arts institution, so we have some flexibility, and we were able to create some great collaborations in our first year working together. National MLW 2022 was a good place for us to start that collaboration. I initially met you, Lisa, at new faculty orientation during a campus tour at the library. I mentioned media literacy as a research interest; we struck up a conversation. And then I emailed you on a whim a few weeks later when I was thinking about organizing the MLW event. We screened the Trust Me documentary on campus. We had food and beverages, and we asked some upper division students to be respondents to the film. The event was presented by the library and the Department of Communication, and then we hosted together and we both attended. It was a great way to start.

LM: And that led us to our partnership, integrating information literacy into your media theory course in spring 2023.

RG: I was teaching a writing-intensive media theory course. This course was a general education class, which meant that I had students from across campus, not just communication majors. I was committed to providing students with depth and breadth of critical media theory, regardless of their major, since a goal of critical media literacy is to get everybody—not just the people who are interested in communication—thinking about media in more purposeful, less passive ways. At the same time, a course requirement was to support scholarly writing, development, and research growth. I thought that after partnering with you, Lisa, for MLW 2022, that your expertise in information literacy would be a good pairing with students’ learning needs for the informational literacy that they had to develop to be able to do the media literacy work I wanted them to do in their writing projects.

LM: You asked me what the top three things all students at our university need to know, from an information literacy perspective. And my answers were: how to find things in the library; how to find the scholarly conversation; and, how to be critical of scholarly sources.

RG: The sessions were laid out so that you came in when students were beginning to write each of their three papers, when they were ideating and planning. You came in for 25 to 30 minutes of each class, and then you had the lesson.

LM: First off, basic library instruction: how to find things in our library. I don’t like teaching this, and this is my number one teaching request from all faculty. I often assume that faculty think this is all I know how to teach. It’s just over and over again; you go through the same things. Actually, at a ACRL conference earlier this year, I was listening to a couple speakers talking about trauma-informed pedagogy, and how important that repetition process is because you cannot know when your students are tuned in, tuned out (Baydoun & Brillat 2023). It’s so much more difficult for us to maintain the attention of our students post-pandemic, and all of the other traumatic events that happened during the past few years. That made me feel a lot better about the fact that if it’s boring for me, I’m sure it’s boring for many of the students and faculty. But at the same time, if something’s getting in there, I’m happy about it and maybe some, if not all, of the students need that kind of repetition. The second session we focused on finding the scholarly conversation and why that’s important. For this one, I wanted students to look through the introduction and lit review of an article to find citations and understand how they were being used. In part, I argued for this because I think students have a hard time understanding the difference between a literature review and an annotated bibliography unless they see it in context. And for a lot of classes, an annotated bibliography or a lit review would be where a project might stop, which adds to the confusion for the students about what these are and what they do. Personally, I love teaching this kind of stuff. I think that it’s important for the students to know how to find those conversations, because it’s in those conversations where we create knowledge. And so, it’s really fun to teach them about, like, how the scholarly conversation looks boring, but it’s actually a ruthless street fight and an essential part of knowledge creation. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite have as much time as I wanted to get into the politics of citation. But I felt like session number three tied into the citation politics pretty well, as we focused on being critical of scholarly sources. In that session, I wanted to focus more on doing a critical reading. I don’t know if the students always understand that what we are trying to do here is to make them knowledge producers and to socialize them into the process of how we do knowledge creation in each discipline. But for students to be producers of knowledge, information, and media, they also have to be able to criticize, and choosing people to build on and people to criticize is essential to lit reviews. They have to be able to criticize to understand why certain texts work and why they don’t want to use other texts. I brought in an abstract from a high impact journal, but it had some obvious racial bias in the description of different music styles. And the students tore it apart!

RG: They really did. They talked about it when you left the classroom, too, which I think is very important.

LM: I loved that one! What do you feel like the sessions gave the students?

RG: At a basic level, having you come to class multiple times gave students a connection to the library as an informational resource, more than just a place to go study or hide, but that the library has people that are informational experts. A number of students told me that they made appointments for the first time to meet with a librarian—aka, you—to get help finding resources for the literature reviews that they were doing. And I know that you’ve said to me at times, that people just don’t know what you do. And now my students do. They know that you’re not just helping them find sources, but you can help them make sense of the sources too, in intellectually rigorous ways that engage critical thinking. That’s really what we want them to do at the end of the day. But on a more abstract level, this helps students see cross-curricular connections for media and information outside the library or media course. The examples that you brought were really relevant. And they weren’t media- or library-specific, but they could have shown up in other classes, as well. I think having you come into the classroom multiple times like you belong there—not as a visitor or guest but as another support person in this knowledge creation process—helped to erase some of the siloing that can happen naturally or by virtue of existing in different departments or buildings. I’m curious, what did you learn through that experience?

LM: It really surprised me how much the students seem to be able to take away from the short sessions. I typically don’t even try to teach most of the time in short sessions. I’ll do some service to whatever the faculty member asked me to come in and do you know, but mostly, I’m kind of there to make some jokes, and say some subversive things about information, privilege, repression, what a racket academic publishing is. You know, things like that. My greatest hits. I’m hoping that students will hear those things and think, “Maybe that’s somebody I want to work with, talk to, get a different perspective from, and who’s never gonna give me a grade.” If I can lure them to my office, I feel like I can teach them whatever they actually really need to know about the process of learning research skills and how to do these things. So, I was really surprised by how quickly your students took to the short sessions, especially the idea of unteaching academic authority, which is a problematic topic, especially in our post-truth times. I’ve even had other librarians talk to me about how we need to stop making the students question scientific authority for the good of the nation, or something. Or, that you can’t do this kind of teaching with first-year students, that it teaches them to turn off their mind to the idea of expertise, which I really think are just a lot of different ways of pretending our students aren’t almost fully developed, thinking, autonomous beings already. They just need a little bit more time to bake that prefrontal cortex.

RG: It’s pretty paternalistic.

LM: Isn’t it, though? It’s a problem with librarians—paternalism. It must have gotten to me too because I was surprised by how quickly they just took to it, and how quickly they were like, “Whoa, what was with these terms? What did they mean by ‘deviance’? What did they mean by ‘African American music’?” They were really, really ready for that! And then they said, “Oh, man, this has to come from some crappy journal, right?” “Oh, this guy’s never been cited, right?” No, this is a flagship journal. This is a high impact journal. He is a very well-cited scholar. You can’t rely on those metrics. You have to rely on your critical thinking skills when you’re coming into contact with any kind of information, even peer-reviewed information.

RG: Having you teach critical information literacy in my media theory course helped me detangle some of the theoretical distinctions between information literacy and media literacy; it helped me see those as not just the same things that overlap and are called different terms by different groups of people. But there really are some substantive and meaningful differences between what you do as an information literacy expert and what I do as a media literacy expert .

LM: Yeah, absolutely. I always assumed that they were basically the same thing, if you want to think about it in terms of critical information literacy in college, and your fun time, that’s media literacy. But no, that isn’t the case. And yes, I learned a lot from the collaboration, as well.

RG: As we’re thinking about future iterations and how we plan to improve, what are you seeing for the future?

LM: In all honesty, this is something that I’d like to implement in probably all my classes. I wish I would have done some exit tickets or minute papers at the end to find out what they found most interesting, what was the thing that was going to stick, what was something that they might not have understood too clearly, or if they have some lingering questions. But, it would have been nice to also get that secondary assessment to see how we did. Additionally, I’d be happy to stay for the whole workshop, if you think it could be useful. I’d also be happy to work with you as you’re planning your syllabi to ensure whatever materials I bring reinforce your instruction, but maybe from a slightly different perspective.

RG: I’m glad you said about the planning piece, because that’s what I see as the space for my improvement. I want to be much more intentional in the future about strategically and collaboratively planning when and where critical information literacy is in my syllabus. I want to say, “Here’s what my topics are. Here’s what we’re talking about. Here’s what the assignments are,” and then have a collaborative conversation much earlier on before the syllabus is set to think, exactly like you said, about how critical information literacy can be integrated into the learning process purposefully, not with an ad hoc approach, which is, embarrassing, but honestly, kind of what I did last time, even though I think it worked out relatively well.

LM: Oh, it shouldn’t be embarrassing. It’s what all of your colleagues do!

RG: Yes, I don’t think that’s unique. But integrating that into the planning process feels like it would be much more productive, much more meaningful, and sounds like something you’re open to as well.

LM: Absolutely. I think a lot of the time faculty don’t realize how much we could get involved at the planning level with them, how much work we would be able to do and would be willing to be a thought partner with them. For example, I’d love to brainstorm ways to draw out some facets of information literacy that could be clearer or better understood with different terminology—whether that’s better from a critical media literacy frame or critical information literacy.

How might we break down academia silos and strengthen alliances that support each discipline’s work?

LM: I was thinking about sledgehammers, how about you, Rachel?

RG: Well, I was thinking in terms of the liberal arts. We are at a small liberal arts college, so there are some affordances to that model and the way that we think about the liberal arts framework that mirrors transdisciplinary collaborations of media literacy and information literacy. There’s an article that’s often shared on our campus, from William Cronan (1998), who says that liberal education “aspires to nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom” (p. 74). That’s a really beautiful sentiment. But more concretely, what does that mean? He says that that means people are listening and hearing, that they’re reading and understanding, that they’re communicating through speech and writing across audiences, that they’re problem solving, seeking truth, understanding and empowering people, and seeing the complex, connected nature of the world. This liberal arts college emphasizes that it’s important to have the depth and breadth of learning, doing critical and creative thinking, problem solving, and, fundamentally, communicating. So we’ve got institutional support and structures that are set up for creating intellectual alliances. But you and I are both advocates of just learning for learning’s sake. Because that’s a condition of being a human and existing in the world in which we live.

LM: Nerds!

RG: So collaborating fundamentally works for us as individuals, too. But being at a liberal arts school means that we’re charged with breaking down the silos, or making the silos permeable, so that there is the interdisciplinary approach for the purpose of helping students see that nothing exists in isolation, that our world and the subjects that we teach are interconnected, and that we need to understand those interconnections and interdependencies to be able to do any type of honest, authentic, critical inquiry. So, for me, this foundational idea that comes out of the liberal arts is like a prerequisite for the type of transformative critical inquiry that we want students to experience through the collaborations that we have with critical information literacy and critical media literacy.

LM: I think it’s also important to model that kind of collaboration for the students because, as you’re getting at, there’s nothing in this world that isn’t a group project. Whether that’s the environment, whether that’s the media ecosphere, whether that’s research or anything. Why we even need to care about the scholarly conversation is because we’re always building on each other’s stuff. Being on the smaller campus, there is the opportunity to work across disciplines. I serve the largest academic division, which is social sciences. It’s still not that many faculty members, and it’s really fun connecting you to faculty members, or connecting faculty who like to collaborate with other librarians who like to collaborate. Being able to actually build those collaborations on our campus is really nice, but it also helps that we are on a campus that has the financial wherewithal to facilitate a lot of these things.

What critical practices are shared? How might media literacy and information literacy promote social and environmental justice?

RG: We’ve already started talking about future work that we want to do. And the first one, and I think you’d be great to speak about it, Lisa, is that you’ve been at the helm of organizing a transdisciplinary research program that questions how to engage with historical texts about eugenics and other problematic race-related studies.

LM: We have a lot of books in our library because of its age and because of our weeding practices. We university librarians don’t get rid of books if we don’t think that there’s enough of them in the state of Ohio, regardless of whether they’re bad science or offensive, so that access can remain. Because of this policy, we have a whole lot of pro-eugenics texts, in addition to many obviously racist and various other works of scientific or medical othering around ability, gender, sexuality, intelligence, etc. In collaboration with a history professor, which isn’t technically one of my disciplines, but our dogs are friends so I guess that makes him one of my faculty. Anyway, we started working on how we are going to use these as primary sources for his Darwinism classes, his eugenics classes, and his scientific racism classes. That project has now exploded into whatever it’ll become. Not only does this speak to the power of academic disciplines, and institutions and knowledge creation at that fundamental level, but you trace these fossilized errors from many disciplines, all the way through to today. But understanding more about how critical media literacy and critical information literacy support each other is part of the reason why I was excited to invite you and another communication faculty into this research table where we could discuss the effects of these works. I was really excited to get you guys involved with that because, of course, communication needs to be here, because we’re still circulating these ideas in the media. But you know, these books are from before our time of microaggressions, when we said it all out loud, when we were making the decisions of how to build this racist world, when we were deciding who got power and who didn’t.

RG: I think it’s great that you wanted to bring communication into that because we might not immediately think that critical media literacy belongs in that conversation, since the project is operating within the sphere of books, and books? That’s English, or that’s the library, or that’s history, right? But exactly like you said, these ideas translate and transmute, and all of a sudden, they’re integrated in popular culture. So it’s important for us to think collaboratively about how information and media literacy helps our students make sense of these types of texts or ideas in multiple contexts, not just in the stacks in the library, but when they’re encountering those conversations on Tik Tok.

We’re currently working on organizing events for MLW 2023. We’re bringing our new outreach and engagement librarian into the collaboration, which we’re pretty excited about, and looking for some new, creative approaches to how we’re doing MLW. And it seems like, at this juncture in time, our interest areas and the unique skills and understandings that we bring through information and through media literacies are in many ways converging on AI (artificial intelligence). The reality is that students are using AI, that they will probably be asked to use various AI software programs in classes, and that our university is providing them access to certain AI tools. We’re at this point where we know that it’s important for students not just to learn how to use those technologies but also to think really critically about what those tools are and what their affordances are, but also what we don’t know about them and what concerns we should have. So for MLW 2023, we’re to utilize the complementary nature of information literacy and media literacy to think intentionally with our students about the benefits but also—

LM: The very real costs of this sort of technology, of the biases that have been perpetuated since AI’s inception. I mean, all of these things that are just being coded into it, just like they were coded into disciplines such as anthropology. I think that seems to be missing from a lot of the larger nuts-and-bolts conversations that I’ve been aware of, not just on our campus but in a lot of the literature, is academics freaked out about AI and what it means for education in colleges and universities. And I really feel like that aspect of like, power/bias/reinforcing inequities is being lost in the panic to prevent or punish plagiarism. 

RG: I’m excited to help our students think outside of the two trains of thought that I’ve heard so far, which are focused on plagiarism and punitive responses, and the very acritical, celebratory conversation around AI’s potential. We’re going to be able to present them with an alternative way of thinking about this technology: in what ways does this create, recreate, and reify the oppression that already exists? And are there opportunities for liberatory engagement? How do we use the critical frame to make this better? Or at least deal with it?

LM: That’s gonna be fun. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Conclusion

In reflecting on our lived experiences as a librarian and media professor, we argue that critical information literacy and critical media literacy, when moved beyond theoretical explication, are valuable in praxis as both as separate and complementary constructs. We advocate for meaningful collaborations between media literacy and information literacy specialists through co-curricular activities and course-based lessons. We find that a liberal arts approach—referring to education rooted in communication, critical and creative thinking, and problem solving—supports transdisciplinary learning, which in turn helps to make permeable the silos that can easily separate critical media and information literacies. Finally, our experiences show that critical media and information literacies can mutually support and strengthen social justice initiatives and practices.

Despite any conceptual ambiguity in the literature, critical information literacy and critical media literacy can complement each other to support students’ authentic and meaningful engagement with and in their world. In our experience, collaboration between information literacy specialists and media educators can give students and educators more meaningful opportunities to learn, apply, and practice the skills they need to be the active citizens a democratic society needs to succeed.

References

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Share, J. (2015). Media literacy is elementary: Teaching youth to critically read and create media (2nd ed.). Peter Lang.

Smith, L. N., & Hicks, A. (2023). Taking stock of critical information literacy. Journal of Information Literacy, 17(1), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.11645/17.1.3416

Wuyckens, G., Landry, N., & Fastrez, P. (2022). Untangling media literacy, information literacy, and digital literacy: A systematic meta-review of core concepts in media education. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 14(1), 168-182. https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2022-14-1-12