Libraries and Learning
Evidence and Authority in the Age of Algorithms
(Presented at “Teaching Writing in a Post-Truth Era,” University of Notre Dame, August 20, 2019)
I come to the issue of teaching writing in the post-truth era from a somewhat different perspective than our previous speakers. I’m a librarian who has long been interested in the ways students get ideas, interact with other’s ideas, and how their experiences as writers in college shape their identity as people with agency and a grasp of how knowledge is made and negotiated by people – people like them. I’m taken with the parallels between writing instruction and what librarians do. Your writing program has as a goal ethical and moral use of words and evidence.
Making an argument is an ethical activity, one that helps students develop intellectual and moral virtues.
It’s about learning how words work and how to use those words ethically. This is also what information literacy is about. Learning is the primary purpose for librarians’ work with undergraduates. My library’s definition of information literacy is similarly ambitious – not just how to find and use information in the library and online, but more deeply to understand where information comes from, how it’s connected to social processes, and how they can participate in those processes with a clear sense of right and wrong.
We sometimes get distracted from these larger goals, though, because what’s on students’ minds is super practical: how to complete an assignment that’s breathing down their neck. How to find those five scholarly sources required. It’s a legitimate concern, especially in this age of anxiety when curiosity and exploration seem like a luxury. When you’re trying to figure out where you are in this new academic setting, just surviving may take up all your energy. When we talk about “student success” we’re not necessarily talking about lifelong learning and the purpose of liberal arts, we’re talking about the ability to perform well as a student, to write academic prose, format footnotes, and draw from scholarly sources without getting in trouble for plagiarism. That tends to push loftier goals to the side.
Wrestling with big ideas and with other’s thoughts using methodical forms of argument can be an incredibly valuable learning experience, but it’s the beliefs that underlie academic inquiry that are really important. Searching for truth ethically, with an open mind, without cherry-picking evidence to “prove” a preconceived answer, learning to live with complexity and ambiguity and feel some responsibility for doing that work – we need that kind of thinking badly. But I’m not sure that when students learn to write academic prose, citing academic sources the way scholars do in their publications, that the values implicit in that kind of writing are clear to them. And while this is nothing new, it seems especially pressing in this post-truth era, when words like “argument,” “proof,” “evidence,” and “truth” are mo