4 Analysis

This review constitutes a preliminary investigation into what ought to be a broader assessment of the state of information literacy scholarship throughout CUNY. This literature review deals solely with materials published since 2018 by CUNY researchers, in order to contend with the transformations necessarily made since the Covid-19 pandemic’s profound impact on pedagogy. As such, there is missing context regarding the history of information literacy publication at CUNY. However, in the spirit of the rapid social and technological obsolescence with which librarians constantly grapple, the author thought it would be best to cover the most recent scholarly developments.

This review will analyze each chapter in isolation before making broader comment. There has been a noticeable decrease in scholarship on the subject of information literacy since 2017, based on an analysis of the metrics provided by CUNY Academic Works. Peaking at 41 publications on Academic Works that year (most likely a large scale ingest effort), there has been a steady decline in information literacy publications stored in CUNY’s central repository, with only 6 documents on the subject collected in 2023. The reason for this is unclear, but the author would like to suggest that new CUNY publishing platforms (Pressbooks and Manifold) can be assumed to be one of the major determiners of where and how CUNY’s scholars are publishing internally. These platforms have not become standard among CUNY’s librarians, and thus the statistics suppose a dearth of publication on the subject that may not be representative of what is rather a shifting publishing environment. Until the time of this review there has been no record or analysis of scholarly publications as a metric of engagement with this topic at CUNY. With the hopes that this review is repurposed and remixed in the future, especially to encompass the years preceding 2018, longer lineages of thought will certainly be unveiled, and greater context provided.

Academic Works

In the scholarship deposited to CUNY’s scholarly repository Academic Works since 2018, there are a wide range of case studies pertaining to instruction methods and quantitative results, which constitute a reflection of the broader discontents of contemporary information literacy instruction. Alongside these studies, the major theoretical points of intervention since 2018 include commentaries on the 2015 ACRL Framework, social justice, generative analyses of classroom formats, and institutional concerns regarding embedded librarianship and the need for greater collaboration between faculty and librarians. Many of these subjects are dealt with through case studies, isolating the successes and failures of particular approaches and environments. While this approach has benefits for other teachers and administrators, there is an argument that the case study as the predominant form of information literacy scholarship, as opposed to broader theoretical examinations, risks isolating the profession. This will be made apparent upon comparison with the scholarship published on the CUNY Manifold platform, which tends to be more interdisciplinary.

Of great concern to information literacy researchers are the implications of the 2015 ACRL Framework and the necessity of responding pedagogically. There is inevitably much overlap between the preferred form of publication, the case study and the subsequent pedagogical experiments. The piece that serves most directly as a broad study on the implementation of the Framework is Wengler and Wolff-Eisenberg’s (2020) article, “Community College Librarians and the ACRL Framework: A National Study.” Surveying over 1,000 librarians, Wengler and Wolff-Eisenberg shed light on a widespread lack of understanding regarding the framework. One of the major findings is that community college librarians would prefer a Framework oriented more specifically to their profession, citing the differences between 2 and 4 year institutions. In fact, the study concludes that 40% of community college librarians had not read the whole document. This study provides fruitful insight into the adoption of the ACRL Framework thus far, and possible routes for the future. In a case targeted to a specific discipline, Johnson & Mayer (2020) compare the educational competencies for social work librarians to the ACRL Framework, showing the ways in which greater collaboration with faculty can preemptively embed the principles of information literacy into coursework. Similarly, Lehner-Quam & Pitts (2019) situate their analysis of the Framework’s usability and effectiveness in a graduate science ePortfolio project. After providing a brief literature review covering other examples of Framework implementation, Lehner-Quam and Pitts tackle their case study from multiple angles, that of the teachers, the students, as well as comparative analyses between two different groups of students and their internal collaborations. There is qualitative description throughout, including quotations from participants before and after the annotated bibliography portion of their projects. The final portion of the piece covers the need for greater investment in these co-teaching projects centering the ACRL Framework.  When posed against the two case studies presented by Johnson & Mayer and Lehner-Quam & Pitts that explicitly cite the Framework, it is clear that there is more exploration to be done regarding implementation. And while these are the case studies which specifically cite the ACRL Framework in their abstracts, the Framework has become a fairly ubiquitous, if not misunderstood, part of information literacy instruction. The author found that many of the works tackling instruction from the angle of experiments in pedagogy also cited the Framework, often in more natural and fluid fashions. For example, a recent book chapter by Linda Miles & Lisa Tappeiner (2023) answers the call of Wengler & Wolff-Eisenberg (2020), applying the ACRL Framework to an Associate Degree Capstone Course. Their critical approach to reading stems from their experience teaching in an urban community college, and they break down their teaching process into a collection of “Curriculum Projects,” emphasizing genre literacy as key to students comprehending the information cycle. A major aspect of their approach is the integration of career and disciplinary literacies into their instruction. By asking students to frame their research from the perspective of one who is already engaged in a chosen field, Miles and Tappeiner find that students develop a greater understanding of how knowledge is produced, and the ways in which scholars contend with a field of study. The ACRL Framework is also navigated in Nandi Prince’s piece “What’s art got to do with politics? Show me the evidence.” In the article, Prince writes an account of her application of three of the frames to a course in the field of Latin America and Puerto Rican Studies, and her integration of art and social justice in order to engage the students. This is a clear piece that demonstrates a potential application of the Framework to a discipline-specific information literacy course.

There are alternatives to the ACRL Framework explored by some CUNY researchers, which attempt to provide creative metrics by which to analyze the effectiveness of information literacy instruction. Diao (2020/2021) provides two different perspectives on frameworks librarians can experiment with in their teaching. Diao (2020) discusses CBL (Case Based Learning), a method of pedagogical storytelling meant to encourage debate. Diao provides a thorough case study from the point of conceptualization to that of assessment, and a call for future studies and specifically greater quantitative assessment. Almost in response to his earlier work on CBL, Diao details the ICE (Ideas-Connections-Extensions) framework, a progressive assessment tool meant to trace the development of knowledge from novice to expert. These are interesting experiments and methods used to attempt the most fundamental aspect of information literacy instruction, the matter of how one learns as opposed to what one learns. Attempting to invent “quantitative” assessments to contend with this question is the unique contribution of Diao’s scholarship.

Two of the most generous and pragmatic contributions deposited to Academic Works are those of Su (2022) and McDermott (2022, 2022). Their contributions deal, respectively, with technological obsolescence and evaluating sources. Su’s “Coping with Constant Obsolescence: A Lifelong Task” focuses on technological obsolescence and the need for librarians’ commitment to being lifelong learners, so as to be able to adapt to rapidly shifting technological constructions. He then provides strategies for coping with this paradigm, and calls for institutions to be engaged in supporting lifelong learning as well. Ian McDermott (2022, 2022) provides us with very useful teaching materials, with his “Evaluating Sources” presentation providing a concise delineation of the difference between popular magazines, scholarly journals, newspapers, and Wikipedia. The other work McDermott has deposited since 2018 is a lesson plan and slideshow for a first year health sciences library instruction course. Providing questions to accompany a slideshow, the lesson highlights the importance of citation practices in scholarly communication. Contributions on the subject of teaching with primary sources are made by Jen Hoyer (Hoyer 2020, Hoyer 2022, Hoyer, et al. 2022). The subject is approached from three complementary angles: redesigning assessment frameworks (Hoyer, et al. 2022), the use of a crosswalk to bridge the standards of K-12 education and higher education in order to highlight potentially greater adaptability (Hoyer 2022), and an analysis of a case study presupposing the use of primary sources as motivators of civic engagement (Hoyer 2020). There is a particularly critical approach at work in these pieces, discernible in Hoyer’s attempts to unsettle institutional standards and frameworks with the aim of fostering greater student participation in their communities. In “Out of the Archives and into the Streets: Teaching with Primary Sources to Cultivate Civic Engagement,” Hoyer crafts an insightful literature review highlighting the crossovers between archives and teaching with primary sources (TPS), citing a diverse literature that encompasses the theoretical importance of archival pedagogy and the attempts to qualify and quantify such pedagogical endeavors.

As the most common form of library instruction, the “One-Shot,” or one-time class that occurs in the midst of another course in order to inform students’ research methods and database proficiency, makes up the majority of the case studies in Academic Works. Nora Almeida’s “Library Tautology” (2022), written as the internal monologue of an instructor of one of these one-shot classes, does a remarkable job laying bare the fractured communications, rushed temporality, and element of forced performance that emblematizes these exchanges. This creative narrative is powerful, witty, and points out the contradictory and somewhat demoralizing nature of the one-shot, bridging the gaps between real-life instruction and critical pedagogy, with copious footnotes connecting the dialogue to the realm of scholarly communication in a way that has great potential for student interactions. Ward, et al. (2020), albeit in a different form, seem to make a similar claim to that implicit in Almeida’s short dialogue. Detailing Queensborough College’s Students Working in Interdisciplinary Groups (SWIG), the authors detail their engagement with Open Pedagogy, with students organizing and creating projects collaboratively over a shared webpage (Blackboard). While Blackboard is being phased out by CUNY, this article provides a solid justification for collaborative, interdisciplinary student-led coursework. By showing visually engaging case studies and the seamless integration of digital storytelling into embedded literacy instruction, the authors make a clear case for the use value of critical pedagogy in library instruction. Richards (2021) confronts the issue of Google, problematizing the dogmatic reliance of academic libraries on scholarly publications, as the ACRL and academic libraries themselves are recognizing the need to tangle with the ways the open web makes information literacy more complex. Richards examines the citations of first-year students and discovers that many of the scholarly sources they were citing were being discovered through the open web. She concludes with the call to integrate the elements of the open web that students seem to like (ease, return of a wide array of sources) into library search systems.

Jones and Mastrorilli (2022) approach the case-study from a quantitative perspective in order to demonstrate the need for longer form courses in information literacy, arguing for the significant impact this format has in helping students understand the librarian as a resource and ally, as well as improving learning outcomes. Their course was designed in coordination with the ACRL Framework, and coordinated with first-year English courses. Outlining their quantitative results (a slight uptick in GPA) and their qualitative responses (students had appreciation for the course), the authors call for future studies demonstrating the library’s value. In other case studies, more specific skills are covered, such as fact-checking through lateral reading instruction (Brodsky, et al. 2021) and awareness of LibGuides among health students (Carey, et al. 2021). Diao (2021) covers an interesting and anomalous subject in his piece on the underrepresented Scholarpedia, comparing articles covering the same topic on Wikipedia and its scholarly double. This article might be posed against the article by Richards, for highlighting a source of information possibly used even less than library search websites. However, the quantitative analysis of the different articles is fascinating. Diao isolates the linguistic microstructures of the different pieces, as well as their titles and forms, thus providing the academic librarian with a structural argument for making the choice between Wikipedia and Scholarpedia in the name of open pedagogy and information literacy.Open Pedagogy, a topic this review will deal with in the section reviewing Manifold publications, is only confronted in one article on Academic Works (Pearce, et al., 2022). The authors reflect on a textbook creation project using the responses of 13 community college students, in order to display the real-world applications of what is still often considered a theoretical approach. By centering the emotional, ontological, and epistemic nature of student participation in this kind of project, Pearce and the other authors are able to get at the root of what is transformative about knowledge production. They also contribute productive questions for faculty to ask themselves as they develop curricula, including how to practice critical self-reflection and promote care in the classroom. Two pieces that revolve around this concept are those of Mark Polger (2021) and Leila Walker (2021). In Mark Polger’s LACUNY presentation, a pragmatic framework is proposed and elaborated in response to the transition to online teaching. Highlighting the overlap of multiple forms of ‘presence’ as beneficial to productive online learning, Polger identifies a potential historical ground to discuss online learning. In a more narrative way, Leila Walker discusses ‘interruption’, or the acknowledgement of vulnerability in the information cycle, as a version of ‘iteration’, an element constitutive of the learning process. Walker contends with the entanglement of privacy, spatio-temporal relations in the virtual, and the cultivation of individualized research practices, proposing a type of pedagogical virtual presence that allows for generative informality. Both pieces, albeit in different forms, recognize the acceptance of fallibility as key to successful experiences with online teaching, acknowledging the speed with which these changes in format were implemented.

Among the publications in Academic Works, only one piece explicitly contends with the importance of acknowledging contemporary digital forms of knowledge. Christina Boyle (2022) writes in her piece “How Do You Meme?: Using Memes for Information Literacy Instruction” about the social power of the meme format and the integration of “librarian-authored memes” into classroom settings. In outlining a brief history of the meme and providing a literature review of educators discussing the format, Boyle proceeds to propose the creation of “original memes as instructional tools that will resonate with our students in a unique and relevant way.” (Boyle, 4) Boyle also provides a series of examples of meme images, their individual histories, and sources for further contextual information. In a section on “Tracing Meme Origins,” Boyle makes a brief point regarding the provenance of online objects that deserves further explication. There are two different topics being covered in regard to these debates. One is on the level of institutional collaboration, the other is directed towards facilitating greater coordination with faculty. One area of research is in regard to academic publishing. In Berger’s (2023) work on predatory publishing, the author provides insight into successful models of deterrence, including integration of academic librarians into related campus centers, as well as encouraging one-on-one consultations with academic librarians. Shirazi (2020) discusses the treatment of doctoral dissertations by institutions, arguing that they are and ought to be considered as important scholarly communications. In both of these works, the issues of copyright and knowledge of the process and intricacy of scholarly communication are brought to bear for consideration by institutions more generally. There is a clear call from all information literacy librarians for greater integration of information literacy instruction into coursework. In Stadler & Rosa’s piece on embedded librarianship, it is illustrated that institutional objectives such as problem solving and integrated learning are more dynamically facilitated through embedding digital communication practices, such as social annotation, into coursework. Hamlett (2021) in her piece “Getting to work: Information literacy instruction, career courses, and digitally proficient students” contributes to the discourse of information literacy in relationship to the job market, highlighting the disparity between the information seeking skills taught in school, and those required in the workplace. She continues with a call for greater collaboration with Ethnography of Work teaching staff, contending that flipped classroom instruction may be a useful format to allow for more time teaching concepts rather than discovery.

A focus on particularity may serve to isolate information literacy as a subject. While these studies serve other teachers looking for new approaches or criticisms of framework applications, this mode of scholarship may stand in contradiction to the simultaneous call being made by information literacy librarians for embedded information literacy. While information literacy seeks a broader integration into curricula throughout CUNY, the recent scholarship seeks a quantitative metric for the success of this approach, without pushing its perspective in the abstract. The call for an information literate population, at least since the 1990s, has been a call for a critically-engaged and progressive community of educators who understand that the information cycle in fact informs the output of statements, descriptions, and facts. There must be this acknowledgement in the scholarly output, or information literacy librarians risk their call for ’embeddedness’ being construed as a call for the end to their positions. The field of information literacy has an inherent politics of pedagogy that must not be obscured in the desire for quantitative representation. While these representations may function as internal validation, they have the unfortunate potential of serving the larger academic debate regarding the human vs. the social sciences, relegating librarianship to a role of apolitical facilitation.

Manifold

There have been consequential efforts to integrate the principles of information literacy into the broader project of Open Educational Resources, Open Pedagogy, and Open Publishing at CUNY. The second chapter of this review indicates a steady flow of publication and course organization on the CUNY platform Manifold. Much of this work dealt with the subject in parallel to digital media and pedagogy. Specifically, the Journal for Interactive Technology and Pedagogy on Manifold contrasted to the state of information literacy scholarship on Academic Works provides insight into the need for greater engagement with digital pedagogy among CUNY’s information literacy community. While Boyle (2022), Cohn (2022), Hamlett (2021), Polger (2021), and Richards (2021) contend with methods of digital pedagogy in information literacy instruction on Academic Works, this review found that while there has been movement by CUNY to increase the use of Open Educational Resources and experiment with Open Pedagogy, these movements have not majorly impacted information literacy instruction. The scholarship that has been published on CUNY Manifold is of a different character than that housed on Academic Works. While one would be ignorant to suggest that it is the nature of the platform itself, one may begin to notice a shift in tone and discipline as one transitions from the longer established platform to the new and mysterious one. Manifold is a user-friendly publishing platform designed by CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. It is an open-source and free software whose mission is to enhance accessibility through its interface. This review would like to argue that while there have been great advances in terms of platform design, and thus the potential depth of engagement, it has been isolated. And so, while the scholarship that has been published via Manifold has thus far been engaging, interdisciplinary, and forward-thinking, it must be made more accessible to CUNY’s librarians across the entire network of schools. The desire for this can be seen in the recent (as of 2024) uptick in programming introducing Manifold to a broader audience. As will be shown in the pieces covered below, there is an understanding that sharing and embedding technologies into programs more widely can only serve to enhance the principles of information literacy so diligently noted in the Academic Works publications.

There are but a few examples of information literacy course building on Manifold. Nancy Foasberg’s (2021 August 16) English 130 Library Tutorial Modules is a well designed course, written conversationally with assignments, images, and resources embedded into an annotated lesson plan. This is the most direct bridge between the types of case studies presented in the Academic Works repository and the interactive scholarship on Manifold. A differently designed course, Controlling Images (2022), deals with the nature of images and race; this extends Foasberg’s module design (and information literacy pedagogy) into a space of intersectional analysis. The mergers of critical social analysis with media and digital literacy is perhaps the hallmark of the scholarship presented on Manifold. Controlling Images is a cannily designed collection of resources and texts that uses the platform in a subtle but effective way, pairing short essays with embedded books, images, and hyperlinks. This use of an interactive platform may become an effective tool for teaching about propaganda; the ability to sculpt networks of information into a central pedagogy is an integral part of crafting exciting and impactful courses. The majority of information literacy work on Manifold are published articles in CUNY’s Journal for Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Centering pedagogy and the ways in which it dialogues with new forms of technology, the journal strikes a critical stance that welcomes myriad perspectives. As such, much of the information literacy scholarship does not refer to the subject by name, but is very much in the mold of Critical Information Literacy. After conducting general searches and documenting the results for the terms “information literacy,” “media literacy,” and “digital literacy,” the author decided to cull articles from the journal that fit this aforementioned mold. So, while some of the work which is covered below does not explicitly appear in a keyword search, it was the determination of the author that the case study or theoretical foray embodied the principles of Critical Information Literacy, or some derivative thereof. For example, there are two pieces that make comment on experiences with First Year students (Brown 2019, Kreniske/Goodlad/Sears/Cheng 2018) in the Assignments issue of the journal. Exploring digital literacy through embedded blogging assignments and applied learning techniques, these pieces provide another potential bridge (following Foasberg’s course design) between information literacy librarians and new platforms. Some of the other case studies in the Assignments issue relate to graduate-level courses, and thus entail a greater degree of specificity. Byosiere (2020, November 19) presents a course design built around the use of Twitter as a mode of  scientific communication. Asking students to create Twitter profiles, Byosiere highlights in her conclusion the ease of assignment completion for students, with the platform operating as an input-output mechanism designed to their interests and also contributing to an understanding of cultivating a professional online presence. There is a helpful list of additional resources at the end of the article for academics interested in integrating Twitter into their courses.

There is an impetus in the Journal to contend with emerging forms of media and its potentials for pedagogy. While there were some articles engaging with memes and platforms on Academic Works (see Boyle 2022), there is a more apparent discourse of experimentation on Manifold. In another piece by Byosiere and others (Byosiere, Blackwell, Gordon, Ventura 2021 August 31), methods for enhancing low-stakes assignments through the use of memes are explored. This is a useful resource for teachers who may be looking for different ways to introduce memes into their courses, as it provides a series of concise case studies and course descriptions. Another new media covered by scholars in the Journal is that of digital games. Miles & Lyons (2019) document their initial research into designing courses based on media literacy objectives and experimental pedagogy. Duncan (2019 May 16) documents the ways “intelligibility” in game-based learning affected confidence and critical thinking. This is a fascinating study into the ways game design and perhaps more broadly screens and the modes of engagement they provoke affect student learning.

Some of the other topics of interest covered in this journal have crossover with those covered in pieces held in Academic Works. For example, Richardson (2020 January 20) covers “tagging” and consciousness of metadata in the creation of student blogs. This more technical language could help to explicitly facilitate the types of systems awareness that the ACRL Framework calls for, with students gaining tangible insight into the ways in which all forms of digital communication become searchable and accessible.

A developing project that intends to utilize Manifold for inter-school collaboration is the LILAC (Library Information Literacy Advisory Committee) Information Literacy Toolkit (2024). Designed by the author of this literature review, the toolkit has been proposed as a linear narrative through information literacy instruction, replete with new open resources created by CUNY faculty.

Conclusion