Developing Lifelong Learners: Controversy and the Educative Role of the Academic Librarian

MAUREEN NIMON

ABSTRACT Academics and librarians in higher education share the goal of maximising learning opportunities for students. Cooperative effort between the two parties for this purpose is general practice. However, recent research and public debate provide evidence of disagreement between academics and librarians in regard to achieving mutually held educational goals. Specifically, there is evidence of opposing positions on the teaching role claimed by librarians in pursuit of developing students' information literacy.

Some argue that the teaching role of the academic librarian will win greater acceptance if librarians undertake educational training. A case is made for building the teaching expertise of librarians at least in part on professional activities they already engage in. This could be done by researching these activities as educational events and investigating how to educate librarians to teach more effectively through these activities. Publication of research in this area would make known an aspect of the teaching role of librarians solidly drawn from their professional expertise and uniquely their own. It is believed that this evidence would facilitate more effective cooperation between academics and librarians. Such a strategy conforms to one aspect of Boyer's scholarship of teaching.

I nformation literacy continues to be a key professional focus for Australian librarians in higher educational institutions. Many academics promote the development of students as 'lifelong learners', a goal that encompasses teaching people to become information literate. Cooperation between

academics and librarians to promote mutual goals commonly occurs, but there is evidence that more can be done not only to improve general understanding of the potential contribution of librarians but simultaneously to enhance it.

Midway through 2001, the Information Literacy Forum emerged strongly from the reorganisation of the Australian Library and Information Association, a structural change on the part of the national professional body designed to break the moulds of custom and direct energy into critical and strategic activities. During August of the same year, members of the Forum took part in an online discussion of issues raised in a paper by Judith Peacock. Peacock argued that:

. . . information literacy is becoming the catalyst for comprehensive and, at times, radical curriculum reform within the tertiary sector. As libraries move to consolidate a dynamic and authoritative position in this evolving scenario so, too,

Maureen Nimon, School of Communication, Information and New Media, University of South Australia, Magill Campus, St Bernards Road, Magill SA 5072. Email: Maureen.Nimon@unisa.edu.au

Nimon: Developing Lifelong Learners

do academic librarians face the challenge of reconstructing their professional roles and responsibilities.

Reference librarians will become key educators in the teaching and learning environments of the future, working in professional partnerships with faculty teaching staff. To do so they must be equipped with refined skills and the conceptual knowledge which enables them to perform with an educational competence, and professional confidence, equal to that of their academic peers.

However, responsibility also rests with parent organisations to provide adequate and timely support for this shift in emphasis. The academic library must reinvent itself as a 'learning library' ... 1

The weight given by Peacock to information literacy as a contemporary concern of Australian academic librarians is supported by the publication in January 2001 of the Information Literacy Standards by the Council of Australian University Librarians. Derived from those developed in the United States, the standards set out not only the need for information literacy, but also that it is a 'prerequisite for lifelong learning and is common to all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education'.2 They also state that 'incorporating information literacy across curricula... requires the collaborative efforts of academics, staff developers, learning advisors, librarians and administrators' .3

Thus the assumptions underlying planning by librarians for information literacy outcomes in higher education in Australia are that • information literacy is an essential component of the education of all

students • achieving effective information literacy outcomes in terms of student

learning requires curriculum reform that embeds information literacy strategies into core learning activities

• librarians need to deliver their expertise into core teaching and learning activities from conception to design and delivery

• to do this librarians need knowledge of and skills in teaching and learning • new, closer working relationships must be forged between all concerned

for student learning.

Information Literacy in Higher Education: Colliding Views Since the development of 'lifelong learners is central to the mission of higher education' and information literacy is a 'prerequisite for lifelong learning' ,4 it is logical that librarians see the potential contribution of academic librarians to the achievement of that mission as vitally important. Consequently, committed professionals such as Peacock argue that 'tertiary institutions must reduce arbitrary limitations and accept, accommodate and encourage newly-defined teaching and learning roles and partnerships'. 5 Yet there appear to be

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considerable barriers to achieving such partnerships in practice, desirable though many librarians and academics may consider them to be.

Peacock herself reports in the Online Forum that, after giving a friend, who was an academic colleague, a brief synopsis of her views, she was 'completely stunned' by the academic's 'quite vehement rejection of the idea that librarians could and perhaps should hold academic status'.6 In 2001, at the request of the University Librarian, Dr Bundy, Irene Doskatsch conducted a review of the contribution made by the library to the information literacy development of the students of the University of South Australia. Doskatsch was to 'propose ways for the library to enhance cooperation with academic staff and other agencies in the university responsible for teaching and learning 'to maximise information literacy development opportunities for students'.

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Doskatsch reported that: The Review revealed a number of issues of concern pertaining to the educative role of liaison librarians. The most contentious were: • liaison librarians perceived that many academic staff had not accepted the

concept of collaborative program planning and teaching involving library professional staff ...

• many liaison librarians believed that the library has made limited progress in promoting to the academic community and senior management the substance and value of the library's contribution to teaching, learning and research.

Both findings provoked loud protestation and refutation from a number of influential academics.8

The first was specifically rejected by the University Teaching and Learning Committee.9

This collision of perceptions is one that must be explored if the partnerships necessary for the embedding of information literacy into curricula are to be effective. Clearly, the response of each group, librarians and academics, sprang from different views of what part librarians should play in teaching and learning. To many of the academics Doskatsch consulted, the part already played by librarians was sufficient; to the liaison librarians, it was not. More importantly, the satisfaction of academics with the status quo epitomised for the librarians the lack of understanding on the part of academics of both what librarians have to offer and their fitness to provide it. The division of opinion becomes even more pertinent when it is viewed in the light of the graduate qualities adopted by the University of South Australia. One of these is that a graduate of the institution will have 'lifelong learning skills' .10 The design of each subject taught in the university must demonstrate how it contributes to the development ofthis graduate quality. Given this requirement, librarians may expect that academic staff will welcome expert assistance in incorporating relevant material and exercises into curricula. That this is not happening to an extent that exploits the potential contribution of academic librarians is a matter worth further investigation. What may be done to narrow

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the gap and perhaps even eliminate this division of views? Peacock proposes an extension of reference librarians' qualifications and a change in their status.

Preparing the Teaching Librarian In 'Thriving for Information Literacy', the 2001 ALIA Information Literacy Forum Online Debate, Peacock asserts that reference librarians should be regarded as the teaching peers of academics and granted academic status and conditions. Simultaneously she argues that reference librarians must equip themselves with 'an educational competence ... equal to that of their academic peers'. 11 Should Peacock's word 'equal' be interpreted as 'the same'? Is the way forward for reference librarians to undertake a diploma in university studies, now often taken by newly appointed academic staff?

Choosing to pursue the same educational qualifications as academics would support Peacock's claim that reference librarians should be regarded as the teaching peers of academics and granted academic status. However, most participants in the debate did not adopt her position in regard to academic status, but took her comments as prompts to explore the nature of the desirable relationship between academic and librarian, to discuss what it should be and how different, if at all, it should become from what it is now. In turn these discussions raised matters relating to the 'relevant conceptual knowledge and practical teaching skills' librarians need to become 'teaching partners' 12 and the identification of the point at which the librarian's teaching role merged into the 'status of professional information consultant' .13 While granting that educational qualifications for academic librarians were desirable, O'Sullivan argued against the case for them translating librarians into academics: 'many law librarians have law qualifications. But I don't think ... this is an argument for librarians to be regarded as the equivalent of lawyers ... understanding the client and working with them is a long way removed from "becoming" the client' .14 Lloyd agreed: 'we have our own specialist areas, unique to our profession. Our credibility rests on our professional responses, creativity, initiative [in reacting] to workplace problems' .15 Peacock responded to Lloyd, 'Point taken Anne ... I'm suggesting that teaching and learning is one of them, now more than ever before'. 16

In this context, the questions of what form the teaching role of academic librarians should take and what preparation they need to fulfil that role take on some urgency. It is, though, sensible to ask what 'teaching' is to be expected of librarians before decisions are made as to how to prepare them to discharge this duty.

It is also sensible to ask whether librarians already have capabilities by virtue of their professional expertise which, expanded and suitably transformed, would simultaneously give them a way into a greater role in learning and be immediately recognised as derived from their traditional profession strengths,

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rather than being supplementary in any way. This is especially so, since academics have long been assumed to be qualified to teach on appointment by virtue of their subject expertise and their extended apprenticeship in the philosophies and methodologies of their disciplines through their study for research degrees. The holding of a higher degree, principally a PhD, as a criterion for an academic appointment was not simply a mark of intensive mastery of knowledge of the field, but also a demonstration of capacity to apply its strategies to problem-solving. As accredited practitioners of their discipline, they were considered able to show others how to do likewise. Teaching in this context was primarily considered modelling for learners how to work in the field and mentoring learners by shaping their efforts to more closely approximate desired standards of professional performance. Exposition of subject matter, as in lectures or through discussion in tutorials, was important but subservient to the demonstration of scholarly expertise in a disciplinary area. Moreover, the mark of university study as distinct from that at school, or even at T AFE, has always been the shift of responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student. While lecturers provided subject outlines, reading lists and assessment tasks, and presented core concepts in lectures, students were expected to 'read' their subjects. Teaching in this sense (outside of schools of education) was never what is sometimes referred to as pedagogy or other labels for the study of teaching itself. It can be argued therefore that librarians are as prepared to teach in the areas of their expertise as academics are in theirs.

Much of the above description of university teaching is as applicable today as it was a decade ago. In so far as it is a reasonable description, then librarians have a similar claim to being teachers as have academics, when they are teaching students information retrieval and evaluation. Indeed, reference librarians working with individual students or small groups within the library itself can be seen to be teaching in the modelling and mentoring mode, a style not less important for not been recognised as teaching, but rather classed as 'service'. There is already recognition of the teaching role of the reference or liaison librarian, especially when he or she is taking classes on such matters as database use, but Doskatsch's research suggests there is a need to promote understanding of traditional work with individual students as teaching. Simultaneously, it would be useful to focus on how to make such work more effective as teaching by the professional development of librarians. Thus the very first step down the path of integrating resource-based learning into university study by exploiting librarian expertise may be for an advisory body such as the Australian and New Zealand Institute for Information Literacy to sponsor research effort into reference work as teaching, rather than service, and to transform librarians' strategies in regard to it accordingly. Educational experts could work with librarians to develop what has been seen as 'reference' into expanded teaching and learning opportunities. Armed with enhanced, and

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specifically, teaching, expertise in this area, reference librarians may then strive to formalise work with individuals and small groups as requisite parts of particular subjects. The publication of reports and articles of the outcomes of joint research between education experts and librarians will build an understanding in higher education of the scholarship of teaching through resource-based learning techniques undertaken by academic librarians. Research publication of this nature conforms to the promotion and development of the scholarship of teaching argued for by Boyer.17

Such an approach is also attuned to contemporary concern with the learner and learning rather than the teacher and teaching. Bahr notes that 'the new paradigm for higher education reflects a need to focus on learning, not teaching' and that in this 'new learning-centered focus' the value of 'learning by doing' is prized.18 If, as partners in the development of a learning culture, librarians take part in the design of subjects to integrate resource-based learning techniques into them, then they may consider building into subject timetables, points at which students are expected to consult on resource use for their studies with librarians in a formal manner, either in person where possible or electronically, where not. Instead of being rostered on to a reference desk to deal with 'what comes up', might not librarians' contribution to student learning be more relevant, and encompass a larger part of the student body more consistently, if their role became to work with students on their resource needs for assignments in ways designed and timetabled as integral parts of the subject program from its conception?

It would certainly be unfortunate if such an opportunity to transform traditional professional work into recognised teaching and learning activities was not taken up because of a misconception that teaching is a matter of lecturing and leading tutorials, of exposition and presentation. While virtually any professional person needs good presentation skills today, to confuse the valuable ability of being able to communicate effectively with an audience in delivering a paper or conducting a demonstration with teaching as it is required in a student-centred environment is a mistake. Bell notes that the shift in emphasis from teaching to learning in discussions in higher education is not a simple matter of semantics. In particular it springs from a recognition that the 'passive lecture-discussion where professors talk and students listen' may still have a place but 'alone [it] fails as an optimal setting for student learning' .19

Here Bell suggests that the move away from the lecture/tutorial mode of university study has been driven by the inherent weaknesses of the approach itself. As mentioned above, Peacock has argued that information literacy has been the 'catalyst' for 'radical curriculum reform'. Many other factors are clearly at work in transforming university study. To examine these would require a comprehensive literature review without adding much that would be useful to the present discussion. What is, however, a major factor in driving

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change is student demand. In a recent article in The Australian, former Vice Chancellor Lauchlan Chipman wrote that there were five factors which today's students valued so highly they would be prepared to pay for them. He listed these as

... all year round teaching, high-quality personal learning resources (notes, videos and computer software instead of lectures for example), teaching at a location and to a timetable that is personally convenient, small class sizes with high levels of interactivity, and access to computing and networks with a minimum of queuing.20

These factors are also symptomatic of the pressures from students for 'flexible delivery' of higher education. Flexible delivery is described by George and Luke as

... an approach to providing educational opportunities that are focussed on the varying learning needs and circumstances of students. These include arrangements which allow for varying the venues and timing of delivery, content (including assessment), the use of resources and technology in the primary delivery phase, and the valuing of student background and previous study.21

Library-based services have often led the way in adapting to such demands and certainly have been instrumental in making many aspects of learning and teaching accessible beyond institutional walls. Adapting library work practices to new forms of teaching and learning is a natural extension of the leadership academic libraries have and continue to provide.

Whatever the causes (and they are clearly multiple}, higher education is rapidly evolving. Curriculum change is constant. Though some lecturers may try to cling to traditional higher educational practice, their stance requires constant defence of the barricades. Nor are administrators on their side. There is, then, more opportunity for every professional with a contribution to make to become part of the 'professional coalitions' which George and Luke22 consider to be necessary for flexible delivery and the 'partnerships between stakeholders for ongoing learning' which Kearns and Papadopoulos found were 'central to the innovative responses' made in five OECD countries to the challenge of building learning and training cultures.23 However, effective professional coalitions must themselves be constructed with care and constantly maintained. They require the investment of time and expertise. Common interests between professional groups will not of themselves ensure effective partnerships, especially since each group has distinctive ways of conceptualising and attaining its goals.

Building Partnerships through Relationship Management In the past librarians have relied largely on advocacy as a means by which to pursue goals which require the cooperation of others. Advocacy has been a key strategy of teacher librarians pursuing cooperative program planning and teaching in schools. However, unless advocacy on one's own behalf is

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accompanied by effort to understand and respect the goals of one's partners, and both outcomes and procedures are negotiated to agreement and maintained by regular review, effective collaboration will not occur.

Would-be partners must invest in relationship management. In public relations today, practitioners are wary of basing their practice on simplistic communication models such as the transmission model that was proposed in the very early days of communication theory. In it communication was viewed as a one-way process by which a sender directed a message at a receiver who would absorb the sender's message exactly as the sender transmitted it, if only all 'noise' could be eliminated. This model was often taken to imply that successful transmission resulted in the conversion of the receiver to the sender's viewpoint. Similarly, advocacy as a strategy for building coalitions, if used as the sole approach, succumbs to the same fallacy: that the case the advocate is making is so self-evidently true that all he or she has to do is make it clear enough that others will accept it. Macauley has called it 'missionising' .24 Frequently advocates attribute their lack of success in achieving the required response in their audience to failures on the part of the targets of the message, rather than any insensitivity on their part to the views of those targets.

Contemporary public relationship practice no longer sees promotion and publicity as its primary focus but rather aims at the building and maintenance of mutually beneficial relationships with clients. 25

Organisations that practice relationship management within a [communication] model of two-way symmetry both generate and receive benefits. In the process, their initiatives help build community while providing social and economic return on their investment.26

Librarians already accept that their educational goals and those of academics overlap, but are not completely aligned. As a basis for building working relationships, clarification of the commonalities and the differences must be a first step. For agreement on the goal to be reached it is essential to determine which partner should do what, how and when in the ensuing collaborative effort.

Peacock is right when she states that the perceived need for information literacy is a factor for curriculum reform. But it is likely that much of the indifference or even hostility on the part of academics and others to librarians' information literacy campaigns is generated by librarians' tendency to conflate information literacy with lifelong learning, or even with new conceptions of literacy in a multi-media based world of communication. 'Literacy' has become so elastic a term, especially when used in combination with other words, as to confound discussion as much as clarify it.

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A Confusion of Literacies The information literate are conceptualised by librarians as 'people able to recognise their need for information, and identify, locate, access, evaluate and apply the needed information' .27 The aim of helping people become information literate is certainly complementary to literacy as defined in Literate Futures: Report of the Literacy Review for Queensland State Schools: 'literacy is the flexible and sustainable mastery of a repertoire of practices with the texts of traditional and new communications technologies via spoken language, print and multi-media'.28 The report asserts that for the young of today 'the capacity to manage, process and interpret information will be as important as the "three R's" were for people educated in the 1950s' .29

Managing, processing and interpreting information is even closer in wording to that of definitions of information literacy than the definition of literacy given above, but it is essential to recognise that what is both primary and central to the description given in Literate Futures is the intellectual processes of the person dealing with information and that the identification, location and accessing of required information is a comparatively minor component of it. Indeed, this second aspect is only implied, not stated. The literate people of Literate Futures are people able to cope efficiently with being 'awash with information ... surrounded, prodded, consumed and overwhelmed by it' 30 because they have intellectual abilities and strategies for choosing and using information, for selecting from the tsunami of data that threatens them. Their most efficient strategy for meeting a perceived need for information may be not to seek for it themselves but to meet that need by defining it then asking an expert (hopefully a librarian) to find it, rather than to look for it themselves.

There is a new learner abroad. The new learner lives in a world where learning is less and less restricted to distinct courses taken in formal, dedicated teaching institutions. Individuals, surrounded by learning opportunities that various voices (educators, employers, sales people) tell them they must seize, become canny and resistant. Resistance is an intelligent response on the individual's part, an information literate response, not an irrational one. As Goodman explains,

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... I am not a technophobe, I don't write with a quill pen, and I believe a certain amount of technological adeptness will keep my brain cells alive. Ifl am living over my technological head, it is because I resist spending an enormous amount of time forming relationships with technology that I know from experience is likely to leave me. Let me put it this way: if you learned French, you can always speak French. If, however, you learned DOS, you can only speak to a docent in a computer museum.

Our electronic companions tend to become obsolete as soon as we've become comfortable ...

It seems we use more time and energy on the technology that was supposed to save us time and energy.31

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The message in Goodman's article is that the information literate person is one who is cautious about exerting effort where it is not going to prove useful. This means that librarians need to adapt their language to express in the terms clients themselves use what advantages librarians have to offer them, rather than assuming they are self-evident.

If academics perceive the literacy for 'New Times' of the Literate Futures report as closer to the chief characteristics of lifelong learners than that of information literacy, then academics will continue to see the teaching they engage in as the educational mission of the university and what librarians offer as supplementary, if desirable. They will treat requests to take part in curriculum design in the light of this perspective. It is argued that though librarians may find such views confrontational, they need to explore these conceptual differences in regard to educational goals. It is also argued that building a bank of research reports demonstrating how librarians teach from the basis of their professional expertise and the educational value of this will win recognition of their rightful contribution and extend their educational role.

Notes 1 J Peacock ALIA Information Literacy Forum 2001 Online Debate

http://www.alia.org.au/groups/infolit/debate.topics/200 1.08.p 1.htm [20/8/0 1] 2 Council of Australian University Librarians Information Literacy Standards 1st ed

Canberra Council of Australian University Librarians 2001 p2 3 Ibidp3 4 Ibidp2 5 J Peacock op cit 6 Ibid 7 I Doskatsch Collaboration between academics and librarians: what are the challenges?

Unpublished thesis for the degree of MA (Information Studies) University of South Australia 2001 p4

8 Ibidpp4-5 9 Ibidp4 10 For the graduate qualities, see www.unisa.edu.au/usainfo/gradquals/ 11 J Peacock op cit 12 L Fairbairn participant, Information Literacy Forum 2001 Online Debate op cit

[24/08/01] 13 R Tweedale participant, Information Literacy Forum 2001 Online Debate op cit

[23/08/01] 14 C O'Sullivan participant, Information Literacy Forum Online Debate op cit [23/08/01] 15 A Lloyd participant, Information Literacy Forum Online Debate op cit [23/08/01] 16 J Peacock participant, Information Literacy Forum Online Debate op cit [23/08/01] 17 C E Glassick, M Taylor Huber and G I Maeroff Prologue by E Boyer Scholarship

Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate An Ernest L Boyer Project of the Carnegie Foundation San Francisco Jossey-Bass 1997

18 A Bahr in A Bahr ( ed) Future Teaching Roles for Academic Librarians NY Harrison Press Published simultaneously as College and Undergraduate Libraries vol 6 no 2 2000p3

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19 S J Bell in A Bahr op cit p47 20 L Chipman 'Paying for a Future by Degrees' Higher Education The Australian 24

October2001 pl7 21 R George and R Luke 'The Critical Place of Information Literacy in the Trend Towards

Flexible Delivery in Higher Education Contexts' Australian Academic & Research Libraries vol 27 no 3 Sept 1996 p204

22 Ibidp205 23 P Kearns and G Papadopoulos Building a Learning and Training Culture: The

Experience of Five OECD Countries Leabrook SA National Centre for Vocational Educational Research with funding from the Australian National Training Authority 2000

24 P Macauley 'Menace or missionary zeal? The librarian's role in the information literacy of doctoral researchers' paper in preparation for publication. Email contact for author petem@deakin.edu.au

25 J Chia 'Online Relationship Management: Is it a Reality for Public Relations Practitioners?' Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal vol 3 no I Summer 2001 pp97-116

26 J Ledingham and S Bruning Public Relations as Relationship Management: A Relational Approach to the Study and Practice of Public Relations Mahwar NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 2000 p55

27 ALIA Information Literacy Forum Newsletter September 2001 pi 28 A Luke Literate Futures: Report of the Literacy Review for Queensland State Schools

Brisbane: State of Queensland [Department of Education] p9 29 Ibidp7 30 Cited in A Bundy 'Information Literacy: The Key Competency for the 21 51 Century'

Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the International Association of Technological University Libraries held in Pretoria South Africa June 1998 http://www.unisa.edu.au/papers.inlit2l.htn

31 E Goodman 'Technically Speaking, it's Time to drop the Pilot' The Guardian Weekly 14-20 June 2001 p30 ·

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