Information Literacy: A New Organizing Principle for the First-Year College Writing Course

Teachers of first-year writing courses and college librarians often work independently to demystify the research process and source-based writing for new college students. Despite the convenience and autonomy of this parallel arrangement, writing teachers have overlooked an important opportunity to dislodge their pedagogy from a long history of ineffective research-based curricula and assignments. That history and its persistence have frustrated some of the most insightful, prominent researchers in writing studies (like Richard Larson and his 1982 critique of the “research paper” as a “non-form of writing”) and library studies (like Barbara Fister and her bemused experience in sessions at the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication). Only recently have researchers like Rolf Norgaard (2003, 2004) and Barry Maid and Barbara D’Angelo (2004) suggested a promising way to chart quite a different future: infuse writing courses, learning objectives, and pedagogies with an understanding of research informed by the “performance indicators” of information literacy developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Why it took so long to discover this possibility is what my presentation aims to explain. It further argues that the potential these standards could have to revolutionize the teaching of research in writing courses is frustrated by the myopic politics of revising the organizing principles that shape professional statements like the WPA Outcomes Statements for First-Year Writing. I conclude by exploring how the CWPA and the ACRL might more explicitly reference one another\u27s organizing principles and nomenclature in their respective best-practices statements and norming standards