DrWeb<p><strong>“I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age | Willenborg | College & Research Libraries</strong></p><blockquote><p>Link courtesy of <span>Library Link of the Day<br><a href="http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/</a> (archive, rss, subscribe options)</span></p><p><a href="https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/index" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Home</a> > <a href="https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/issue/view/1680" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Vol 86, No 4 (2025)</a> > <a href="https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/26856/34779" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Willenborg</a></p><p><strong>“I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age</strong></p><p>By Amber Willenborg and Robert Detmering<a href="https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/26856/wilen.html#footnote-000" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">*</a></p><p>This national qualitative study investigates academic librarians’ instructional experiences, views, and challenges regarding the widespread problem of misinformation. Findings from phenomenological interviews reveal a tension between librarians’ professional, moral, and civic obligations to address misinformation and the actual material conditions of information literacy instruction, which influence and often constrain librarians’ pedagogical and institutional roles. The authors call for greater professional reflection on current information literacy models that focus on achieving ambitious educational goals, but which may be unsuitable for addressing the larger social and political crisis of misinformation.</p><p><strong>Introduction</strong></p><p>Donald Trump’s unlikely presidential victory in 2016 has become inextricably associated with growing public concern about the potentially negative impact of false and deceptive information on democratic society (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Tenove, 2020). While media saturation and political distortion eventually rendered phrases such as “fake news” and “alternative facts” virtually meaningless, ongoing waves of COVID-19 skepticism, QAnon cultism, and 2020 election denialism suggest that various forms of misinformation and disinformation will continue to play a worrisome role in political discourse going forward. Misinformation—defined broadly to encompass disinformation and related concepts—is not a new problem for democracy; however, in today’s environment, online social networks facilitate the rapid and widespread circulation of misinformation into the larger media ecosystem, making verification exceedingly difficult and enabling interference in political campaigns and elections (Muhammed & Mathew, 2022; Tenove et al., 2018). Unsurprisingly, as long-time information literacy educators and advocates, many librarians feel professionally and morally obligated to address this crisis.</p><p>In recent years, innumerable scholarly works, think pieces, and statements from professional organizations have asserted that librarians have an especially important role to play in helping students and other library users evaluate information sources more effectively against the backdrop of civic discord and online propaganda (ALA, 2017; Batchelor, 2017; Cooke, 2017; Eva & Shea, 2018; Fister, 2021a; IFLA, 2018; Jaeger et al., 2021; Musgrove et al., 2018). Succinctly encapsulating what has become the consensus view, Beene and Greer (2021) state, “Librarians are uniquely poised to prepare learners for a lifetime of critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and information literacy” (p. 3). Based purely on the literature, the outpouring of classes, workshops, events, online guides, and other content focusing on fake news and related topics indicates that instruction librarians have largely accepted some measure of responsibility for combating misinformation as part of their efforts to advance information literacy on a broad scale (De Paor & Heravi, 2020; Revez & Corujo, 2021).</p><p>At the same time, while there appears to be general agreement that librarians should involve themselves in teaching students to identify misinformation, there is controversy surrounding the nature of that involvement. For example, librarians have been criticized for their apparent lack of engagement with research from other disciplines regarding the psychological and emotional dimensions of misinformation, specifically cognitive biases such as motivated reasoning, as well as imperfections in human memory, that can lead people to cling to false beliefs, even after they have been corrected (Sullivan 2019). Librarians have also been called out for their reliance on checklist heuristics that stress evaluating the superficial features of web sources in isolation, rather than thinking critically and holistically about sources in relation to one another (Beene & Greer, 2021; Faix & Fyn, 2020; Lor, 2018; Ziv & Bene, 2022). The popular “CRAAP Test” (Blakeslee, 2004) is perhaps the most notable—and now increasingly notorious—example of this problematic checklist approach. Additionally, to more fully understand how librarians and other educators are teaching students to evaluate information, several researchers have conducted content analyses of library and university websites (Bangani, 2021; Lim, 2020; Wineburg et al., 2020; Ziv & Bene, 2022). This body of scholarship consistently shows that such websites emphasize outdated, inadequate, and counterproductive evaluation guidance, as opposed to what Ziv and Bene (2022) refer to as “networked interventions,” (i.e., proven techniques such as lateral reading that focus on evaluation within the context of the larger web) (p. 917). Although providing a certain level of insight into the instructional approaches employed by librarians and offering fully justifiable critiques of those approaches as they appear online, these studies are necessarily limited by their dependence on websites, which, divorced from the context of lived experience, may ultimately tell us very little about how librarians actually teach their students about misinformation.</p><p><strong><em>Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.</em></strong></p></blockquote><p>Continue/Read Original Article Here: <em><a href="https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/26856/34779" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">“I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age | Willenborg | College & Research Libraries</a></em></p> <p><a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/america/" target="_blank">#America</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/college-libraries/" target="_blank">#CollegeLibraries</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/donald-trump/" target="_blank">#DonaldTrump</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/health/" target="_blank">#Health</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/library/" target="_blank">#Library</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/library-of-congress/" target="_blank">#LibraryOfCongress</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/politics/" target="_blank">#Politics</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/reading/" target="_blank">#Reading</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/resistance/" target="_blank">#Resistance</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/science/" target="_blank">#Science</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/technology/" target="_blank">#Technology</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/trump-administration/" target="_blank">#TrumpAdministration</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://drwebdomain.blog/tag/university-libraries/" target="_blank">#UniversityLibraries</a></p>