Bibliographic instruction and postmodern pedagogy - The Library and Undergraduate Education

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by Taylor E. Hubbard

INTRODUCTION

D'ya know the creed a

Jacque Derrida?

Der ain't no reader.

Der ain't no wrider

Ider

--Anonymous

This bit of wit might be the abstract of many responses to postmodernism--the projects of deconstruction, irrationalism, and other forms of the virulent "French disease" spraying through ink jets onto sacrificial trees around the country. Canonical outrages rumble across the academic landscape. Strong programs battle weak responses, agents unfix, texts destabilize, boundary disputes flourish. Of these academic wars going on in the texts we buy and the disciplines we support, librarians and campus information specialists might well ask Gertrude Stein's (1937) famous question: "Is there a there there" (p. 289)? From the paucity of references to postmodern anything in our professional literature, the answer would appear to be negative. A quick search through the 1982-1994 ERIC can link librar* and (deconstruct* or postmodern*) only seven times total. LISA finds eleven links. Despite the odds, however, this author maintains that postmodernism is worth consideration.

For one thing, as information managers, we should have front row seats at discussions that go to the heart of our profession as collectors, codifiers, and deliverers of information. In many ways, we seem to have settled on definitions of information that resemble a cargo manifest of hardware and artifacts. We take pride in volume counts and holdings but take the Nuremberg defense when asked how, except by shear weight of numbers, these tomes and tools function to support the disciplines for which they were brought into being. Postmodernists would like us to consider that there may be no knowledge, only knowledges, that our reference and circulating texts are curiously ambiguous as communicators of information, and that each text (document) is a knowledge claim that follows local rules made by social agents we call disciplines--the human factor.

For those involved in bibliographic instruction (BI), postmodernism implicitly invites us to revisit our concepts of information as we go about our instructional business. If all knowledge is local, should not our instructional focus be on those who create it rather than on the subsequent acts of others who publish, collect, and organize it? If we accept the reflexivity principle prescribed by postmodernists, should not we be looking at the preconceptions, values, and biases we and others have imposed during the classifying and organizing process (Hubbard, 1992)? This has already occurred to others on campus. Among composition instructors, for example, there has been movement toward reorienting student research from a top-down structured exercise to a bottom-up discovery experience. Rhetoric is being rehabilitated. Perhaps we have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

Finally, we should seek out as many perspectives as possible in the face of advancing technologies to help students interpret what authenticity, value, and use is to be made of the deluge of information raining down on us. On the Evergreen campus, as I suspect on many others, the question of whether or not to deal with electronic media, which I will shorthand as "The Net," has been supplanted by the more pressing question of how to deal with it. It is a question being asked, naturally, of the library--the self-proclaimed "heart of the university." A great deal of useful material has been compiled about what is out there and how to get to it; my issues of ALA and ACRL journals are filled with helpful surfing hints and addresses, not to mention some disquieting access and administrative tempests of the talk show variety. But questions and answers about the knowledge value and relevance of The Net are less easy to find in library literature. For example, what qualities of knowledge or information are transcendent in either codex or digital form, and how is this decided? The Net is now, and may well continue to be, an unorganized collection of knowledge or information. If what we have taught in the Industrial Book Age is the organization and structure of codex knowledge and all we teach about The Net is communications software, data manipulation, and liberal attitudes, the Information Age may be more threat than promise for our pedagogy if not our profession.(1)

POSTMODERNISM

"Postmodernism" presents lexicological problems because of wide acceptance and local use by academics and professionals as well as by the popular culture. The definition that follows is reductionist to a degree and no doubt annoying to anyone versed in philosophical or epistemological niceties, but my interest here is on the pedagogical opportunities presented by postmodernism.(2)

Defining "postmodernism" first requires defining "modernism," to which it is a response. For present purposes, "modernism" (and the related term "structuralism") is a philosophical attitude that ripened in the twentieth century. It has intellectual roots in rationalism, positivism, and evolution, reaching back as far as Plato's ideal forms (idealism). It is given to speculation and theories of the grand universalizing kind, attempting to hand down laws. that govern the natural and, increasingly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, social worlds. It implies order and orderly linear thinking and systematic approaches to problems and exposition. This in turn implies structure and hence structuralism. From the postmodernist perspective, modernism privileges science and the scientific method as its examplar. Much like Plato, in defining knowledge, modernism tends to discount, marginalize, or dismiss individual or collective acts which, by their spontaneous nature, lack systematization. This extends to the arts in which, in order to be granted recognition, a work must conform to rigid rules and sensibilities pronounced by the critics and priests of high culture. Modernism craves certainty and predictability. Keats would say it has no negative capabilities.