Bibliographic instruction and postmodern pedagogy - The Library and Undergraduate Education

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by Taylor E. Hubbard

law or tradition, juridically defined or spontaneously accepted, to

proffer such discourse? (p. 50)

Obviously, this is a different concept of "content" than that of structural BI. If we spin a BI program out of it, Foucault's method proposition might be: if information has its roots in human activity and its expression in human action, then questions of authority, and the discourse analysis embedded in them, are worth considering in what we teach about information. What is going on in the texts we collect? How do they create the knowledge that places the library at the center of the university? However, library literature seems to be ignoring, or studiously avoiding, these basic questions. For example, in a recent review of "Library Literacy," the BI column of RQ a twenty-five-year summary of the column could cite only two articles related to discourse studies (Arp, 1994).

The inattention to texts is an odd circumstance when we consider that our shelves are virtually groaning with works on the social aspects of knowledge. Woolgar's (1988), Science, the Very Idea, which addresses both science and social sciences, is a good example, as are Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life, McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics, and Nelson, et al.'s The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences.... Gross, in his Rhetoric of Science, appends a twenty-page list of them (pp. 221-42). Becher (1989) has made a career of writing delightful articles and a book, Academic Tribes and Territories, on the behaviors of knowledge communities. Lodge and others (Small World) have contributed satiric looks at our academic worlds. Together, they are a reminder that knowledge, like life, "is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation" (p. 69), as Leonard Woolf (1970) observed. These are examples of humanistic tools we can give students to break into the disciplinary ivory towers.

One study used frequently in information courses at Evergreen is Shaping Written Knowledge, by rhetorician/writing instructor Bazerman (1988). The work is a collection of Bazerman's published articles, one of which, "What Written Knowledge Does," is especially useful for illustrating how a text can be analyzed by students (pp. 18-55). In the article, Bazerman dissects three illustrative articles taken from journals in literary studies, social sciences, and science, each by disciplinary heavyweights--i.e., Hartman, Merton, and the well-known duo of Watson and Crick of DNA fame. Bazerman uses these articles in a Sherlockian manner to compare how these authors go about constructing statements of knowledge that are recognizable and accepted by their disciplines. "In mediating reality, literature, audience, and self, each text seems to be making a different kind of move in a different kind of game" (p. 46). He concludes by pointing to these four components of composition as the defining elements in disciplinary knowledge:

Getting the words right is more than a fine tuning of grace and clarity;