Nurturing the seed planted in the fertile youth (Blue Scholars 2005)
This is my contribution to information literacy. I can’t assume neutrality.
Because there’s nothing about educating folks of color that has ever been neutral. It’s always had a purpose, acculturation bound to education. The intersections of the pedagogies I use are not unusual in other fields, why isn’t it present in our field? What is it in our field that keeps us from inter-secting all of these pedagogies, the informed assets of students, in this very explicit way? How do we account for the lived experiences of the students?
How do we get there? How do we get to the point where we’re teaching underserved populations while utilizing what they know and what they learned on campus. Period. That’s it. That’s it right there in a nutshell.
Scholars have long wrestled with the problem of unequal access to ed-ucation. A number of distinct approaches have focused on the cultural biases inherent in curriculum and pedagogy. In the educational environ-ment, the “struggle over the curriculum over whose experience would be represented as valid or whose language or history would be taught—
are unquestionably long–standing” (Apple and Buras 2006, 24). What is knowledge? Who can create knowledge? Whose stories are told and how are they told? Whose lived experience is valued? The answers to these questions serve to define certain knowledge and literacies as assets that can be used in education.
I’d like to shed light and welcome you to our home—one that was in-tentionally created not on the premise of defining what I.L. is, or practic-ing and gainpractic-ing I.L. skills. I.L. is present—but in the context of teachpractic-ing I.L. that allows my students and I to do I.L. in a way that is culturally rel-evant to our lived experience, and revitalizing in a way that makes room for healing.
In this classroom, information literacy instruction had a unique op-portunity for guiding inclusion and acculturation of those that have been underrepresented and underserved in academia. Whether it is in one-shot orientations, a research project, or class curriculum created with a colleague in a different subject area, librarians must begin to look at the diverse populations they serve, their situatededness, and make informa-tion literacy relevant (Accardi, Drabinski, and Kumbier 2010). I believe the information shared here has the opportunity to help inform and transform information literacy with the engagement of students and their voiced lived experiences guiding the way. Developing critical information literacy curricula (Accardi, Drabinski, and Kumbier 2010), encompassing asset-rooted (Paris and Alim 2014) pedagogy (Akom 2006) and informed learning (Bruce, Edwards, and Lupton 2006), with what I term “explicitly racialized situadedness context” that capitalizes on the knowledge, cul-tural wealth, and culcul-tural situadedness of community college students, can help students’ engagement and persistence in academia.
The assets that my students and I bring into our classroom helped us create an environment that made a library classroom relevant, revitalized, and sustaining in our lives. Our classroom is a place where student assets are the defining components and where I believe the library classroom environment and information literacy instruction must move toward. This article contains autoethnographic snapshots from my hip-hop themed li-brary classroom. My conclusion up front is that, if there must be academic intervention protocols, let the students do the intervention—on us, for us. Our students are giving us their assets to revitalize our curricula—for them, for us, and for those who follow.
Conclusion
If you walked by a street and you was walking on concrete and you saw a rose growing out of concrete—even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side— you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete So why is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of all of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how I am leaning crooked to the side. You can’t even see that I’ve come up from out of that. (Tupac Shakur 1994)
Teaching information literacy from the viewpoint of what I know and what my students/people know provides validation and an inclusive classroom.
What my history tells me, what is important to understanding a topic, un-derstanding anything is always central to my learning. I do this by tapping directly into students lived experience and their connection with rap and hip-hop. Students show me that they can flip things around.
Students understand now that they are sitting in academic classes,
get-ting a neutral education—an education that leaves race and cultural con-text out of the conversations; that leaves their knowledge/lived experi-ence out of the conversations; and that is not attempting to look at the formal and informal information networks that students know exist. My information literacy praxis is based on formal and informal information networks. It is based on informed assets and cultural context alongside the dominant narrative. Much of today’s academic curriculum and instruction is in deficit. As an information literacy librarian, I need to acknowledge and engage students’ real assets. The real gain by teaching information literacy in this way gives students the ability to bring their entire selves and create a whole picture. Adding student assets to the situation makes information literacy more valuable, relevant, and useful. Another benefit of this type of I.L. instruction is increasing cultural literacy from their historical context—they can learn more about their cultural context and the dominant narrative alongside it in this formal/neutral environment.
I assume that students have cultural assets and that I am enriching their cultural assets via information literacy. I assume it is an important enrich-ment—part of their education—and that this process helps them use the informal and formal. This study constructs a definition of information literacy that includes the identification of how information intersects with students’ cultural knowledge, with their racialized cultural context, and considers information literacy to be valuably applicable to many differ-ent classes, necessary in understanding how the people involved, whose knowledge intersects becomes a part of the story, are part of information literacy praxis.
In this study the use of student voice placed students as experts in an environment that has seen them as being in deficit. In concluding this article, I harken back to what I believe the skills of an asset-based-minded teacher/researcher does; it is to understand what my students bring in their own terms. Acknowledging their assets means I want to learn from them. It is my students doing the intervention on me, doing intervention on the practice of information literacy instruction/definition for librar-ians. In conclusion, these students speak and end this study with their own autoethnographic voices:
King: I think this class was an opportunity for me to . . . . It was a space that acknowledged that people come into learning environments with expe-riences that could be useful or they are useful and they are valuable. To me this class turned some experiences that are sometimes dramatic and traumatic into something that could be academic to us learning why certain things happen in our neighborhood and why we experience certain things. It puts a lot of things into context for people who are not necessarily aware or knowledgeable about why your neighborhood is the way it is.
Jazz: Yeah. If you just get rid of some boundaries. Teachers, I understand there has to be boundaries, of course, but if you get rid of that teacher, student hierarchy, students are going to want to come back, students are going to want to learn, they’re not going to just sit there and be like,
“Oh my God, I’m in this class.”
Jazz: In this library class—because of the stuff I was learning. It was rel-evant, I wanted to, how do I put it in words? I wanted to learn. It was something that, I can’t even put it in words. I took the library class a second time. I needed to, I was craving to learn more, because I wanted to feel like I did in that first class.
Glossary
I can teach you my language rosetta stone. (Drake 2010)
additive: Assumes that students have assets to help them in acquiring more knowledge, and that student assets are additive not subtractive (Va-lenzuela 1999).
asset-based approach: “Emphasizes strengths over weaknesses, resil-ience over risk, and assets over deficits” (Rose 2006, 239). It is an infu-sion into culturally sustaining pedagogy that displaces the deficit model of teaching approaches that spans years and years in the history of education in the United States (Paris and Alim, 2014).
authenticity: When one’s behavior is deemed truthful by those within one’s community.1
bias: An inability for impartiality due to notions and assumptions encoun-tered prior to exposure.2
Black English: Any of a variety of dialects of English or English-based pidgins and creoles associated with and used by black people.3
code-switching: The modifying of one’s behavior, appearance, etc., to adapt to different sociocultural norms.4
critically explicate racialized context: Acknowledgment of race as be-ing essential and of the utmost importance in the lives that have been racially marginalized by the dominant culture (author’s definition).
double consciouness: An experience of having two selves experienced by African Americans, first noted by Du Bois ([1903] 1989).
informed assets: Informed assets is the historical, and cultural knowl-edge of race and community. It is the decolonized narrative alongside the dominate narrative. It is current cultural knowledge and lived experience through the lens of race, class, gender. Informed assets theoretical fram-ing assumes that what students know, and their cultural assets, help them in acquiring more knowledge.
intentional space: A culturally relevant space where members mutually agree to come together to create a context of conversational intimacy in which participants feel comfortable telling their stories, discuss shared experiences, and critically think about social/cultural context in society (author’s definition).
lived experience: Personal knowledge gained from surrounds, and inter-actions within society/community.
street knowledge: Resourcefulness to survive at the margins of society.
subtractive schooling: The concept that schools subtract resources from students (Valenzuela 1999); this is on top of cultural assimilation and de-ethnization (Lopez 1976).
traditional schooling: The dominant ways of teaching education—de-funct of cultural and indigenous knowledge and ways of teaching and learning.
underrepresented/marginalized: Groups that identify in terms of phys-ical, cultural, and class characteristics—race, class, gender, caste, tribe, mi-norities—and lack representation in areas that have the prolific presence of a dominant culture (Solórzano and Yosso 2002).
Notes
1. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “authentic,” accessed June 16, 2016, http://www.merriam-webster .com/dictionary/authentic.
2. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed., s.v. “bias,” accessed June 16, 2016, http://thefreedictionary.com/bias.
3. Dictionary.com Unabridged, s.v. “Black English,” accessed November 17, 2016, http://www .dictionary.com/browse/black-english.
4. Dictionary.com Unabridged, s.v. “code-switching,” accessed November 17, 2016, http://www .dictionary.com/browse/code-switching.
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