Navigating information literacy education and personal beliefs
Election fraud. Unsafe vaccines. Crisis actors. Fake news. With so much misinformation circulating via the internet, and even via traditional media sources, what’s an information professional to do?
As information professionals, our instinctual reaction to these issues has been the rallying cry of information literacy. The ALA defines information literacy as the ability to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information”. We highlighted some of these skills in a previous issue of Book[ed], where we discussed identifying bias in media sources, as well as assessing these sources for the accuracy of the information they convey. In addition to these skills, the ability to identify rhetorical strategies (and rhetorical fallacies) can help us resist being manipulated by deliberately misleading arguments. As information professionals, we must make sure that we are able to shepherd our patrons and the community at large through this process, as these are often skills many people are not taught explicitly in school.
We recently had visceral proof of the dangers of misinformation: that of a domestic terror attack on our Capitol building on January 6th, fueled by false allegations of election fraud and belief in global conspiracy theories. But lest you believe that circulation of misinformation is only the province of far-right groups, I will remind you of rampant misinformation circulating in leftist social media during the George Floyd protests last May. No one group is immune to the lure of misinformation, especially when the falsehoods confirm our deeply-held beliefs.
And here is the thorny piece of the current crisis for those of us in the LIS community: listing resources, developing literacy frameworks, and even creating lesson plans feel staunchly within our wheelhouse, but what can we do about people’s beliefs? Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman tells us that humans have two thinking processes: one that is slow, rational and deliberative, and one that is emotional and instinctual. If we as information professionals only appeal to one way of thinking, but not the other, we fail to fully address the roots of why pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and general misinformation continue to be alluring.
Sidestepping the issue of belief while providing information literacy resources falls firmly in the “myth of library neutrality”, which we examined in our August 2020 issue of Book[ed]. In his 1986 Nobel Prize speech, Elie Wiesel asserted that “we must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”
As information professionals, information literacy will always be a core tenet of our field. But we must also engage in open and honest conversations about beliefs. We must listen and attempt to find common ground. We must acknowledge people’s fears and be willing to share our own. We must make our spaces welcoming of all patrons, especially those who have been excluded by libraries. Education is valuable; so are relationships. It is our job to balance the two in order to effectively thwart misinformation.