Disciplinary Socialization: Learning to Evaluate the Quality of Scholarly Literature

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in incorporating information literacy (IL) instruction into undergraduate curricula in higher education (HE) as a stand alone specialism, "a soft applied discipline" on its own. However, diverse and conflicting views exist about whether information use and evaluation can be taught as discrete activities in isolation from disciplinary content and context, and who, faculty or librarians, should be teaching information literacy. This article seeks to shed additional light on these issues by empirically exploring how literature evaluation and use is taught by faculty in four fields: physics, medicine, social politics and social work, and literature. Using Becher's (1989) characterizations of academic fields along the dimensions hard-soft and pure-applied, convergent and divergent, rural and urban, we explore the relationships between the nature of knowledge production within the fields studied and their practices of teaching literature use and evaluation. The findings indicate that IL is best conceived as something that can not be meaningfully approached or taught as separate from disciplinary contents and contexts. Information skills must be taught in ways that are wholly integrated with the ways literature is searched, used, and evaluated within disciplines.

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