In a Research-Writing Frame of Mind

Librarians have been coordinating with composition instructors to offer information literacy instruction in composition classrooms long enough that it can no longer be considered a new trend, but rather a standard feature of many information literacy programs. Sometimes this collaboration comes in the form of a one-shot, sometimes the librarian is embedded, and sometimes the librarian is a co-instructor. Information literacy and composition are often intertwined in higher education; recently, the professional organizations associated with writing programs and with information literacy programs have developed documents to define the characteristics, habits and dispositions of successful students. The documents, the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, lay out frames that describe students who write and manage information well. The publication of these two Frameworks provides an opportunity for practitioners to examine the relationship between writing and information literacy, what writing instructors often refer to as research-writing skills. Intended for librarians and composition instructors, this book chapter examines how teachers of writing and research skills can enhance their understanding of the two Frameworks as being similar and linked with one another, and by doing so become more effective teachers. This chapter makes the intersections of information-using and writing that exist implicitly in practice explicit for students as it explores ways to better integrate writing and research instruction in composition and information literacy classrooms. It does so by looking at how the intersections between the Frameworks inform writing and library instruction pedagogy providing examples of writing and information-using assignments based on the Frameworks

In a Research-Writing Frame of Mind

Librarians have been coordinating with composition instructors to offer information literacy instruction in composition classrooms long enough that it can no longer be considered a new trend, but rather a standard feature of many information literacy programs. Sometimes this collaboration comes in the form of a one-shot, sometimes the librarian is embedded, and sometimes the librarian is a co-instructor. Information literacy and composition are often intertwined in higher education; recently, the professional organizations associated with writing programs and with information literacy programs have developed documents to define the characteristics, habits and dispositions of successful students. The documents, the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, lay out frames that describe students who write and manage information well. The publication of these two Frameworks provides an opportunity for practitioners to examine the relationship between writing and information literacy, what writing instructors often refer to as research-writing skills. Intended for librarians and composition instructors, this book chapter examines how teachers of writing and research skills can enhance their understanding of the two Frameworks as being similar and linked with one another, and by doing so become more effective teachers. This chapter makes the intersections of information-using and writing that exist implicitly in practice explicit for students as it explores ways to better integrate writing and research instruction in composition and information literacy classrooms. It does so by looking at how the intersections between the Frameworks inform writing and library instruction pedagogy providing examples of writing and information-using assignments based on the Frameworks

Communities of Information: Information Literacy and Discourse Community Instruction in First Year Writing Courses

The artifacts of discourse (print texts, recordings, Web documents, etc.) are information, and as such fall under the umbrellas of both discourse communities and information literacy. Since the product of a discourse community is information, and in a first-year writing course students are both learning how to navigate and to join discourse communities, students should be taught about discourse communities and information as linked ideas. We reframe the idea of discourse communities as information communities that share aspects of both John Swales’s definition of discourse communities and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. By presenting these ideas as intertwined, not only do students learn about the features of different types of communication in a given field, they begin to think of the artifacts of that communication and how it is organized, shared, and created. In this chapter we give examples of how to explicitly draw together some of Swales’s characteristics of a discourse community and the Framework. In addition to tying together concepts from information literacy and discourse communities, we provide examples of assignments that can be used in the composition classroom

National (Be)Longing: American Imperialism and Identity Formation in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

In this project, I examine narrative strategies used by writers of the American West to create, discuss and critique "American" identities. The work of contemporary multi-ethnic US authors including Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Dream Jungle, Nina Revoyr's Southland, and Manuel Muñoz's What You See in the Dark, I argue, should not be considered as a separate category of American literature, but rather a part of an on-going conversation within twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. These texts are a part of a crucial and often overlooked component of American literatures. They reveal a legacy of denied belonging that supports cycles of structural, cultural, and personal violences against marginalized subjects. Since multi-ethnic literature of the US and multi- ethnic US subjects are diverse and shifting, and do not rely solely on geographical, national, or physical limitations, they are thus difficult to define. Yet the authors included in this project use that very ambiguity as a potential for interrogating the concepts of "America," "American subject" and "American literature" to reveal how American experiences, ideologies, and rhetorics challenge, complicate, allow, or deny belonging in America, and contributions to American narratives. These authors - Hagedorn, Revoyr, and Muñoz - I suggest, take on the challenge of representing minority experiences while also seeking to define an America that envisions the multiplicity which is foundational in narratives of America, but which is so often excluded in practices of national belonging. In order to make this argument, I investigate the relationships between national identity and transnational affiliation, between visibility and violence, between subjectivity and identity, and between kinship and affiliation. My project draws on recent critical conversations on identity in US multi-ethnic literature, and I build upon work by scholars including Lisa Lowe and David Eng that foregrounds the fluidity of identity in order to examine the effect of racializing processes that are built into cultural discourses on people and communities of different levels - local, national, transnational and global. These conversations also reveal a central concern of US multi- ethnic literature and scholarship to be the deconstruction of essentialism, and what Yen Le Espiritu calls the "emergent quality" of panethnicity present for ethnic Americans and ethnic American scholars. Multi-ethnic literature of the US presents opportunities to identify and counteract discourses of power that produce and are obscured by essentialist concepts of ethnic identities. However, such deconstructions, while they reveal unequal power structures, might also be seen to limit the possibilities for minority empowerment through political mobilization. Together, Dogeaters, Southland, What You See in the Dark, and Dream Jungle posit different models through which individuals' experiences can be represented, alternative methods of national belonging can be expressed, and new constructions of identity can account for multiple - and often conflicting - alliances. Occasionally, these novels suggest that important aspects of identity must be ignored in order to gain community alliance. I argue that those aspects of identity which the state, popular culture, or dominant ideology erase or "forget" in order to gain strategic support for or visibility of minority groups in America are many times the very aspects that are the most marginalized. The novels also then frame an argument about American identity both by creating the possibility of an American identity for native and ethnic American minorities and by revealing the ways in which US popular culture and global capitalism both structure and disrupt possible ethnic and multi-ethnic American identities

Communities of Information: Information Literacy and Discourse Community Instruction in First Year Writing Courses

The artifacts of discourse (print texts, recordings, Web documents, etc.) are information, and as such fall under the umbrellas of both discourse communities and information literacy. Since the product of a discourse community is information, and in a first-year writing course students are both learning how to navigate and to join discourse communities, students should be taught about discourse communities and information as linked ideas. We reframe the idea of discourse communities as information communities that share aspects of both John Swales’s definition of discourse communities and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. By presenting these ideas as intertwined, not only do students learn about the features of different types of communication in a given field, they begin to think of the artifacts of that communication and how it is organized, shared, and created. In this chapter we give examples of how to explicitly draw together some of Swales’s characteristics of a discourse community and the Framework. In addition to tying together concepts from information literacy and discourse communities, we provide examples of assignments that can be used in the composition classroom