Teaching information literacy in an undergraduate class on the geography of the Middle East

ABSTRACT

Geography instructors have a role to play in helping their students to become more information literate. This is especially important today, given the complex and dynamic nature of our informational landscape, and given the evidence that young people lack much of the knowledge that is needed to engage with information critically. This paper reports on the effectiveness of an information literacy module that was included as part of a course on the Geography of the Middle East. It describes the design and rollout of the module, and the results of a study designed to assess the effectiveness of the module and the class on students’ information literacy, and to better understand students’ existing relationship to information about the Middle East. The findings of the study suggest several ways that future iterations of the module might be improved.

KEYWORDS:

• Information Literacy
• Middle East
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
• bias
• knowledge production

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Madeline Melchert. I would also like to thank Jennifer Friberg, Jennifer Sharkey, Kent LaCombe, andJacklyn Weier for their feedback and advice, and John Kostelnick for collecting and managing the study’s consent forms. Thanks also go to the article’s anonymous referees, and to the editors of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education. This research was made possible through a Illinois State University Scholarship of Teaching and Learning University Research Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though see O’Tuathail (1998) and Somdahl-Sands (2015) for attempts within Geography to integrate some of these various elements of information literacy. O’Tuathail & McCormack report on their attempt to simultaneously teach students how to use the internet for research while also teaching them the critique of it. And Somdahl-Sands explains her process of bringing together the teaching of critical media literacy and the sharing of key concepts like Orientalism and mental maps in an assignment in which students refine their media analysis skills by blogging.

2. For an overview of the histories of and differences between them, see Mackey and Jacobson (2011). Briefly, media literacy and meta-literacy place a greater emphasis than information literacy historically did on the creation of media and information, including collaboratively and including in new media spaces.

3. LIS scholarship has made a similar move towards qualitative and critical methodologies (see Halpern et al., 2015; Magnus et al., 2018).

4. I was especially interested in whether the module improved students’ information literacy, however, because content about the Middle East was taught during the module and discussions of information took place throughout the duration of the course, it did not make sense to try to separate the module from the class for analysis in any definitive way.

5. I also kept occasional research memos but these will not be discussed here due to space constraints.

6. This is not the actual course number.

7. These questions received 13, 12, and 11 responses respectively. These low numbers may indicate respondent fatigue, as these questions came fairly late in the survey. They may also indicate that respondents were unsure how to answer these questions, or that answering them required a type of reflection that they were unwilling to engage in at that moment.

8. Not always, however: one respondent wrote that information-literate people “ … understand that almost all sources have bias, and realize that bias does not inherently mean that a source cannot be trusted” (Table 5, example 10).