Teaching Genre Critique in the Library Classroom

Information systems are “loaded with history, authorship and context of production…because they are produced, distributed and used as part of human activity”

(Andersen, 2006, p. 221^[1]

“teachers often see the power of genres to inhibit creativity more than the power of genres to reveal constraint”

(Devitt, 2010, p. 337^[2])

As you may have already noticed, the methods of teaching genre critique significantly overlap with the ideals championed by the critical information literacy movement. This movement, similar to teaching genre critique, is an attempt to raise student consciousness to promote their own agency in order to gain the language and understanding to critique and problematize the information genres with which they interact. Teaching students about genres explicitly, particularly as genres enter into the discourse during the research process, becomes a skill which, according to Michelle Holschuh Simmons (2005)^[3], is uniquely situated for librarian involvement. This is because, suggested Simmons, librarians interact with many disciplines without being a member of the discourse community of any of them. Librarians can give students more power in their disciplines to deliberately “denaturalize,” “transgress,” and/or “work within” (Simmons, 2005, pp. 302-303) their discourse community’s genres.

Information genres like the library database are difficult to teach because, to really champion them, it is necessary to understand the genre at two levels: 1.) the genres indexed in a database and 2.) the genre of the database itself. If you’re entering a classroom of first- or second-year undergraduate students or any group who doesn’t have the foundational knowledge associated with scholarly works, focus on introducing this first by using the techniques from teaching particular genres or teaching genre awareness to help students get a handle on genres like the scholarly journal article.

Only when you’re lucky enough to get multiple sessions with a group of students does it become appropriate for students to begin critiquing genres. If students are advanced, you can even introduce genre critique of the library database.

The WAW^[4] teaching movement offers another opportunity for librarians to teach critically. The method invites librarians to ask questions such as, Instead of teaching students how to find information, what if we taught students about information? and, Can information seeking become the discipline, rather than the task, of the information literacy classroom?

Importantly, there is already overlap in the basis of WAW and critical IL; in a 2004 article describing how to implement critical IL, librarian Troy Swanson^[5] recommended librarians teach students to ask “about information. What is it? How is it created? Where is it stored?” (p. 259). Although Swanson doesn’t name genre explicitly here, this appeal to librarians to teach about information fits right into the WAW approach.

By incorporating our own domain knowledge into our lesson plans we can begin to teach students to recognize and criticize the genres of the library, including the library catalog and library databases. Critiques of the classification systems we use and often display as impartial or neutral (see Matthew Reidsma, 2019^[6], for a primer) are examples of how we can introduce students into this discussion.

Since the one-shot library lesson is the only option many of us have to teach students, and teaching genre critique is only possible using a scaffolded method, we must look for an alternative approach to help students achieve genre awareness. One such possibility is provided in the next sub-section, An Alternative to the One-Shot: Training the Trainer.