What does it mean to be a good researcher? For that matter, what does it mean to be a good reader, or a good writer, or a good anything?
Sometimes we try to answer this question by focusing on discrete skills: can I find an article in a database? Can I cite sources correctly? Can I structure a sentence grammatically, or craft a coherent thesis statement? These skills are important, certainly, but they’re each only a piece of a larger picture. For us to truly exercise these skills well, we need to understand the core ideas that underly them.
The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education lists six overlapping frames of information literacy. You can think of them as six ideas, six core understandings, which give us the ability to interact with information effectively and ethically. These ideas intersect with and inform each other: if we deepen our understanding of one, it affects how we think of the others.
The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy and the Six Major Frames. From: Burress, T., Clark, M., Hernandez, S., & Myhill, N. (2015, June). Wikipedia: Teaching Metaliteracy in the Digital Landscape [poster]. Presented at the ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition, San Francisco.
Don’t worry! You don’t need to know information literacy in this rather academic way. The point is to realize that there’s a lot going on underneath the discrete skills we tend focus on. The fact is, we can learn to do certain actions—to click the correct link in a search result or to insert a citation—but that doesn’t make us genuinely literate consumers or creators of information. Imagine teaching someone to drive by only showing them how to push the gas pedal and turn the steering wheel. They’d have relevant skills, but they’d lack the integrated awareness of physics, traffic flow, road safety, and social responsibility that they need to truly be a good driver.
Information literacy is exactly this kind of integrated ability. It’s not a checklist we complete once; it’s a way of being, a disposition, a continuous process. When we talk about information literacy as a set of integrated abilities, we are talking about bringing together mechanical skills (like searching or citing) with core concepts about what information even is and how it is produced and valued and shared and the whys behind all this. It is this integration that transforms a collection of isolated skills into a cohesive, enduring way of being—a way of engaging with the world of information critically, reflectively, and ethically.
(This is a very Jesuit thing, by the way! You might have heard the term cura personalis—"care for the whole person?" Part of Gonzaga's mission is to develop students holistically, giving them not just a set of skills in a vacuum but deep, transformational understandings that change who they are for the better. More about Jesuits soon!)
Image courtesy of Lumen Learning
As in research, the writing process will also require integrating multiple distinct abilities. For example, the generation of a thesis statement may require preliminary reading and reflection, individual introspection, ideation and inquiry, and a reiteration of any or all of these components.