Teaching information literacy and writing studies - Grace Veach 2018
Food for thought
Classroom-Centered Approaches to Information Literacy
In their book They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, Graff and Birkenstein (2010) challenge the assumption that writing for academic purposes can be separate from writing for personal reasons. In Chapter 9, “Academic Writing Doesn’t Always Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice,” they remind readers that when writing for academic purposes, most students tend to assume that means they must subsume their own personal voice to the words and ideas of others they use from research. Graff and Birkenstein (2010), however, insist that students should not consider academic language as being mutually exclusive from other kinds of language. They stipulate that “Although academic writing does rely on complex sentence patterns and on specialized, disciplinary vocabularies, it is surprising how often such writing draws on the languages of the streets, popular culture, our ethnic communities, and home” (p. 128). This idea is often echoed in the experiences of many of my own first-year writing students. In a recent survey of student writers, one student claimed that most academic writing, especially writing that involves research, was “impersonal and quite frankly, boring.” Whenever I teach this chapter to my students, many of them are suspicious that the personal can find a place in writing assignments that they have long assumed are reserved for what another student in the survey called “structured, fundamental, and basic.” In other words, according to many of my first-year writing students, academic writing and personal voice, including a voice that emerges from writing about personal experiences, has little business in a college classroom where academic research is taught.
Indeed, moving between academic discourse and personal writing remains one of the most mysterious concepts for students. The experiences many young writers bring with them to their first-year writing classrooms usually involve writing assignments requiring them to pick one or the other. As such, many students fail to recognize how their personal stories can find a place in the context of academic research. Many in composition studies, though, have shown that writing for personal reasons is not mutually exclusive from learning how to write for academic ones. Gottschalk (2011) breaks through this either/or thinking by showing how a writing course on expressivism can coexist in Cornell University’s writing-in-the-disciplines first-year program. She argues that the course provides for students “imaginative ways to enter into the conversation of the disciplines, when they are given ways to make the academic personal and the personal public” (2011). Similarly, Williams (2011) rethinks the legacy of Donald Murray to show that writing about the personal and writing about broader academic topics should be taught hand-in-hand. Williams (2011) insists that breaking through these dichotomies leads us “to respect student knowledge, to respect students as writers” (2011). In short, integrating students’ personal experiences with academic writing and research should not be considered antithetical to what many, including students themselves, see as the primary work of the academy.
This chapter argues that requiring first-year students to integrate academic research with personal stories contributes to their stronger understanding of the broader social contexts of language use, contexts that allow them to complicate the role information literacy plays in their understanding of how to be a writer. I describe an assignment in which students write a personal essay about the role food plays in their family, investigating connections between familial culinary traditions and how those personal narratives connect to their understanding of broader social, historical, and cultural topics. Here, I draw from surveys with my student writers and from their essays to show how this project gives first-year writers rhetorical tools to be able to dismantle what Berthoff (1990) calls “killer dichotomies” when writing about personal experiences in academic contexts. This assignment challenges their understanding of personal and academic writing by addressing how academic conventions of research can be integrated into personal writing. While these students are not always able to negotiate this transformation successfully, almost all of them gained a clearer awareness of how their personal stories can be integrated with their academic literacy practices.
THE PERSONAL, THE ACADEMIC, AND FOOD NARRATIVES
The interaction between the personal and the academic is certainly nothing new in composition studies. Ever since the early process movement, writing teachers have routinely tried to get students to incorporate personal stories in an academic context. Yet, many students still enter their first-year writing courses under the assumption that their personal stories and narratives have little bearing on their academic work. As Berthoff (1990) insists, though, “There are no dichotomies in reality: dichotomizing is an act of mind, not of Nature” (pp. 13—14). In their edited collection, Holdstein and Bleich (2001) collect essays from several compositionists testifying to the way the personal intersects with professional lives. Specifically, they remind readers of how scholarly writing traditionally restricts first-person experiences and eschews the use of the dreaded “I” in scholarly writing: “Students are not taught that sometimes the first person is effective, or that one’s own experience may well matter in one’s announcing knowledge, but that it is actually not acceptable to use the I or to fold in personal experience in substantive ways in academic writing” (p. 2). Herrington (2002) reconsiders Peter Elbow’s argument for getting students to render experience in their writing. Herrington applies Elbow’s argument for rendering experience in academic as well as nonacademic writing so that when they leave her courses, first-year writers not only learn how to write for academic settings but learn something about themselves, too (p. 238). She also argues that if students are restricted from engaging the personal with the academic, their education lacks a certain richness of learning about themselves that otherwise might not take place:
They are radically impoverished while at the university, as well, if they are cut off from a powerful way of continuing the ongoing work of composing themselves and, in relation to others, of bringing their knowledge to bear on topics pursued in their course work across disciplines. (p. 238)
This focus on work across the disciplines is reinforced in Gottschalk’s (2011) research on the benefits of teaching personal writing in a writing-in-the-disciplines program and shows the success such a course can have on students’ ability to integrate the personal with the academic, arguing that it “avoids the dichotomous trap of our asking for ’boring’ academic writing or for ’interesting’ personal writing” (2011). In short, encouraging students to integrate personal experience with academic knowledge and writing leads them to richer writing experiences, experiences that allow them to see their personal backgrounds as having a stake in their academic work.
One subject area where students have located the personal in the academic is food. Food narratives have become common genres for students to read, as well as to write. Indeed, College English once devoted a whole issue to writing about food. In that issue, Bloom (2008) compares the process of writing to the process of preparing a meal, quoting food historian Massimo Montanari:
Food acquires full expressive capacity, thanks to the rhetoric that in every language is its necessary complement. Rhetoric is the adaptation of speech to the argument, to the effects one wants to arouse or create. If the discourse is food, that means the way it is prepared, served, and eaten. (p. 347)
Later, Bloom shows that food writing is accessible: “Readers are looking for insight, entertainment, relaxation, even more than for information (except in cookbooks), and can count on food writers to provide these” (p. 354). In that same issue, Waxman (2008) explores the role of food memoirs as a literary genre and argues “for the educational value and appeal of culinary memoirs in the literature classroom” (p. 381). Waxman’s argument explores food memoirs as a genre to be read, consumed, and digested. Recently, Bedford St. Martin’s published a reader entitled Food Matters (2014), a collection of food narratives and essays exploring the role of food production and consumption, designed for first-year writing classrooms. As such, food writing, as Bloom suggests and the Bedford reader demonstrates, can be an accessible genre for many first-year writing students. This chapter is an effort to extend Waxman’s insistence on the value of the food writing genre, exploring what happens when food memoirs become something produced, cooked-up even, and not just consumed, in the first-year writing classroom.
INFORMATION LITERACY AND STUDENTS RETHINKING RESEARCH
The research skills students learn in the type of writing assignment I am about to describe are compatible with the development of information literacy skills outlined in the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016). Specifically, the food narrative assignment engages students in three of the Framework’s six concepts: Authority Is Constructed and Contextual; Information Has Value; and Research as Inquiry. In addressing these three concepts, this chapter does not mean to suggest that the ACRL Framework’s other three concepts—Information Creation as a Process, Scholarship as Conversation, and Searching as Strategic Exploration—are not taught. They are. As explained in the “Introduction,” the framework “is based on a cluster of interconnected core concepts, with flexible options for implementation, rather than on a set of standards or learning outcomes, or any prescriptive enumeration of skills” (2016). As such, my assignment focuses mostly on how students are able to construct writerly authority, to see how research leads to inquiry, and to discover the value in their information.
Integrating the personal and the academic allows students to transform their research and their understanding of what constitutes research in academic settings. This blending of the academic and the personal, as the food memoir assignment accomplishes in my first-year writing classroom, leads students to engage more fully in developing information literacy skills, skills that are increasingly taught, in collaboration with campus librarians, across the whole of the semester and not just in what Artman, Frisicaro-Pawlowski, and Monge (2010) call “one-shot” library lessons. Artman and colleagues (2010) argue that through collaboration and shared responsibility, writing teachers and librarians can integrate information literacy more fully and richly in student writing. “By helping faculty from across disciplines incorporate meaningful IL assignments and instruction in their courses,” they write, “WPAs and their collaborative library partners can encourage the development of additional context-specific approaches to research writing beyond the composition program” (p. 105). Similarly, Nelson (2013) suggests that most students, in part because of the lack of integration between instructor and other university programs, still rely on a research process that she calls the “Compile Information Approach,” an approach in which students see “their main task [being] compiling and presenting information ’to the customer neatly wrapped in footnotes and a bibliography’” (p. 89). Nelson discerns that many of these students rely on this “Compile Information Approach” despite the “recent advances in research technology and the growing emphasis on teaching information literacy” (p. 89). She quotes Bizzell and Herzberg (1987) in their assertion that “most faculty define student research as ’research-as-recovery,’ not research-as-discovery” (Nelson, 2013, p. 105). In doing so, Nelson (2013) suggests that faulty need to design research assignments to “discourage the one-night-stand approach and require critical evaluation of sources and effective use of information to achieve self-determined goals, in other words, research-as-discovery” (p. 106). By incorporating information literacy instruction with the composition classroom, going beyond the “one-shot” lesson that Artman and her colleagues (2010) caution, while at the same time moving students beyond the “Compile Information Approach” and “one-night-stand” method that Nelson explores, my food narrative assignment encourages students to rethink not only their preconceived notions of research but also their preconceptions of the role the personal plays in the academic. It allows students to transform their traditional stance on research and, in so doing, transform their writerly selves.
THE SETTING
In the spring of 2012, and again in spring 2014, I taught a first-year composition course in which both times I taught an assignment on food memoirs. In the 2012 course, I revolved the course around the theme of “Cleveland.” Most of the students come from Cleveland and the northeast Ohio region, and I believed a theme course on their hometown would generate interesting and vital papers that blended the academic with the personal. For the food assignment, I asked students to write an essay about the role food plays in the history and culture of Cleveland and in their own lives and families. To help them understand the role of food and culture in Cleveland, we drew from two main sources: one, Cleveland-native Michael Ruhlman’s book The Soul of a Chef, specifically the section on Cleveland chef Michael Symon and his restaurant Lola. Two, students also read several articles on Cleveland food and culture by Plain Dealer food critic Joe Crea, who also visited the class and shared his wealth of knowledge and expertise on the Cleveland food scene. One of the assignment’s options asked students to write a personal, first-person essay about the role food has played in their family, specifically investigating the connection between the food and the area or ethnicity in which they grew up. In addition to the readings from the sequence, I also asked them to conduct library research on those food traditions as secondary material to help them place their personal experiences in a broader, more public context. In the 2014 course, the focus changed a bit from a theme course on Cleveland to a theme course on popular culture, and the assignment changed a bit, too. I still kept the option to explore food traditions in their family and connect those traditions to broader contexts, but I also included an option where students were asked to pick a film or a popular television show that features eating and food and write an analysis of how that TV show and/or film portrays food. Again, students were required to combine library research with their analysis of the film or television program.
To help me with incorporating information literacy with this project, I worked closely with our library’s liaison to the English department, Nevin Mayer. At my institution, information literacy is stated as a core competency for written and oral expression, and Nevin’s work with the library reflects a larger information literacy outreach between academic programs and the library. Artman and colleagues 2010) argue that this kind of collaboration leads to better responses to research on the part of students. They stress that “librarians hope to provide information literacy instruction and support at multiple points during a project or a term, providing repeated opportunities in which students can practice a range of approaches to research” (p. 99). Indeed, Nevin and his library assistants not only offered one-on-one sessions, similar to the one-shot experiences in traditional research settings, but they also provided multiple sessions during a semester, both in class and in the library, where students could focus on anything from basic research strategies to more specific tasks, such as looking for a particular piece of supporting evidence for a project. For instance, Nevin and his assistants built a Subject Guide specifically for my Cleveland-themed course, and they also constructed a Web page of online resources and databases on the history of Cleveland and Ohio, including both academic and nonacademic—yet substantive—sources students pulled from for their writing assignments. For my popular culture course, Nevin provided a page of databases for pop culture studies. In addition, Nevin and I collaborated on the role information literacy would play in the course’s different assignments, and Nevin visited the course two or three times to work with us on various aspects of finding materials using both traditional and online methods. Nevin also met one-on-one with students in both courses on a variety of information literacy strategies: understanding and developing an appropriate topic, accessing appropriate information, evaluating information for quality, using information critically. In response to a survey on his role in teaching research to students across the university, Nevin stressed “that critical thinking is closely aligned with information literacy. To that end, that is a value I see woven through the university’s learning goals.” This connection, therefore, between information literacy and critical thinking manifests itself in my food assignment and the process Nevin and I used to lead students to see research as an integration of scholarly sources and personal experience.
STUDENT RESPONSES TO THE ASSIGNMENT
Now, I would like to share some of my student writers’ reflections on how incorporating personal experience with academic research in their food memoirs led some of these students to transform their relationship to research, highlighting the assignment’s strengths and weaknesses. The feedback comes from a small group of students from the class, but it reflects the feedback in general that I received from students in both courses. These cases demonstrate the role that blending personal and academic research can have for different kinds of first-year writing students, bolstering their transformation from students who held rigid notions of research to writers who complicated the relationship between personal and public. Many of the students who responded to my survey noted that they rarely, if ever, considered much research when writing. Or, if they did, it was to gather as many secondary sources as possible and put them together as quickly as possible to satisfy a high school research assignment, echoing Nelson’s (2013) “Compile Information” and “one-night-stand” approach (p. 89). As such, the food narrative assignment leads students to understand authority as constructed and contextual, to understand that information has value, and to see research as inquiry.
AUTHORITY IS CONSTRUCTED AND CONTEXTUAL
One of the benefits of the food narrative assignment is that it teaches student writers that writerly authority, and the decisions made about resources, depends on context. One of the threshold concepts developed by the ACRL (2016) insists that “Authority Is Constructed and Contextual.” In other words, according to the ACRL, “Information resources reflect their creators’ expertise and credibility, and are evaluated based on the information need and the context in which the information will be used” (Association of College and Research Libraries [ACRL], 2016). Yet, most students who come into my class assume that most research assignments are written for the same audiences and for the same purposes, if they are familiar with research methods or information literacy practices at all. In her response to the survey Trish, for example, emphasized that academic research was something she was not familiar with entering first-year composition: “In high school, I remember writing one big research paper but wasn’t taught what in-depth research was. I remember using a few websites and a book. In college, I learned how to properly use all my resources online and in the library.” Here, she suggests that, based on her experiences, most research projects lack a clearly defined rhetorical situation, that all she had to do was cite a few websites and maybe a book or two, and be done with it. Trish also noted that previous teachers—including college instructors—gave students “a number of required sources for a particular paper with the only instruction being: no Wikipedia.” In other words, her previous experience with research and information literacy revolved around satisfying strict requirements for the number and type of sources used, without taking into consideration audience, purpose, or the overall context of the project.
In allowing students to integrate the personal with the academic, my food narrative assignment shows students how authority is constructed and that decisions about what information to include in a research assignment are context-bound. Because of the assignment’s narrative bent, students build a writerly ethos through incorporating family stories and other personal anecdotes and connect them to information gathered through their academic research. In her paper, “The Irish Way,” Trish explores her family’s Irish roots and describes the various food traditions her family maintained, focusing on her family’s tradition of enjoying brunch at her grandparents’ house after mass each Sunday. In her narrative, she describes her Nana’s boxty, a potato pancake popular in Irish breakfasts. Her grandparents emigrated from Ireland in their early twenties, and Trish depicts the different Irish dishes they served around the lunch table each Sunday. In doing so, Trish integrates her family’s traditions with the history of Irish immigration to the United States and the impact of the mid-nineteenth-century potato famine on the Irish diet:
When the potato crop replenished, it came back as more of a side dish than the main ingredient, because of its prior difficulties. Though, potato pancakes still remain one of the most precious items on Nana’s list, and will continue to be one for my future family.
Here, through the integration of her personal stories from her family and through her research into the history of the Irish potato famine and its impact on Irish culture, Trish is able to connect her family’s traditions to larger public and historical events. Later, Trish remarked in the survey that before this assignment, she “knew very little about incorporating credible and relevant research in my writing.” After researching Irish food histories and connecting them with her family’s experiences, she notes that “there is a correlation between the two. I remember writing about family traditions and researching different meanings to those traditions and understanding where it came from and why my family did that.”
Another student who responded to the survey, Kelly, reflected that the integration of the personal with the academic in the food assignment challenged the way she considered context and authority in her writing. At her high school, Kelly remarked, “They taught us how to see if a source was credible or not. I briefly learned how to use a scholarly database, [and previous writing teachers] nearly always emphasized the importance of incorporating trustworthy research in writing.” In other words, she recognized that the integration of the personal with the academic altered her previous assumptions about her paper. After writing about the harmful side effects of fast food in American diets, Kelly perceives that authority in research is largely dependent on the context of the research project. This assignment, on the one hand, led Trish and Kelly to engage in the kind of academic meaning-making that Gottschalk (2011) identifies when she argues that “Students and instructors alike are more engaged, more entertained, and more passionately involved when students are provided imaginative ways to enter into the conversation, … when they are given ways to make the academic personal and the personal public” (2011). On the other hand, the assignment also invited these students to construct a writerly authority and understand that information used in research is always bound by context.
INFORMATION HAS VALUE
In addition to constructing authority and context, this assignment also teaches students that using information from various sources adds value to a student’s learning process. As the ACRL (2016) puts it, “Information possesses several dimension of value, including as a commodity, as a means of education, as a means to influence, and as a means of negotiating and understanding the world” (2016). In the food narrative assignment, students engage in different types of information acquired from both personal and academic sources, to negotiate and understand the world around them. Specifically, the ACRL stresses that “value may be leveraged by individuals and organizations to effect change and for civic, economic, social, or personal gains” (2016). This focus on numerous definitions of “value” may at first appear oversimplistic, or even contradictory. But the frame is careful to point out that “the individual is responsible for making deliberate and informed choices about when to comply with and when to context current socioeconomic practices concerning the value of information” (2016). In other words, my food assignment allows students to recontextualize information so that they see some kind of value in that information, value they may not have considered before—whether it is for “civic, economic, social, or personal gains” (2016).
Consider my student Zoe. Like most of my students, Zoe came to the course without much prior instruction in research, as she stated in the survey, and when she did use research in her writing, she assumed sources obtained from the library had little to nothing to do with information acquired from personal experience. To her, research was mostly “using databases and giving credit in the bibliography.” At first, Zoe was unsure about integrating the personal with the academic: “I found it hard,” she notes. “I wasn’t sure how to go about conducting research when writing papers about personal experience.” In her paper, Zoe chose the option of writing about a film and how it portrays food and food consumption, focusing on Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me (2008) and how fast food can have negative consequences for one’s health. Although she did not focus on personal experiences and narratives as much as other students did in their papers, Zoe incorporated secondary sources she found from library research, mostly Michael Pollan’s essay, “Escape From the Western Diet” (2012), an essay we had read as a class, as well as sources from economic and agricultural databases. Even though most of her essay summarizes these sources without connecting them to her own personal experiences and narratives, her narrative makes some moves toward writing about growing up overexposed to fast-food diets. In addition, the information she connected—Spurlock’s film, Pollan’s essay on Western diets, and the agricultural and economic sources—proved valuable to her, complicating the role of fast food in the American diet. Her essay focuses on how the food industry makes it difficult for Americans to escape a diet of processed and fast-food options, a perspective she learned through her research. Later, Zoe notes that even though she chose the film option, the topic was still personal because of the ubiquity of fast food and, as a result, the assignment challenged her previous understanding of the role personal experiences play in academic research. “It was easier to write papers about personal experiences, and finding research seemed a little easier because you’re relating to yourself.” Because students like Zoe, though the food assignment, are able to relate researched information to personal experiences, much of the information they gather and learn about has value.
In her response to the survey, Marissa also reflected on the value of information in her learning. Marissa expressed that she had little experience with information literacy instruction, pointing out she had little knowledge of research methods, stating that “even coming from a private liberal arts high school, we did more novel discussions than we did research writing.” For the food narrative assignment, Marissa wrote a paper on the role her Mexican heritage plays in the food traditions her family enjoys during Christmas. Like Zoe, Marissa also struggled with integrating secondary sources with her personal stories. Indeed, the majority of her paper focuses on descriptions of her family’s Christmas celebrations and her grandmother’s cooking, with little library research incorporated; when she did use a secondary source, it felt more like an add-on than an integrated part of her writing. Yet even this clumsy attempt at integrating secondary sources proved valuable later in the semester for Marissa. The food assignment challenged her to connect family experiences with academic research, and although her food narrative was not as successful as it could have been, she later told me that the experience helped her with the semester’s major research project, where students researched a topic associated with their major. In reflecting on the course’s role in her learning, she mentioned that the food assignment had a significant impact on her research:
I did my paper on public health and the study of infectious diseases and epidemiology. I’m not sure I ever thought the two papers were ever correlated but being able to write personally helped in leading to the big research paper as I was able to discover my voice and style. To me, using research in writing about personal experience is not always necessary but it adds value.
In other words, Marissa was able to complicate the integration of secondary research into personal experiences and, in the process, discover connections between personal experiences and academic research. As such, Marissa discovered the value such personal information holds. In short, while students such as Zoe and Marissa came to the assignment with little to no experience with research outside of a rigid, assignment-driven, “one-shot” experience that valued secondary sources only over any other kind of research, the assignment challenged their preconceived notions of research to show how different kinds of information can prove valuable to their learning and their writing.
RESEARCH AS INQUIRY
The food assignment, in addition to constructing authority and showing how information has value, also taught students Research as Inquiry. Research as Inquiry is one of the threshold concepts in the ACRL’s Framework, where they state that “Research is iterative and depends upon asking increasingly complex or new questions whose answers in turn develop additional questions or lines of inquiry in any field” (2016). By starting with their own family food traditions, my students used those experiences as a starting place to begin questioning larger social, cultural, and historical conditions. Kelly’s paper, for instance, is a good example of how students in my class were able to use research as inquiry. Kelly, an honors student who came into the class better prepared to conduct research than most other students, had never considered research playing a role in writing about personal experience. After her experience with the food memoir assignment, however, she responded in the survey that she “can turn personal experience into more than just stories. You could share information, and intertwine stories with facts to share good information with readers.” Although she had a fairly strong grounding in research from high school and other prior experiences, Kelly noted that the food assignment led her to invert her research process, leading her to consider Research as Inquiry. “It changed the way I created a piece of writing,” she reflected. “I revamped my whole writing process, which now begins with research rather than writing.” In other words, Kelly let the research guide her writing process.
This focus on letting her research questions guide her writing process manifests itself in her food narrative. Kelly had spent much of her high school years living in Scandinavia with her family, and this experience led her to question American diets and what she saw as the overreliance on processed foods. Like Zoe, Kelly was interested in the harmful effects of Western diets, but unlike Zoe, Kelly researched the question further, and her paper reflects how this assignment leads students to ask, as the ACRL states, “simple questions that depend upon basic recapitulation of knowledge to increasingly sophisticated abilities to refine research questions” (2016). Kelly’s research process began with responding to Pollan’s essay, “Escaping the Western Diet.” Here, she expanded Pollan’s definition of “Western diet” and narrowed her focus to industrial farming. She drew from sociology resources to expand her understanding of the West to include Europe and other countries with significant European origins. In doing so, she combined her family history with various academic resources to write a paper that expanded Pollan’s argument to show how industrial farming is not just impacting American diets but European ones, as well. In doing so, not only did Kelly connect personal experiences to academic resources, but she put into practice the ACRL’s focus on inquiry, which, as they note, “extends beyond the academic world to the community at large, and the process of inquiry may focus upon personal, professional, or societal needs” (2016). Later, in reflecting on her experience researching and writing the paper, and its impact on research she performed later in her college career, Kelly observed that, “depending on the research I am able to do, sometimes my whole piece of writing may have to change from my original idea in order to incorporate the research properly.” In short, Kelly’s food narrative on industrial farming, Western diets, and her own experiences living in Europe and the United States exemplifies Research as Inquiry.
SUMMARY
In her brief essay, “Writing Is Informed by Prior Experience,” Lunsford (2016) points out that when students identify clear connections between writing assignments or from one writing situation to another, prior knowledge assists them in solving the new rhetorical situation (p. 55). But, she adds, “when they simply rely on a strategy or genre or convention out of habit, that prior knowledge may not be helpful at all” (p. 55). As I have demonstrated here, an assignment that leads students to break down the dichotomies between personal experience and academic research illustrates this use of prior knowledge. Even though some of the papers were a mixed bag—some were quite good, like Kelly’s, while others merely dropped secondary research into the personal story, like Marissa’s—the assignment altered the way most of these students considered the role of research in their writing process. In doing so, the assignment engaged students in the ACRL’s threshold concepts for learning information literacy. The assignment taught students how authority is constructed dependent on context, such as Trish’s realization that her family’s Irish food traditions connect to larger historical, public contexts and that her personal experiences give her an authorial credibility she might not have otherwise appreciated. The assignment also led students to see the value of information, such as Marissa’s awareness that personal experience, combined with academic research, can lead not only to further understanding of family traditions but, in her case, led her to a richer understanding of her eventual major field of study, public health. Finally, the assignment also leads students to see Research as Inquiry, as when Kelly used her family experiences dividing time between Sweden and the United States to begin questioning the Western world’s reliance on industrial farming and other kinds of processed foods. The combination of asking students to write food memoirs, of asking them to consider a more integrated model of learning information literacy, and of breaking down the dichotomy between personal and academic, transformed these students’ relationship to research and writing.
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