Meaning Making in the Library: My Response to ACRL NW 2012

It didn’t take me long after beginning my work in libraries to realize that the “librarian as guardian of knowledge” idea had become totally outdated the moment our information formats stopped being physically scarce. And Barbara Fister’s critique of the “library as warehouse of information” metaphor at last week’s ACRL NW Conference pushed me to think harder about a couple of key questions: If it’s not a scarcity of resources that gets people into the library, then what is it? Why does the library still hold such a privileged place in our collective imagination, even as it's lost that place in our collective wallet? And, finally, why do I love my job so much, what brings me such intense joy on the reference desk and in the classroom?

I think that beyond information, beyond knowledge, beyond the technology that we provide access to, there is something that the library and librarians facilitate that is as valuable now as it has ever been, and depends on our communities as much as it does on our facilities, technologies, and commodities.  I’m not talking about the writing of papers, or the accessing of e-reserves, or the time in the study room, or the reading of a call number.  I’m talking about the ideal end of all of that work: the making of meaning.

Why do we ask our students to read, to write, to solve, to collaborate?  As educators, we hope that our students’ lives will be enriched by the connections that they make in the classroom.  I argue that that is precisely the beautiful, rich, hard work that I see happening around me, daily, in the library.  What is the library if not a rich site of contextualization?   To that end:

• We provide group study rooms so that students can build off of each other’s work to make something better than they could have made on their own.   
• We fill our shelves with the intellectual work of others so that our readers can discover that their experiences have been shared, or that others’ lives are profoundly different from their own.   
• We wait at the reference desk so that we can encourage the asking of deeper, more probing, more thoughtful questions.   

I feel most exhilarated at work not when I find exactly the fact that a student was looking for, but when I can see in a student’s face the dawning of a connection between their own experience/curiosity/question with another’s work/words/thoughts.

The UW Bothell, where I work, organizes a significant portion of its Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences curriculum around the “Banking Concept of Education” chapter of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It struck me that both Barbara Fister and Char Booth, in their keynote addresses at ACRL NW also used the “banking concept” as an important metaphor to work against.  In this chapter, Freire describes a prevailing attitude toward education that conceptualizes the transmission of information as being a uni-directional flow from the teacher to the student.  This disempowering process devalues the experiences, expertise, and contexts of the student and privileges the teacher as a single authority figure who embodies the “right” kind of knowledge (Freire 72).  Freire instead advocates for a decentralized power structure in the learning environment which recognizes what every member of the community brings to that new context and remakes every student as a teacher, and every teacher as a student.  In this model, the knowledge flow is multi-directional and meaning is made collaboratively in a process that he calls “mutual humanization” (75).

It is no surprise that Freire came up so frequently at this conference, because we are at a moment in our history as a profession when we are liberated from many of the old metaphors that have hemmed us in and occupied our time.  We all know, now, that information is easy to come by, but meaningful information is created, not stumbled upon.  We, as librarians, teachers, learners, and community members, have the license to communicate openly and lovingly with our intellectual communities.  We get to support and be supported by their ideas, energy, passions, questions, and labor.  And in that process, if we are open, passionate, and hardworking ourselves--if we maintain a position of radical curiosity toward our community members, library users, and environment--we can make beautiful meaning together.

Freire, Paulo.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30^th Anniversary Ed. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.