One of the great questions of
philosophy is the relationship between the one and the many. This is also the
conflict between the universal and the particular. This has real practical
importance in how you understand life.
Every day I go into work and perform
a set of tasks. These include turning on the lights, checking in books,
switching the server tape back-up, sending reminder emails, and requesting and
supplying interlibrary loan. I can add more to this task list, but the task
list is not my job.
Instead, my job is to help fulfill
the mission of the library through circulation services. The Library’s mission
is to instruct, facilitate, and mentor individuals to develop personal learning
environments, find and evaluate information they need to thrive, and empower
themselves to be lifelong learners. This mission provides information literacy
instruction. Information literacy is my job, as a component of theological
education and spiritual formation. Information literacy provides the ability to
move from a lack of knowledge to competency to express previously unknown
knowledge or skills to others.
Everything I do should relate back
to telos, the goal, not merely checking items of a list. There are four
components of information literacy according to the Framework for Information Literacy for
Higher Education by the Association of College and Research
Libraries (ACRL). This organization defines information literacy as:
A spectrum
of abilities, practices, and habits of mind that extends and deepens learning
through engagement with the information ecosystem. It includes
·
understanding essential concepts
about that ecosystem;
·
engaging in creative inquiry and
critical reflection to develop questions and to find, evaluate, and manage
information through an iterative process;
·
creating new knowledge through
ethical participation in communities of learning, scholarship, and civic
purpose; and
·
adopting a strategic view of the
interests, biases, and assumptions present in the information ecosystem.
I will come back to information
literacy in another post, but it is easy to confuse a task list with a job. When
the task is separated from the job, the task becomes irrelevant. The task list
can easily appear to be the job. The particulars can envelop and obscure the universal.
