American media as of late has reported on the rapid decline of Detroit’s population. What used to be the fifth-largest city in the United States is now a city that has experienced more than a decade of steadily increasing population exodus as the Ford Motor Company finds itself in the midst of economic and identity crises. Detroit is a city that was built on Henry Ford’s industrial-era assembly line model of work, where the valuable worker was the worker who could efficiently and repeatedly perform a single task in isolation along a line of multiple tasks. The end result? Cars! Cheap cars and well-paid workers. And in the 1910s this was an absolutely phenomenal way to work. But there is a reason that, in 2011, Detroit as a city is struggling with both a population and an identity crisis. As Bob Dylan noted, “The times they are a-changin,’” and—as all educators today know—21st century learning is not in the business of producing assembly line workers.
In his article, “Assumptions, Information Literacy, and Transfer in High Schools,” James Herring tackles one of the perhaps most important and least explicitly-considered facets of education: the transference of skills and knowledge. Transference is both so highly embedded and so important in the process of education (in terms of humans learning as they mature, which is differentiated here from the sequential experience of school) that it is often overlooked in terms of what teachers and TLs are doing in their day-to-day lives. However, it is important to remember that learning is, at its core, perhaps nothing more than the process of unraveling how something is similar or different from something else, and in making such distinctions, we come to see how and which skills and concepts can be applied from one situation or task to the next.
His format throughout the article is this: after outlining a series of six assumptions (held by teachers, TLs, and students) regarding information literacy (IL) in select Australian high schools, he goes on to show how the six assumptions are largely challenged by the findings he made in these high schools. The heart of Herring’s findings might be summarized thusly:
• Teaching IL is—like teaching any subject—largely a process of making the implicit explicit. Students do not generally realize the importance of IL skills and how these skills are relevant to their future. In this scenario, there is very little or no student “felt need” or “buy in.”
• Making the implicit explicit, as noted above, is another variation on the importance of metacognition in learning. Students who can both understand content as well as understand the reasons for and importance of the content they are learning will develop learning connections that are both deeper and more enduring.
What follows is a reflection on selected details from Herring’s article:
• Students often perceive IL as something that is or is not taught by individual teachers based mostly on those teachers’ personal preferences. As such, students’ perceived value of IL is diminished (“If only some teachers find it important, then obviously not all students need to find it important either. And I think I’ll—conveniently—choose to be one of those students who find IL unimportant. Nice. Now I don’t have to worry about that part of my learning.”)
• Most teachers regard IL as a purely skills-based piece of learning. Some teachers is merely and only using a search engine effectively. In this scenario, IL becomes something akin to a single tool used at a single point in a process, and is as a result not understood by students as “here is something that I can use today and tomorrow in all areas of my studies and my life.” Only a few teachers understand that IL is also related to concepts metacognitive thinking, and that the more informationally literate students are, the more likely they are to become at least academically successful regardless of the subject of their studies.
• Many teachers and TLs assume that students understand the rationale for what they are being taught. This assumes that students themselves are capable of making the implicit explicit, which is rarely the case.
• This detail makes simple (and good) sense: a lack of teacher repetition and reinforcement leads to a lack of transfer. Teachers must collectively reinforce the importance of IL for students to buy in to the process.
• Some less engaged students regard transference as the teacher’s responsibility, not the student’s (that is, these students wait for the teacher to make the explicit implicit, and assume that if this step is not taken, then the topic at hand—in this case, IL—must not be important).
• Most teachers and TLs see transference as the students’ responsibility (uh-oh!). This assumption may likely be based on the fact that—for most teachers and TLs—the importance of and benefits of IL are utterly obvious. As such, teachers and TLs assume that students see these obvious benefits as well.
• Finally, when there is a lack of student understanding with regards to transfer, there is usually no “culture of transfer” in the school—that is, the staff is not collectively aware of the importance of and committed to emphasizing IL.
We know that IL is important, and will only continue to become ever more so in the foreseeable future. We—teachers and TLs—know this. But another important party in our teaching lives do not know this. Let’s make the implicit explicit: in with transference and metacognition, out with the industrial assembly line model of understanding that sees each skill as a discreet, one-step task that is only valuable in a single context. If he were alive today, I like to think that even he would see that we can get more mileage with transference and metacognition.
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