Barbara Fister basically defines the life skills model of IL

Just go read it. It's brilliant.

And then go read The Myth of Information Literacy again. It's also brilliant.

And I can't for the life of me see how a single approach to information literacy or composition could possibly contain both. If, as Barbara says, wanting students "to learn skills they can use after college" is in opposition to "providing a 'service' to other departments" so that students can "survive college"--or, more charitably, develop as apprentice scholars--then what is really going on with undergraduate curricula in general, let alone information literacy?

Information literacy: mixing models

There are few concepts in academic librarianship that vex me as much as information literacy. I avoid the phrase whenever I can, to the extent that I sometimes worry I will shoot myself in the foot if I someday have an interview for an instruction position.

A major part of the vexation is that there appear to be two competing (and possibly conflicting) models of what information literacy is for. One is a scholarly research model, excellently described in Wayne Bivens-Tatum's latest post on the subject, "The Myth of Information Literacy." The other is a life skills model, which gets invoked whenever librarians start talking about preparing students for lifelong learning (e.g., IFLA's "Guidelines on Information Literacy for Lifelong Learning").

Identifying these two models puts us on the fast track to getting derailed by the perennial (and false) distinction between "impractical" liberal arts education and "practical" professional training. I would like to avoid that. So I am going to simply make the claim that crafting a scholarly argument about a subject is a different task than making an informed decision about it. Both are useful tools and important abilities for educated, engaged citizens to have. The problem is when the teaching methods and learning outcomes appropriate for one model get mixed in with the methods and outcomes of the other.

This confusion is one of the reasons I am a pain about urging librarians to see setting information literacy goals as the proper responsibility of the teaching faculty. Different institutions have different priorities and different cultures.

And it is precisely on those differences that I go back to being vexed about information literacy, because I think when Wayne says

Ultimately, this means that I'm not concerned with information literacy in the broadest sense, with whether students or anyone else have all the skills necessary to find, evaluate, and incorporate information about any topic whatsoever. Almost nobody but excellent reference librarians will ever meet that goal anyway.

then I immediately think he is missing the question of the baseline. It is like talking about how nobody except excellent literary scholars will ever be able to competently analyze any text they come across, while ignoring the students who have difficulty even telling the difference between, say, a scientific study and newspaper reporting about that study and an op-ed that draws on that study to try to score political points. Does everyone need to be able to make sense of War and Peace? No. But everyone does need to be able to take a look at War and Peace and say, hmm, maybe not the best source for information on Russian military history.

Iris at Pegasus Librarian sees the light about library research instruction:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, though, it’s been that I am not there to teach the students how to find, evaluate, and use information. I tried that with a couple of courses, and it failed. Miserably.

No, I’m there to do two things: to give the students a couple of skills they need right now, and to spark their imaginations about what could be possible if they decided to make a habit of this research stuff.

When I do presentations for students, I tell them that I will have succeeded if they remember two things. First, that tools exist to uncover the information they want and need. Second, that librarians want to help them learn how to use those tools. I give the example of students who come to see me a week or two later and say, "I know you showed us how to [library thing], but I don't remember how it works," and I tell them how happy I am with that response, and I mean it. And inevitably, during the walk-around-answer-questions-hands-on-student-research part of the presentation, someone will say, "I know you just showed us how to [library thing], but I can't get it to work." And I smile at them and show them how.

It is not only for our own sake that we librarians need to relax about presentations. Students are so ready to feel dumb or ashamed when they don't pick up something right away. Being open about the fact that these tools take practice is a good first step.