Teaching Information Literacy in an Era of Misinformation

My new courses start tomorrow, so I’m putting the finishing touches on this week’s materials.

Last summer, I encountered more challenges with generative AI-composed writing than in any previous term, so this year the theme for my writing courses is AI, research, and writing. We’ll spend the whole term considering how the dramatic increase in reliance on AI in a variety of fields and disciplines is changing our world, and our writing.

One challenge that I have encountered more frequently in recent years is class members who think that academic writing is fundamentally biased by the positionality of the authors.

Not by identities linked to race and ethnicity, gender, or class, mind you, but by the status of the writers as university professors or institute-affiliated research scientists who work for, say, Statistics Canada. A small but growing number of my students have felt that elevating peer-reviewed scholarship over other forms of knowledge and discourse is fundamentally elitist and ideologically suspect.

An example: in one class last spring, I had a class member who was skeptical of all received forms of authority because he believed that government conspiracies hid vital truths from the public about everything from vaccination safety to the existence of paranormal phenomena. Every class discussion was underscored by his contention that what we were reading failed to tell the whole truth.

This student was determined to research conspiracies using non-academic sources, because scholarly writers were, effectively, in on it: colluding with the government to hide the truth.

We spent hours together discussing why I required some peer-reviewed sources for the research assignments, but our perspectives were so wildly divergent that it was hard to communicate across a divide, not of ideology or politics, but of disbelief in the academy and scholarly research. He also didn’t trust the news.

In previous years and decades, I’ve not infrequently encountered students who objected to the feminist slant of my interpretations of literature, or my insistence on reading classic Canadian texts with an eye on reconciliation and decolonization.

I still remember the young man whose excellent Catholic education had prepared him for rigorous debate but not for Tomson Highway’s depiction of sexually abusive priests in Kiss of the Fur Queen. Now that I’ve spent some time teaching at a Catholic college where my students were more informed about reconciliation and right relationships than any cohort I’ve taught, I suspect his experience would be different: the Church is in a far more forthright mood than it was three decades ago.

But what’s new in recent years is this more generalized skepticism about whether there’s a difference between empirical research-based analysis and just making stuff up.

I worry.

But it has changed how I approach talking about scholarly sources and their value for student research.

Because this may be my last term teaching academic research and writing, I’m feeling both more invigorated by these challenges and more dismay about a future in which fewer students will have access to academic research and writing courses.

Cuts to colleges and universities across Canada are forcing administrators to make hard choices.

At some point, British Columbia may decide that its mandatory first-year English courses are too expensive to be worthwhile. And my contention is that now, more than ever, we need a small-class experience for all first-year students where they grapple with questions of epistemology and ethics. It doesn’t need to be first-year English: first-year Philosophy, or Gender Studies, or Psychology could also fit the bill. But they need focused feedback to their writing, along with instructors who believe in the value of student research.

My own faith, I admit, has been crumbling in the face of AI-generated slop.

Research papers are one thing. I can find the invented citations for hallucinated scholarly sources and have frank conversations with the student authors.

But when I noticed students using AI to create discussion posts (only one paragraph!) and peer reviews, I became distressed.

My classes are built on a compact of respect and care for peers; borrowing from folks like Kevin Gannon and Cate Denial, it has long been my teaching ethos that in my courses, everyone gets what they need.

Now I’m not so sure. What some of my students need seems to be the course credit and an opportunity to move on to things they care about more in their diploma or degree programs.

And less nagging from me about the value of original scholarship.

GenAI is an alluring shortcut to folks who are juggling jobs and families and coursework that doesn’t feel meaningful, despite my best efforts.

But I’m going to give it one more try.