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This article proposes that we extend our information literacy instruction programs to include tenets of genre theory as a way to move toward a more critical stance in our pedagogy. By developing an anthropologist's sensitivity to culture, academic librarians can learn the characteristics of the academic disciplines and then help students learn these characteristics as a way for them to understand the rhetorical practices in these fields. In making tacit practices visible, librarians can facilitate students' transitions into the cultures of their chosen disciplines. In this way, we can help students see that information is constructed and contested not monolithic and apolitical.
A major feat that students must accomplish in their undergraduate years is to learn the discourse of their chosen discipline. Disciplinary discourse includes the ways that members of a particular discourse community write, read, speak, and research, as well as the assumptions that they make and the epistemologies with which they craft their arguments.1 The undergraduate academic experience is one in which students begin to learn both the domain content and the disciplinary discourse or rhetorical processes of their chosen field.2 Most often the domain content receives the lion's share of instructional time in the typical undergraduate curriculum in the United States, even though students often struggle to learn the tacitly communicated rhetorical processes.
The assertion that educators need to teach students not just content but also the conventions of a particular discourse community is rooted in genre theory. Proponents of genre theory assert that making explicit the conventions of a particular discourse allows students to learn these conventions and thereby gain entry into that discourse community.3 This school of thought has its roots in M. M. Bakhtin's work on speech genres4 and in Michael Halliday's work on systemic functional linguistics, which proposed a "systematic relationship between the social environment... and the functional organization of language."5 It is this social environment surrounding the academic discipline that is often neglected in the teaching of undergraduate students.
Frequently the domain-specific rhetorical processes are seen by the faculty members who work within the domain as the "normal" or "natural" or "correct" way of writing, reading, or researching; and they expect their undergraduate students to be able to learn and adopt these ways of communicating...