Comments on: The education vs. indoctrination debate

By: Nathan

Nathan — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:40:27 +0000

My view is that teaching is indoctrination. “Doctrine” means teaching. You are always doing it. Even if you direct a person to multiple opinions on an issue, you are trying to indoctrinate them to be a good listener. In the Western tradition, we simply have put a high premium on logic, evidence, and argumentation. And then, there is also the element of trusting authorities and presuppositions. All of this comes into play.

By: Christine

Christine — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:39:08 +0000

I have to admit (there is a lot of that going around) that I rarely if ever refer students to OA journals except in response to a specific request for a specific title. And my reasons for this are perhaps a bit self-serving. I am fighting a constant and occasionally uphill battle to make our students (and at times faculty) recognize the value of the library’s subscription resources. Any direction of the students away from these resources invariably seems to result in their wandering off away from the library resources, often to the detriment of the quality of their research. Because I rarely have time to dig into the complexities of the information landscape and help them to understand how OA journals fit into that landscape, they instead seem to latch on to these titles (and by “they” I mean both students and faculty) as reason to blow off library resources…a move which is perhaps deserved at times…but a frustration none the less.

By: Deborah

Deborah — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:39:21 +0000

We’ve incorporated open access materials into our link resolver—which should put these resources into the mix of materials that students and scholars will consult. The key to making open access resources more central to the research process is their integration into the tools that students and scholars use—key research databases and (let’s be honest) Google Scholar. When developing an instruction session for undergraduates, I usually focus on how to evaluate information—but don’t discuss the open access issue. We actively encourage our undergraduates to use ILL to acquire materials not held locally, so access is not as much of an issue. I have, however, raised the open access issue with graduate students and faculty. I teach a series of workshops called the “Survival Skills for Graduate Students” and we introduced a workshop in that series this past year on the publishing process (at the request of graduate students!) Especially in that workshop, I talk about copyright, publishing, and open access—not to discourage graduate students from publishing in for-profit journals but to raise their awareness of the publishing options available and of their rights as authors.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:44:40 +0000

If this has anything to do with indoctrination, it’s that we’ve been indoctrinated by vendors (and ourselves) into thinking that we’re teaching students the proper way to do research if we guide them to stuff we pay for and ignore scholarship that anyone can access, even though we’ve been telling scholars to go the open access route.

I don’t want students to believe that once they graduate and move to some part of the country or the world where there isn’t a well-funded library that they’re outta luck. Teaching them to find resources that are available to all makes a lot of sense. So why don’t I do it more often?

This disconnect seems to parallel the vexing fact that so few librarians self-archive their own work (or choose to publish in OA journals) and that our very own association’s publications are not 100% OA.

We’ve been indoctrinated.

By the way, there’s been a pretty wholehearted effort to suggest that academia is indoctrinating Our Youth and turning them into Radicals. David Horowitz keeps trying to force scholars into teaching “both sides” of everything – as if everything has two sides.

The Free Exchange on Campus blog keeps track of these claims of indoctrination, in case you’re interested. I owe them a few blog posts, in fact.

In answer to your question, yes, I do push my values to unsuspecting students. They think I’m just going to give them an answer – look there, copy that down, off you go. Instead I give them an interrogation, hoping they’ll realize that honing a good question is what college is about and that easy answers aren’t usually good answers. But that’s sorta my job.

Isn’t college about teaching values? Not who to vote for or what to think, but what makes for good evidence, how to analyze an argument, that all claims are open to analysis. Those are values, and for some students the inherent challenge they pose to certain “truths” they don’t want to examine critically can be threatening and unwelcome.

I work at a Lutheran institution and the department that gets the most heat for this kind of “indoctrination” into academic values is the religion department.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:15:06 +0000

I’m not sure I’d equate referring someone to an open access source to referring based on the color of the book. To me, it seems more like referring someone to something held by the library vs. referring them to something that can be retrieved through ILL. To be fair, I’m not a reference librarian so don’t have immediate experience, but it seems like access to materials should be one factor in what’s recommended (though certainly not the only factor — if the “best” resource is only available through ILL then they need to go that route).

By: Stephen Francoeur

Stephen Francoeur — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:03:52 +0000

Kim, thanks for the nod to my post. I should note that what compelled me to write about the issue of OA journals was not that I was hoping to instruct students at the desk about OA. Instead, I was simply wondering what discovery tools I should be using to find OA content. If a student is looking for a known article, and my e-journal/link resolver tool indicates that I don’t have access to it via subscription services, what confidence should I have that might be discovery tools somewhere that will help me find out if the article is available in a preprint or postprint OA repository (or, better yet, is available online freely because the journal itself is OA). If my databases don’t have access to a known article, before I recommend ILL to my student, should I first always/often/sometimes/rarely try searching things like OAIster, Google Scholar, Live Search Academic, or DOAJ?

I also wonder which if any of these search tools we might want to hook up to our federated search tool and also list on our databases page. There dozens of subject-specific OA archives (there are two just for library and information science, for example). Should we add these? Can we count on some sort of meta OA search tool yet?

In short, how should we be connecting our users to content that may be OA?