The silent research partner

Last class while continuing our discussion of information literacy and related terms, we discussed the silent research partner. No, not copious cups of tea. Not dinner eaten in front of your laptop while searching databases. Not the friend who is not in graduate school that you call to assure you that it will not always be this way. While all of these may completely valid silent research partners, the silent research partner that we actually discussed in class was emotion.

Kristin began the lecture with an activity in which we mapped out how we conduct research. She then had us write our emotions about each step of the research process on our map. Although I had discussed the information seeking process in other classes, this was the first time that I had applied the emotions of the research process to my own research processes. It was an enlightening experience. In most respects, my map corresponded to the emotions of the research process put forth by researchers.While prior discussions made intellectual sense to me, actually seeing the emotional elements of research mapped onto my own behavior made it much more real.

After building our maps, we discussed Carol Kuhlthau's research on the information search process and Bloom's taxonomy of knowledge acquisition. I'm not going to rehash the theories here (though if you are reading this and don't know about them, I urge you to look them up because they are very cool.) Instead, I want to pose a question. Should part of information literacy be awareness of the search process and its accompanying emotions? We as librarians talk about library anxiety all the time, and we know that anxiety tends to be present at particular points in the information seeking process. What if students were taught to expect anxiety at certain points in their research, if they learned that it was normal, that everyone else probably feels as at sea as they are? I was talking to my mother awhile ago, and she told me that in middle school and high school she would go to the library to try to do research, but that she didn't really know how to search and she was afraid to ask the librarian, because she (my mother) was supposed to be smart. She didn't know that it was ok to be confused at the start of a research paper. I myself still get anxious and confused at different points in the research process, and I'm trying to teach myself that that's ok. Research shows that when I'm anxious when selecting a topic, I'm actually being completely normal. Maybe if we taught budding researchers not just the steps to research, but what they can be expected to feel as they move through the process, they would be more aware of how they are responding to research. They might not necessarily have decreased uncertainty or  frustration, but they might take comfort in knowing that they aren't alone in feeling that way and know that it's not them- it's the research process.