441 Toward a Framework for Information Creativity Mark Dahlquist* Recognizing the importance of information literacy in defining the primary focus of library instruction, this paper suggests the potential utility of a complementary principle of information creativity. Employers and educators now increasingly stress creativity’s value and teachability; this paper turns to the work of John Dewey to suggest that the traditional distinction between creativity and literacy education is not only unavoidable but also potentially productive. This paper offers some initial suggestions as to what a framework for information creativity might entail, and pro- poses that an emphasis on information creativity could both highlight the familiar association between libraries and creativity and inspire a theory and practice of creativity that strengthens traditions of democratic social progress. Introduction: Creativity and the Moment Since the early twentieth century, the word creativity has appeared with increasing frequency in English-language publications, its use rising sharply in the 1950s and continuing its upward trend thereafter.1 This trend has continued in the first decades of the twenty-first century, as the value of creativity has come to be emphasized across an increasing variety of domains. The growing interest in this term is reflected in figure 1, which tracks the frequency of the words creativity and literacy in the Google Books corpus between 1930 and 2019.2 *  Mark Dahlquist is Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian at Miami University, email: dahlqumj@miamioh.edu. ©2023 Mark Dahlquist, Attribution-NonCommercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) CC BY-NC. FIGURE 1 Google Books Ngram Viewer, “creativity and literacy, 1930–2019”3 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 442 College & Research Libraries May 2023 The increasing social value placed upon creativity was described in 2002 by Richard Florida, who argued that a revolutionary “rise of the creative class” was evident in city plan- ners’ and corporate recruiters’ growing interest in attracting young, nonconformist “creatives.” In Florida’s view, this population would usher in a “new Creative Age” in the twenty-first century.4 As Florida predicted, creativity has become one of the most desired “soft skills” in hiring decisions across industries, and its value has become visible in the architecture of workplaces and academic institutions. Businesses have replaced cubicles with colorful, open-concept lounge and office areas, and universities have invested in similar creativity zones: flexible spaces, often located in libraries or information commons, designed to promote ideation, col- laboration, and creativity.5 These campus and workplace changes have taken place as social psychology has increasingly challenged the idea that creativity occurs in moments of inner illumination mysteriously “gifted” to remarkable individuals, instead describing creativity as a capacity that can be developed and a process that occurs within social and material contexts.6 Creativity can be defined in a number of ways. It can be viewed, for example, as the capac- ity to devise novel solutions that are appropriate to particular contexts or as the imaginative capacity associated with the creative arts. It can be defined narrowly, as a capacity related to the development of individual talents or to the pursuit of social creativity and justice.7 This paper suggests that Deweyan models of individual and social creativity offer a promising foundation for a creativity-focused framework designed to complement the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy.8 Such a creativity framework could also supplement, on the one hand, modes of design thinking modeled on commercial forms of creativity,9 and on the other, forms of critical librarianship adapted from bodies of thought that did not focus on libraries as key resources for enabling social change. Whether understood in connection with individual problem-finding, the creative arts, or social creativity, creativity has experienced a remarkable set of challenges over the past few years. The coronavirus pandemic, responsible for more than six million deaths between 2019 and 2022,10 shuttered playhouses, soundstages, and cinemas—many for good—while discouraging young people from entering the creative arts.11 Other challenges have arisen from social struggle, as groups with different transformational agendas sought to inspire, har- ness, or regulate the production and reception of creative works, while at the same time the development of transformer-based language models such as Chat-GPT has raised concerns about malicious uses of AI-assisted creativity. The breakthroughs of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements in 2017 and 2019, respectively, have challenged and worked to reform practices and institutions that have long embedded racial and gender inequalities into creative industries and practice. Institutions such as the Academy of Motion Pictures, the governing boards of many theatres and pub- lications (such as Poetry magazine), and municipal zoning boards across the United States (many of which had tolerated gentrification while seeking to attract young “creatives”) were challenged to reform their practices.12 Reforming creative practice is an important dimension of these international social justice movements. However, during this period of creative reform, a countervailing reaction has also strengthened. Authoritarian reactionary movements have attempted to limit the production and reception of creative work, whether by stipulating that government buildings should be constructed in “classical” style, attacking public support for the arts, or vilifying the “Magic Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 443 Kingdom” of the Disney corporation.13 Moreover, this movement has sought to ban books from libraries and classrooms, with the aim of suppressing traits and practices associated with creativity, such as open-mindedness, growth mindsets, and whole-child education, seeing these as threats to conservative beliefs about race, gender, sexual identity, and sexual orientation.14 Such challenges to schools and libraries are related to broader efforts to undermine forms of liberal democracy that have tended to sustain multicultural social creativity.15 Indeed, since the Capitol Hill insurrection of January 6, 2022, American conservatives have increasingly endorsed the religious ethnonationalism of authoritarian leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, seeking “liberation from liberalism itself.”16 In view of these profound challenges to creative practices and institutions, this paper considers the potential value of the concept of information creativity to library instruction. This concept could serve as a companion or complement to the theory and practice of information literacy. This paper argues that despite the increasingly capacious, critical, and anti-oppressive nature of information literacy (especially as outlined by the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy), a companion concept of information creativity could offer a distinctive means of fostering both individual human flourishing and forms of multicultural liberal democracy that can support progress toward social equity and justice. This paper is not intended as a critique of information literacy, the value of which is well established.17 It does, however, consider some of the tensions related to creativity that have long been recognized in discussions of information literacy, and it suggests that a framework for information creativity could guide the development of library-based activities and services that are less closely attached to the core information literacy practices of locating and evaluat- ing information sources. In addition to providing a framework for instruction, an information creativity framework could also help connect and coordinate the various programs and ser- vices many libraries already offer that aim to inspire, support, and distribute creative work. Although libraries have successfully promoted information literacy as a term encompass- ing most forms of library instruction,18 it is important to recognize the enduring distinction between educational approaches that emphasize literacy and those that emphasize creativity. Historically, this distinction has been signaled by a variety of “dueling dichotomies” that em- ploy different terms to describe a tension between educational approaches that value testable skills such as literacy, “the three Rs,” or “the basics,” on the one hand, and those that value more abstract qualities such as originality, self-realization, or expression, on the other.19 Recent work in developmental psychology has tended to support the existence of a basic cognitive distinction between thinking that aims to evaluate information correctly (as a literate reader can do) and thinking that aims to imagine and explore new possibilities—a fundamental “explore-exploit” dilemma.20 The persistence of this distinction in education and psychology suggests the potential value of developing a companion library instructional framework for supporting “creativity-forward” library instruction. This paper looks to the writings of John Dewey, who came to be seen as the “national philosopher” of the United States during the first half of twentieth century, as a basis for conceptualizing information creativity. Although Dewey’s influence declined for a time fol- lowing his death in 1952,21 it enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980s,22 when his work was revived by philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. At the same time, belief in the value of Dewey’s educational writings was sustained by progressive educational theorists interested in “using Dewey to forge consensus among competing visions of the educational 444 College & Research Libraries May 2023 future,” as Thomas Fallace observed in describing the use of Dewey by feminist educators such as Maxine Greene and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann.23 Beginning with Cornel West’s 1989 The American Evasion of Philosophy, Dewey’s work has also been extended by a range of African American thinkers, including Paul C. Taylor, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Melvin Rogers, and Denise James. These thinkers have considered Dewey’s writ- ings in connection with those of Black intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke, and Frantz Fanon,24 filling in Dewey’s blind spots and calling out his failings in order to produce a reconstructed Deweyan perspective that more emphatically challenges racist and colonial attitudes and practices.25 It is in this spirit of multivocal reconstruction that Dewey’s model of equitable, democratic, and intercultural creativity carries particular value for conceptualizing creativity-oriented library instruction. This paper begins by briefly considering some limitations and tensions that are evident in the history and development of information literacy. It then considers some of Dewey’s reservations about the adequacy of literacy as a general metaphor for educational practice and then offers a provisional description of some key features of an information creativity framework that could serve as a companion approach to the prevailing model of information literacy. In proposing a move from a monopolar to a bipolar conception of library instruction, this paper does not imply that locating and assessing information and the production of origi- nality are separable activities. Rather, it suggests that understanding each of these activities on its own terms can foster individual and social creative potentials that have typically been overlooked under the unipolar information literacy framework. Information Literacy and the Basics Some of the limits of a monopolar approach to library instruction rooted in the notion of literacy can be understood by historicizing the development of the concept of information literacy. In- formation literacy received its initial institutional definition in the 1989 Final Report of the ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy,26 during a period when literacy itself—the ability to read and write—was the subject of intense national debate. This controversy over an ongoing American “literacy crisis” was driven by the rise, beginning in the late 1970s, of the conservative “back-to-basics” educational movement, which advocated greater use of standard- ized testing and a return to educational fundamentals in order to reverse what back-to-basics activists described as ominous and precipitous declines in student-achievement scores.27 In books such as Paul Copperman’s The Literacy Hoax (1979) and Yale Pines’s Back to Basics (1982), back-to-basics activists stressed the dangers of an ongoing literacy crisis, and presented themselves as members of an insurgent movement for standards-based educational reform that was sweeping the country.28 Although this movement received support from some members of minority communities who saw in standardized testing an underutilized instrument for addressing educational inequalities,29 it was championed primarily by white conservative Re- publicans who argued that creativity was the educational problem. They held that during the permissive 1960s, “teachers began to emphasize ‘creativity’ in the English classrooms” under the influence of Deweyan teaching methods, with the result that schools had “shortchanged instruction in the written language” and produced a generation of students without adequate reading and writing skills.30 The increasing frequency with which the term literacy appeared in publications during the 1980s (see figure 1) illustrates the growth of this controversy,31 which was deeply rooted in social anxieties about race, class, and gender. Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 445 The influence of the back-to-basics movement was evident in the initial ALA definition of information literacy, which cited the movement’s crowning achievement: the A Nation at Risk report, issued in 1983 by Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education.32 Like other back-to-basics documents, A Nation at Risk painted a stark picture of educational decline. It argued that test scores and other indicators revealed that “the educational foundations of our society are pres- ently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”33 The ALA report that defined information literacy faulted A Nation at Risk not for its panicked rhetoric but for its decision to “largely exclude libraries” from consideration as a po- tential resource for solving the illiteracy problem.34 An early bibliography on information literacy made the link between information literacy and A Nation at Risk clear, observing in 1990 that while “[Paul] Zurkowski in 1974 first used the phrase ‘information literacy,’ its “current mean- ing and use came in response to national education reform reports, including A Nation at Risk.”35 In keeping with this Reaganite back-to-basics influence, the ALA Final Report on Informa- tion Literacy described information literacy as an essential skill akin to the ability to read and write: “a survival skill in the information age” that was important to all citizens, who needed to “know how to find, evaluate, and use information effectively to solve a particular problem or make a decision.”36 By stressing the essential nature of the skill it defined, the ALA Final Report answered a question that had been posed almost a decade earlier, at a national White House conference during the Carter administration: “Do libraries, the traditional storehouses of information and knowledge, have a place in this fast-moving information age?”37 The 1989 ALA Final Report answered in the affirmative. It argued that the place of libraries in the dawning information age would be to rescue the nation from the threat of illiteracy that the A Nation at Risk report so vividly described. As it turned out, however, the literacy crisis identified by A Nation at Risk and back-to- basics activists was generally overstated and based on problematic assumptions, as progressive educators argued at the time. Richard Ohmann pointed out in 1976 that the purported decline in literacy as measured by standardized tests in fact reflected “an increase in equality and so- cial justice” because the declines cited by conservatives reflected the growing percentage of US students taking college entrance exams and the growing number of women, immigrants, and people of color attending colleges and universities.38 More recent analysis has tended to confirm this interpretation.39 Although the promotion of reading literacy and information literacy is surely laudable, the language of the ALA Final Report illustrates the drawbacks of relying too heavily on the metaphor of literacy to describe library instruction. For example, the report resorted to deficit representations of information “illiterates,” observed that the “lives of information illiterates are more likely than others to be narrowly focused on secondhand experiences of life through television,” and asserted that “minority and at-risk students, illiterate adults, people with English as a second language, and economically disadvantaged people” were among those least likely to have learning experiences that promote information literacy.40 The Final Report presented the acquisition of information literacy as a form of liberation, but it did so in a way that is tonally problematic, promising the rewards of the Reaganite free market to individual learners who achieve information literacy: There is ample evidence that those who learn how to achieve access to the bath of knowledge that already envelops the world will be the future’s aristocrats of 446 College & Research Libraries May 2023 achievement, and that they will be far more numerous than any aristocracy in history.41 In its description of “information illiterates” whose lack of literacy constituted a crisis, and in its frankly aristocratic language, the 1989 ALA Final Report presented basic and information literacies as closely related and somewhat mystified solutions to the same purported cultural and educational crisis. The soaring and liberatory rhetoric of the Final Report reflected what researchers in the New Literacy Studies movement identified as a “literacy myth,” in which “literacy stands alone” as a force that “invariably results in economic development, democratic practice, cognitive enhancement, and economic mobility.”42 This myth is linked to a long history of regarding literacy as a marker of superiority or even, anthropologically, as “the crucial factor distinguishing ‘civilized’ from ‘primitive’ peoples,” an attitude that has often provided a basis for systemic racism, serving for example to justify the “literacy tests” used to disenfranchise African Americans during the Jim Crow era.43 As this paper’s next section notes, information literacy instruction has since 1989 sought explicitly to reject and dismantle the core assumptions of the literacy myth. However, this paper argues that the assumptions supported by this mythologized popular conception of literacy can be further contested by more explicitly making room for creativity in library instruction, and that proponents of the back-to-basics movement were right to recognize creativity-oriented learning as a challenge to reactionary projects of conservative restoration and Reaganite efforts to justify existing social inequities. The Creative Reform of Information Literacy Information literacy as understood and practiced today certainly encourages creativity and is different in many ways from the version of information literacy unveiled in the 1989 ALA Final Report. Moreover, it should also be noted that the practice of information literacy has always varied widely, and that library instructors in the 1980s worked in partnership with creative compositionists such as Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie.44 Long before the 2015 ACRL Framework placed new emphasis on creativity,45 creative practices were often incorporated into library or information literacy instruction. For example, the 2000 Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education cited the educational taxonomy of Benjamin Bloom, who defined creativity as closely tied to synthesis, which was for Bloom the educational objective concerned with “putting together parts so as to form a whole.”46 The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy introduced by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl in 2000 and widely adopted by information literacy instruc- tors identified creativity, rather than synthesis, as a higher-order learning objective.47 Thus, through Bloom’s taxonomies and other inlets, such as LEAP/VALUE learning outcome rubrics created by the Association of College and Research Libraries and the influential 1996 Boyer Report on the 2000 ACRL Standards, the value of creativity has been persistently asserted and articulated in connection with information literacy theory and practice.48 However, despite the longstanding presence of creativity in information literacy, there has been an enduring tension at the heart of information literacy. As David Bawden noted in 2001, “the term literacy has always had (at least) a dual nature” that encompasses both narrow and broader understandings of the term.49 Christine Pawley similarly described information Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 447 literacy as a “contradictory coupling,” observing that “policies to promote ‘literacy’ have systematically worked to render some groups of people—indeed, the majority—less capable of active information use and knowledge construction than an educated elite.” Pawley ar- gued that relying on the metaphor of literacy to describe library instruction could result in “Procrustean consequences,” by framing students as information consumers.50 In 2006, James Elmborg cited Pawley’s Procrustean misgivings and turned to the writings of Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, and especially Paulo Freire, as he and others worked to develop a model of critical information literacy that would avoid the reductive psychic and social consequences of which Pawley warned.51 The insights of Paulo Freire have played a crucial role in shaping critical information literacy pedagogy, and have been widely influential.52 Though he was aware of the reductive notion of literacy championed by the back-to-basics movement,53 Freire developed a more ex- pansive and creative understanding of literacy, which was shaped by his experience teaching Brazilian agricultural workers to read (and thereby enabling them to vote, because until 1985 Brazil imposed a literacy requirement on voters). Whereas for the back-to-basics movement the term literacy had signified a need for educators to focus on testable basic skills, in Freire’s “problem-posing education” the term referred to a process of social solidarity and creativ- ity with far-reaching transformational aims. Freire’s writings often articulated these aims in terms of a social awakening (conscientização) tied to Marxism and Christian existentialism and associated with a notion of social creativity.54 For example, Freire argued that authentic educa- tion is that which “bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflections and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation” and who work toward “the transformation of the world in behalf of the increasing liberation of humankind.”55 This perspective is broadly consistent with Dewey’s conception of creative democracy.56 Although there are important distinctions between the perspectives of Dewey and Freire, it is important to recognize the significant kinship between the ideas of these progressive educationalists.57 While Freire’s conception of creativity helped to define critical information literacy, Dewey’s conceptions of inquiry and creativity found their way into the 2015 Framework for Information Literacy with the help of Carol Kuhlthau, whose 2013 “Rethinking the 2000 ACRL Standards” helped to shape the Framework’s more creative and adaptable conception of infor- mation literacy.58 In calling for this change, Kuhlthau stressed the importance of “inquiry,” and especially “guided inquiry,” to the information-seeking process: Guided inquiry opens the inquiry process at Initiation, immerses students in background knowledge at Selection, guides in exploring interesting ideas at Ex- ploration… and evaluates at the close.… By embedding a holistic approach within the inquiry process, information literacy develops as students’ understanding of content deepens.59 As a result of the advocacy of Kuhlthau and others, the 2015 Framework incorporated as one of its six frames the notion of “Research as Inquiry,” which defined research as a process of posing “increasingly complex or new questions whose answers in turn develop additional questions or lines of inquiry.”60 In Guided Inquiry (2015), Kuhlthau cites Dewey as the foun- dational, though not the exclusive, source for her understanding of this term: 448 College & Research Libraries May 2023 The underlying assumption of this book is that learning is a process of construc- tion based on the educational theory of John Dewey… his most comprehensive work, Democracy and Education, first published in 1915, provides the foundation for inquiry learning.61 The incorporation of Dewey’s concept of inquiry learning into the ACRL Framework points the way to an information creativity approach to library instruction that would give creative inquiry freer scope to operate independently from notions of literacy that Dewey regarded as fundamentally limiting. Such notions have persisted as unresolved tensions in the practice of information literacy, despite significant reforms.62 John Dewey and the Limits of the Literacy Metaphor Prolific and highly influential over a long period, Dewey continues to be viewed as arguably “the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century,” and his ideas have retained, or regained, a wide currency among educators and academics in the twenty- first.63 The incorporation of Dewey’s notion of inquiry into the 2015 ACRL Framework represented an important shift toward a more flexible and creative understanding of information literacy. Nevertheless, Dewey’s presence in the Framework was in some ways incongruous, be- cause Dewey repeatedly cautioned against relying too heavily on literacy as a metaphor for conceptualizing education more generally. Although he was a strong proponent of universal childhood instruction in reading and writing and a critic of economic and racial inequalities in access to literacy, Dewey had significant misgivings about overemphasizing literacy in discussion of education, expressing concerns that anticipate the “Procrustean consequences” described by Christine Pawley in 2003.64 Writing of literacy in Democracy and Education, for example, Dewey observed that even though “in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in symbols,” an overemphasis on mere “technical information expressed in symbols” had resulted in an impoverished popular understanding of education that empha- sized literacy at the expense of other modes of learning. He wrote: Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores social necessity and its identity with all human association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy.65 Dewey regarded literacy as a poor metaphor for education because it failed to convey the important roles of learner-driven inquiry, experiential richness, and reciprocal communication in supporting authentic learning and social progress in a pluralistic society.66 Dewey’s ambivalence regarding the notion of literacy was rooted in his perspective as a progressive educator who emphasized experiential learning and the importance of rich and varied communication with others, as opposed to learning by rote. Dewey described his educational philosophy in Experience and Education: If one attempts to formulate the philosophy of education implicit in the practices of the newer education, we may, I think, discover certain common principles Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 449 amid the variety of progressive schools now existing. To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity… to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world.67 In this passage, Dewey’s reservations about the use of literacy education as a model for broader educational practice come to light in his advocacy of the “expression and cultivation of individuality” and also in his preference for education that explores “the opportunities of present life” over education offered as “preparation for a more or less remote future.” Dewey’s belief that “the only way to prepare for social life is to engage in social life” led him to criticize educational philosophies that regarded creativity and inquiry as coming after a period of mechanical literacy instruction (which might be described as learning “the basics”), during which “pupils are expected to use their eyes to note the form of words, irrespective of their meaning, in order to reproduce them in spelling or reading.”68 For Dewey, the practice of deferring creativity until after students had acquired literacy was a serious philosophical and educational mistake. Dewey’s critique of educational approaches that focus on acquiring literacy was linked to his belief that learners (whether beginners or experts) have a need to construct a reflective “experience” that integrates and renders meaningful the incessant sequence of fragmentary impressions encountered by individuals in the modern age. On the matter of literacy and experience, Dewey wrote: What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win the ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worthwhile, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses his desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses his ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?69 Dewey was always skeptical of the attitude that learners need to acquire basic skills before de- veloping the ability to pose meaningful questions and discuss them with others.70 “We always live at the time we live,” Dewey wrote in Experience and Education, warning of educational theories in which “the potentialities of the present are sacrificed to a suppositious future.”71 Dewey’s rejection of this sacrifice puts his progressive understanding of education and inquiry at odds with literacy models of education such as the ACRL Framework, which stress the importance of building fundamental skills needed for later achievement. In particular, Dewey’s educational philosophy cuts against the Framework’s incorporation of the “threshold concepts” developed by Erik Meyer and Ray Land. The assumptions underlying the notion of threshold concepts are closely related to the notion of literacy instruction, because they include the idea that key creative possibilities are initially hidden beyond educational “thresholds” and can be explored only after “learning the language of the discipline,” that is, only after understanding “troublesome” threshold concepts.72 Dewey rejected the idea that learners should defer engaging in inquiry or creativity until after they have mastered the basics of literacy or other forms of gateway knowledge. 450 College & Research Libraries May 2023 Dewey’s reluctance to view education as literacy acquisition was also tied to his un- derstanding of communication as a complex and reciprocal interpersonal and intercultural exchange that extends far beyond acquiring the ability to decipher written signs. Dewey fa- mously expounded this idea in his 1934 Art as Experience, in which he argued that creativity is communicative and that creative thinking is widespread, rooted in shared human capaci- ties, and not limited to those who have undergone lengthy training of the kind associated with formal education. Just as Dewey viewed scientific reasoning as an extension of ordinary human problem-solving, he understood works of art as acts of communication that deepen experience and share it among people and cultures. He wrote: At their best they [works of art] bring about an organic blending of attitudes characteristic of the experiences of our own age with that of remote peoples. For the new features are not mere decorative additions, but enter into the structure of works of art and thus occasion a wider and fuller experience. Their enduring ef- fect upon those who perceive and enjoy will be an expansion of their sympathies, imagination, and sense.73 Dewey characterized such experiential communication as a vexed issue, indeed “one of the most serious problems of philosophy”; nevertheless, he maintained that “art is a more uni- versal mode of language than the speech that exists in a multitude of unintelligible forms.”74 For Dewey, progress toward a freer and more equitable social order depended on developing modes of communication that participate in the creation of beauty—and thus extend beyond the recognition of symbolic meanings. As Paul C. Taylor writes, for Dewey, “ethical life is bound up with an essentially artistic or poetic revisioning of the landscape of agentive pos- sibility, and human personalities are always works in progress, fashioned at the intersection of community resources, social conditions, and ethical agency.”75 This is one reason Dewey thought the popular meanings of the term literacy did not adequately describe what students must learn as they acquire the ability to read and write while also encountering and creating new horizons of meaning and aesthetic possibility in connection with others. Toward an Account of Information Creativity Practices Dewey’s belief that social institutions such as libraries and schools should be constituted “so as to make possible a better future for humanity” is a promising basis for conceptualizing library instruction as a service linked to social creativity.76 At the same time, the rootedness of his educational ideas in developmental psychology connects his work to the creativity of individual learners. A key link between Dewey’s educational writings on creativity and con- temporary creativity research is his strong belief, which has been well corroborated by edu- cational research, in the importance of intrinsic motivation in producing student creativity.77 Although Dewey’s writings on creativity included a variety of interesting claims that could be considered for incorporation into an information creativity framework,78 the present study draws mainly on Dewey’s theory of intrinsic motivation, according to which learners should explore information in ways that open up new meanings and enrich their individual and social experience. This sense of “exploration” might draw on the way this term is used by Alison Gopnik and Christopher Lucas, as previously mentioned, as well as the reader- response literary criticism of Louise Rosenblatt, which relied on Dewey’s conception of art to Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 451 describe interpretive “exploration” in which “both reader and text are essential to the trans- actional process of making meaning.”79 An information creativity framework would apply these principles to creativity-focused library instruction and services. Dewey’s characterizations of inquiry, creativity, and experiential learning were rooted in both developmental psychology and his experiences as an educator and designer of curricula and schools. A drawing published in The School and Society (1900) illustrates Dewey’s concep- tion of experiential education, in which information resources would be centered in a school in which “the child shall have in his own personal and vital experience a varied background of contact and acquaintance with realities, social and physical,”80 and in which the library would provide a central space for reflection and inquiry, a place where the day’s lessons and undertakings could be investigated and connected to emergent questions. Dewey explained that the diagram presented in Figure 2 represented his educational values rather than a floor plan for a particular space: The object is to show what the school must become to get out of its isolation and secure the organic connection with social life of which we have been speaking. It is not our architect’s plan for the school building we hope to have, but it is a diagrammatic representation of the idea which we want embodied in the school building. On the lower side you see the dining-room and the kitchen, at the top the FIGURE 2 Conceptual Floor Plan, from The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902), 95 452 College & Research Libraries May 2023 wood and metal shops and the textile room for sewing and weaving. The center represents the manner in which all come together in the library; that is to say, in a collection of the intellectual resources of all kinds that throw light upon the practical work, that give it meaning and liberal value. If the four corners represent practice, the interior represents the theory of the practical activities.81 By situating learning activities amid workshops, kitchens, and textiles (laboratories and studios for art and music appear in Dewey’s plan for the second floor), Dewey envisioned libraries as points of connection between experiential learning and information that would allow experi- ences to be more meaningfully understood. Discussing the space devoted to textiles, indicated in the above plan, he writes: The basal fact in that room is that it is a workshop, doing actual things in sewing, spinning, and weaving. The children come into immediate contact with the materials, with various fabrics of silk, cotton, linen, and wool. Information at once appears in connection with these materials; their origin, history, their adaptation to particular uses, and the machines of various kinds by which the raw materials are utilized.82 Dewey conceptualized the library as a space surrounded by makerspaces, in a school extend- ing outward into the social world—a vision that played an important role in the incorporation of libraries into American elementary schools in the early twentieth century.83 Dewey returned to the library-as-metaphor in The Public and Its Problems (1927), his treat- ment of democracy and public opinion. In this foundational text of media studies, Dewey observed that many of his contemporaries (notably Walter Lippman, whose opinions were the chief target of Dewey’s treatise) believed the expanding availability of information pro- vided little hope for the cause of democratic progress. Dewey acknowledged the validity of Lippman’s concern that because “the mass of the reading public is not interested in learn- ing and assimilating the results of accurate investigation,” such results “remain secluded in library alcoves, and are studied and understood only by a few intellectuals.”84 To respond to this skepticism about the interest of the demos in accurate information, Dewey returned to The School and Society’s vision of a vibrant school library located at the center of a process of creative inquiry that aims to facilitate democratic social progress. Replying to Lippman and other critics, Dewey observed that while the “mere existence and accessibility” of accurate information “would have some regulative effect,” this information would also offer an “irresistible invitation” to those motivated to fashion it into compelling narratives, that is, to storytellers—those who translate facts and data into the art of human experience. Dewey writes: Men’s conscious life of opinion and judgement often proceeds on a superficial and trivial plane. But their lives reach a deeper level. The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness…. Poetry, the drama, the novel are proofs that the problem of presentation is not insoluble. Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling of it by emotion, perception, and appreciation.85 Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 453 In Dewey’s account, for information to serve the ends of democracy, “a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it,” precisely because “democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communication.”86 Writing at the close of World War II, Dewey saw habitual inattention as both a threat to democracy and a challenge to creativity; he turned to the idea of the library to imagine a response to this challenge.87 Whether as conceptual metaphors or elements of governmental recommendations, Dewey viewed libraries as crucial to learning and democratic social progress.88 His perspective sug- gests the value of developing a framework for information creativity. Such a framework would embrace both the creative nature of social democracy (as emphasized by Freire, for example) and the forms of creative exploration and production associated with early child- hood development and divergent or experimental thinking—and it would value these forms of creativity not as secondary to the practices of locating, evaluating, and using information but as primary activities in themselves. Adopting the term information creativity for such practices, a definition such as the fol- lowing might be proposed: Information creativity involves the experience of encountering, employing, transforming, or making informational objects for artistic, exploratory, or communicative purposes when creative originality or production is of primary concern.89 Defined in relation to the ACRL Framework, information creativity is a companion concept that provides a necessary complement to forms of instruction grounded in literacy and threshold approaches to education. An information creativity approach would provide a fuller and freer scope for the operations of Deweyan “inquiry” by emphasizing the relation of inquiry to “experience,” Dewey’s other key term. These practices can be further characterized by identi- fying some of the activities and priorities information creativity could involve. For example, information creativity practices might: • Facilitate the pursuit of nonresearch projects with creative orientations, such as artistic or reflective projects • Deal with “problem-finding” when a topic or question has not yet been identified • Facilitate experiential or surprising encounters with things, such as rare print materials, or make use of serendipitous methods • Emphasize immediacy and minimize threshold limitations (such as in zine making, 3D printing, and video- and audio-editing workshops) • Practice the innovative presentation of information (such as data visualization and sto- rytelling), in which information is located and transformed for the sake of presentation or analysis • Emphasize remediation and form (such as transforming a written argument into a video essay) • Emphasize the poesis of the maker Information creativity as sketched above would support library instruction that has either a more expressive focus (for example, on personal growth and experiential reflection) or a more technical focus (for example, on skills workshops teaching students how to use a particular cre- ative tool) than is typical of information literacy instruction. Table 1 offers a preliminary typology that distinguishes the principles of information literacy from those of information creativity. 454 College & Research Libraries May 2023 It should be noted that the table’s conceptual distinctions between literacy and creativ- ity frameworks for library instruction are differences in emphasis rather than contradictions, such that each approach supports and enhances the other. This typology compares the practices and values that might be emphasized in informa- tion literacy and information creativity learning sessions. However, this mirrored opposition obscures an important distinction between information literacy and creativity: like literacy, creativity is a skill one may learn or a disposition one may cultivate, but it is also an activity of creative production, one that invites libraries to adopt a wider and more systematic view of their efforts to foster, and perhaps measure, creative productivity.90 Such an approach would not only inform the design and assessment of activities and workshops in which creativity is encouraged, but would also assist librarians across departments in coordinating services that are less recognizably linked to information literacy instruction. It may be useful to think of these activities as elements of an inspire–support–distribute model or cycle of information creativity, as illustrated in Figure 3. In this model, activities such as creative workshops, exhibits, performances, and many archival and special collections instruction sessions (for example, those incorporating what has been called a wunderkammer element) could be classed as services that serve to inspire creative activity.91 Likewise, library efforts to provide tools, space, instruction, and time for creating digital and material objects—whether such efforts take the form of makerspaces, digital tools, loaned equipment, or support for data analytics or video production—could be categorized as services that facilitate creativity. When libraries publish or showcase creative work (for example, in institutional repositories or via open-publishing initiatives) and cultivate conversations about the work produced by members of their communities, they are distribut- TABLE 1 Information Literacy vs. Iinformation Creativity Information Literacy Information Creativity Dispositions/Values Dispositions/Values Authority as constructed and contextual “What if?” experiment as resistance Literacy; understanding symbols Experience; sensation Thresholds and understandings Immediacy and skills Information as data/content Information as things/form; visualization Scholarship as conversation Spontaneity and expression Arguments Stories Persuading an audience Personal growth Information has value Reappropriation Searching as strategic exploration Serendipity through observation Information creation as process Information exploration Knowledge Practices Knowledge Practices Locating information (Re)presenting information Identifying authority Deauthorizing; speculative doubt Breaking complex questions into simple ones Hypothesizing and envisioning new connections Demonstrating intellectual humility Considering one’s own experience and perspective Evaluating authority Making; poesis Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 455 ing creative outputs back into the community, serving to foster new creative inspiration in a virtuous cycle. Although the oppositions presented in Table 1 and the cycle depicted in Figure 2 are only schematic representations (like Dewey’s conceptual diagram of a library in a school), they nevertheless suggest some possibilities for coordinating library services and programs that are too often viewed as piecemeal and disparate. A framework for information creativity could remind community stakeholders of the value of libraries as engines of creativity92 and could help libraries develop approaches to supporting creativity as a goal in its own right. Conclusion Although the ACRL Framework provides significantly greater scope for creativity than the state- ments that preceded it, its central metaphor for information literacy emphasizes the acquisition of threshold skills as preparation for future creativity. This deferral of creative activity suggests the need for information creativity educational practices that focus on immediacy, reflective experience, and personal growth, as well as workshops focused on tools that can be used im- mediately. The widespread acknowledgement of the importance of information literacy among college and university instructors and administrators is an achievement to be celebrated and strengthened, but it is worth asking whether an overly unipolar insistence that “information literacy is the central and underlying priority of all library activities” has proven to be a limiting approach.93 Indeed, if the term literacy has become sufficiently broad to describe all possible FIGURE 3 The Inspire–Support–Distribute Cycle 456 College & Research Libraries May 2023 forms of library instruction, one might wonder whether the term has become so broad that it has lost its usefulness in the absence of a contrasting instructional principle. In the United States, the back-to-basics movement achieved its crowning success in 2001 with the passage into law of the No Child Left Behind Act, which emphasized phonics-based literacy instruction and introduced more standardized testing into public schools. In subse- quent years, however, US public schools gradually adopted a more balanced approach to literacy instruction, in which the teaching of phonics occurred alongside activities designed to promote creative work and intrinsic motivation—a balancing that recalls Dewey’s belief that traditional and progressive models of education are not always mutually exclusive.94 Libraries are well positioned to develop practices for inspiring, supporting, and distributing creative production in the context of a more bipolar, or balanced, approach to library instruc- tion and services—and to assess and present these practices in ways that demonstrate the value of libraries in supporting the individual and social creativity of students, faculty, and members of the larger community.95 In outlining the potential usefulness of a framework for information creativity, this paper has pointed out some limitations, historical and conceptual, of literacy and threshold-based approaches. Of course, it should be emphasized that despite these limitations, the need for libraries to provide and expand information literacy instruction has never been more urgent. However, just as libraries developed information literacy as a response to the real and imagined needs of the 1980s, the present moment calls for an approach that responds to the growing interest in creativity evident across a range of instructional, civic, and commercial contexts, and the need to respond wisely and justly to the growing challenges that now confront social and individual creativity. This paper takes up the work of John Dewey as a useful and widely known orienting perspective rather than as a limit, bearing in mind the important question posed by Paul C. Taylor, of “whether and how much to appeal to the mighty dead in contexts that don’t reward the invocation.”96 When contextually appropriate, and when viewed in connection with its many interlocutors, Dewey’s educational philosophy offers a useful frame of reference for conceptualizing library approaches to information creativity. As employers and universities continue to emphasize creativity’s value as a practice and skill, libraries should consider the potential value of developing approaches for supporting the creativity of their patrons and for articulating a vision of libraries as sites of expansive forms of experiential reflection and creativity—capacities that can strengthen democratic communicative norms and underwrite both progressive social justice and individual human flourishing.97 Notes 1. Creativity became a topic of active discussion in the 1950s following a presidential address by Joy Paul Guilford to the American Psychological Association, later published as Joy Paul Guilford, “Creativity,” American Psychologist 5 (1950): 444–54. See also Harold Anderson, ed., Creativity and Its Cultivation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959). 2. Google Books Ngram Viewer, “creativity and literacy, 1930 –2019,” accessed December 29, 2020, ht t p s:// b o ok s.go og le.c om /ng ra m s/g raph?c o nt e nt =l it erac y%2Cc r eat iv it y& yea r_ st a r t =193 0& yea r_ end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3. On ngram methodology and limitations, see Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331, no. 6014 (January 2010): 176–82, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644, and Eitan Adam Pechenick, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds, “Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 10 (October 2015), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137041. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=literacy%2Ccreativity&year_start=1930&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=literacy%2Ccreativity&year_start=1930&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137041 Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 457 3. Google Books Ngram Viewer, “creativity and literacy, 1930–2019.” 4. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xii. 5. Paul Petrone, “The Skills Companies Need Most in 2019 – And How to Learn Them” (LinkedIn, 2018), accessed April 14, 2020, https://www.linkedin.com/business/learning/blog/top-skills-and-courses/the-skills- companies-need-most-in-2019-and-how-to-learn-them. Graeme Evans, “Creative Cities, Creative Spaces and Urban Policy,” Urban Studies 46, nos. 5–6 (May 2009): 1003–40, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009103853. Beckie Supiano, The Creativity Challenge: Teaching Students to Think outside the Box (Washington, DC: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2020). Katja Thoring et al., “Creative Environments for Design Education and Practice: A Typology of Creative Spaces,” Design Studies 56 (May 2018): 54–83, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2018.02.001. Examining data from LinkedIn, Microsoft’s online employment service, Petrone, finds that creativity was the most valued soft skill among those hiring through LinkedIn. 6. James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg, The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge, UK: Cam- bridge University Press, 2019), 19. R. Keith Sawyer, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Note, however, that despite the shift away from viewing creativity as an attribute of solitary genius, creativity research supports the value of both individual reflection and group collaboration; see Bernard A. Nijstad, Michael Diehl, and Wolfgang Stroebe, “Cognitive Stimulation and Inter- ference in Idea-Generating Groups,” in Group Creativity: Innovation through Collaboration, ed. Paul B. Paulus and Bernard A. Nijstad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137–59. The study carrel in the bookstacks and the collaborative makerspace or seminar room can be mutually supportive, to put it in library terms. 7. Glăveanu and Kaufman, “Creativity: A Historical Introduction,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 2nd ed., ed. James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 9–26. On the academic value of creativity, see Aleksandra Gajda, Maciej Karwowski, and Ronald A. Beghetto, “Creativity and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Educational Psychology 109, no. 2 (2017): 1–31. 8. ACRL, Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016), https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ ilframework. 9. Peter N. Miller, “Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2015. 10. “WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard,” World Health Organization, accessed April 17, 2022, https:// covid19.who.int. 11. Sarah L. Kaufman, Michael Andor Brodeur, and Peggy McGlone, “Empty Classrooms, Studios and Stages: In the Covid-19 Era, an Arts Education Requires an Even Greater Leap of Faith,” Washington Post, August 20, 2020. 12. “Adrian Matejka Will Be First Black Editor of Poetry Magazine,” Seattle Times, April 26, 2022, https://www. seattletimes.com/entertainment/adrian-matejka-will-be-first-black-editor-of-poetry-magazine/. Jazmine Hughes, “Does SoHo, Haven for Art and Wealth, Have Room for Affordable Housing?” New York Times, April 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/04/nyregion/soho-gentrification-racism-wealth.html. 13. Zachary Small, “Trump Makes Classical Style the Default for Federal Buildings,” New York Times, December 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/arts/design/trump-executive-order-federal-buildings-architecture.html. 14. Dana Goldstein and Stephanie Saul, “A Look inside the Textbooks That Florida Rejected,” New York Times, April 22, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/us/florida-rejected-textbooks.html. Kelly Jensen, “‘Libraries Are Promoting an Agenda to Destroy Families’: Idaho State Rep Partners on Program to Remove Books from Libraries,” Book Riot, May 4, 2022, https://bookriot.com/heather-scott-book-ban-plans/. 15. Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (December 2014): 682–715, https://doi. org/10.1177/0090591714535103. 16. Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 19. Dewey’s ideas are a primary target of Deneen’s influential book. 17. Megan Oakleaf, Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report (Chicago: Asso- ciation of College and Research Libraries, 2010), 54–55. John Walsh, Information Literacy Instruction: Selecting an Effective Model (Oxford, UK: Chandos Publishing, 2011), 57–59. 18. Sophie Bury, “Faculty Attitudes, Perceptions and Experiences of Information Literacy: A Study across Multiple Disciplines at York University, Canada,” Journal of Information Literacy 5, no. 1 (2011): 45–64. See also Oakleaf, Value of Academic Libraries, 55. Bury cites her own survey results and several previous studies as estab- lishing that “faculty believe strongly in the importance of information literacy instruction,” 51. 19. Jim Cummings, “Literacy Policy and Curriculum,” in The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies, ed. Jessica Rowsell and Kate Pahl (New York: Routledge, 2015), 231. Ronald W Evans, Fear and Schooling: Understanding the Troubled History of Progressive Education (New York: Routledge, 2020). Dana Goldstein, “An Old and Contested Solu- tion to Boost Reading Scores: Phonics,” New York Times, February 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/ us/reading-phonics.html. https://www.linkedin.com/business/learning/blog/top-skills-and-courses/the-skills-companies-need-most-in-2019-and-how-to-learn-them https://www.linkedin.com/business/learning/blog/top-skills-and-courses/the-skills-companies-need-most-in-2019-and-how-to-learn-them https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009103853 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2018.02.001 https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework https://covid19.who.int https://covid19.who.int https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/adrian-matejka-will-be-first-black-editor-of-poetry-magazine/ https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/adrian-matejka-will-be-first-black-editor-of-poetry-magazine/ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/04/nyregion/soho-gentrification-racism-wealth.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/arts/design/trump-executive-order-federal-buildings-architecture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/us/florida-rejected-textbooks.html https://bookriot.com/heather-scott-book-ban-plans/ https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591714535103 https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591714535103 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/us/reading-phonics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/us/reading-phonics.html 458 College & Research Libraries May 2023 20. Alison Gopnik, “Childhood as a Solution to Explore–Exploit Tensions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375, no. 1803 (July 2020), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0502. Christopher G. Lucas et al., “When Children Are Better (or at Least More Open-Minded) Learners than Adults: Developmental Differences in Learning the Forms of Causal Relationships,” Cognition 131, no. 2 (May 2014): 284–99, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.010. 21. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 386. 22. Joseph Margolis, Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 23. Thomas Fallace, “John Dewey and the New Left, 1960–1988,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 52, no. 5 (2020): 12. See also Judy Whipps and Danielle Lake, “Pragmatist Feminism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, November 19, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/. 24. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Paul C. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013). Eddie S. Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Denise James, “Prag- matism and Radical Social Justice: Dewey, Du Bois, and Davis,” in Pragmatism and Justice, eds. Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 163–79. See also George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Nancy Frazier, “Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics of Culture,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 157–75. 25. See Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895–1922 (New York: Teach- ers College Press, 2010); Paul C. Taylor, “The Influence of Dewey on Race Theory,” Harvard Review of Philosophy, 26 (July 2019): 23–36, https://doi.org/10.5840/harvardreview201991922; and Shannon Sullivan, “(Re)Construction Zone: Beware of Falling Statues,” in In Dewey’s Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction, ed. William J. Gavin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 109–28; On Dewey, race, and indigeneity, see Matthew Villeneuve, “Instrumental Indians: John Dewey and the Problem of the Frontier for Democracy in Indigenous Education, 1884-1959,” PhD diss., (University of Michigan, 2021). https://doi.org/10.7302/2968. 26. ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, Final Report (Washington, DC: ACRL, 1989), http:// www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/presidential. 27. Ira Shor, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). National School Boards Association, “Back-To-Basics. NSBA Research Report 1978-1” (Washington, DC: National School Boards Association, 1978), https://eric.ed.gov/?q=Back-To-Basics.+NSBA+Research+Report+1 978&id=ED149483. 28. Paul Copperman, The Literacy Hoax: The Decline of Reading, Writing, and Learning in the Public Schools and What We Can Do about It (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1980). Burton Yale Pines, Back to Basics: The Tradi- tionalist Movement That Is Sweeping Grass-Roots America (New York: Morrow, 1982). The back-to-basics movement drew on earlier critiques of progressive methods of literacy instruction, such as Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read (New York: Harper & Row, 1955). 29. Keith Gilyard, “African American Contributions to Composition Studies,” College Composition and Com- munication 50, no. 4 (June 1999): 626–44, https://doi.org/10.2307/358484. 30  Merrill Sheils, “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” Newsweek, December 8, 1975, 58–63. The title of Sheils’s Newsweek cover story refers to Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 Why Johnny Can’t Read (see note 28 above). 31. Pines, Back to Basics: The Traditionalist Movement That Is Sweeping Grass-Roots America. Pines makes this point in the very subtitle of his book. 32. David P. Gardner et al., A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: Govern- ment Printing Office, 1983). 33. Gardner et al., A Nation at Risk, 5. 34. ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy. 35. Trish Ridgeway, “Information Literacy: An Introductory Reading List,” College & Research Libraries News 51, no. 7 (August 1990): 645. 36. ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy. 37. Association of College and Research Libraries, Final Report of the White House Conference on Library and Information Services (Washington, DC: National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, 1980), 9. 38. Richard Ohmann, “The Decline in Literacy Is a Fiction, if Not a Hoax,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 1976, 32. 39. James W. Guthrie and Matthew G. Springer, “A Nation at Risk Revisited: Did ‘Wrong’ Reasoning Result in ‘Right’ Results? At What Cost?” Peabody Journal of Education 79, no. 1 (2004): 7–35. Jal Mehta, “Escaping the Shadow: ‘A Nation at Risk’ and Its Far-Reaching Influence,” American Educator 39, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 20–26, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0502 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.010 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.010 https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/ https://doi.org/10.5840/harvardreview201991922 https://doi.org/10.7302/2968 http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/presidential http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/presidential https://eric.ed.gov/?q=Back-To-Basics.+NSBA+Research+Report+1978&id=ED149483 https://eric.ed.gov/?q=Back-To-Basics.+NSBA+Research+Report+1978&id=ED149483 https://doi.org/10.2307/358484 Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 459 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1064157. 40. ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy. 41. ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy. 42. Harvey J. Graff, “The Literacy Myth at Thirty,” in Literacy Myths, Legacies & Lessons (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 49. 43. Brian Street and Niko Besnier, “Aspects of Literacy,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2002), 527 44. Ken Macrorie, The I-Search Paper (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988). Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 45. The ACRL Framework indicates support for creative practice at several points. For example, the “Searching as Strategic Exploration” frame emphasizes the “often non-linear and iterative” nature of searching for infor- mation, describing it as a process “encompassing inquiry, discovery, and serendipity,” and the frame “Scholar- ship as Conversation” encourages students to “see themselves as contributors to scholarship rather than only consumers of it.” 46. Benjamin Bloom, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain (New York: McKay, 1956), 162; see also 65. Note, however, that placing creativity at the top of a conceptual pyramid, as many representations of Bloom’s taxonomy do, is problematic from a Deweyan per- spective. 47. Lorin Anderson et al., Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, complete ed. (New York: Pearson, 2000), 240, 266. On the use of taxonomies in information literacy instruction, see Walsh, Information Literacy Instruction, 70–86. 48. Boyer Commission, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities (Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1998), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED424840. Association of American Colleges and Universities, “Creative Thinking VALUE Rubric,” 2009. Association of College and Research Libraries, Information Literacy Competency Standards (Chicago: ACRL, 2000), http://hdl. handle.net/11213/7668. On the Boyer Report, see Randy Burke Hensley, “Curiosity and Creativity as Attributes of Information Literacy,” Reference & User Services Quarterly 44, no. 1 (October 2004): 31–36. For a discussion of creativity as an aspect of library instructional practice, see Erinn Batykefer and Laura Damon-Moore, Incubating Creativity at Your Library (Chicago: ALA Editions, 2019). 49. David Bawden, “Information and Digital Literacies: A Review of Concepts,” Journal of Documentation 57, no. 2 (April 2001): 221, https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000007083. 50. Christine Pawley, “Information Literacy: A Contradictory Coupling,” Library Quarterly 73, no. 4 (October 2003): 425, https://doi.org/10.1086/603440. 51. James Elmborg, “Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 32, no. 2 (March 2006): 192–9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2005.12.004. See also Elmborg’s remarks on Dewey, 196, and Heidi L. M. Jacobs, “Information Literacy and Reflective Pedagogical Praxis,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 34, no. 3 (May 2008): 256–62. For a redefinition of literacy, Jacobs turns to Rebecca Powell in addition to Freire. 52. Annie Downey, Critical Information Literacy: Foundations, Inspiration, and Ideas (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2016). For a broader review of approaches to Freire’s work, see Peter Mayo, Interpretations of Freire’s Work – A Critical Review, Liberating Praxis (Leiden: Brill, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004406124_003. 53. Paulo Friere, Foreword, in Ira Shor, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 54. Diana Coben, Radical Heroes: Gramsci, Freire and the Politics of Adult Education (New York: Routledge, 2015), 72. 55. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, 30th anniver- sary ed. (New York: Continuum, 2000), 84, 176. 56. John Dewey, “Creative Democracy – The Task before Us,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, Vol- ume 14: 1939–1941, Essays, Reviews, and Miscellany, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). In this essay, Dewey asserts that “democracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness,” with the consequence that “the task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute,” 229. 57. The founders of critical pedagogy often emphasized this kinship. See Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal and Radical Debate over Schooling (London: Routledge, 1986); Maxine Greene, “In Search of a Critical Pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 56 (November 1986): 427–41; and Ira Shor, “What Is Critical Literacy?” Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism, and Practice 1, no. 4 (January 1999): 2–32. See also Thomas Fallace, “John Dewey and the New Left, 1960–1988,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 52, no. 5 (2020): https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1064157 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED424840 http://hdl.handle.net/11213/7668 http://hdl.handle.net/11213/7668 https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000007083 https://doi.org/10.1086/603440 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2005.12.004 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004406124_003 460 College & Research Libraries May 2023 593–607. Freire himself cited Dewey only once in his published works. In a footnote to his essay “Education as the Practice of Freedom,” Freire remarked wryly that “on the subject of originality, I have always agreed with Dewey” while refuting accusations that he “plagiarized European or North-American educators.” Paulo Freire, “Education as the Practice of Freedom,” in Education for Critical Consciousness, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 57. Fallace, “John Dewey and the New Left,” 8, appears to overlook this reference by Freire. Freire’s reluctance to elucidate the relationship between his writings and Dewey’s has left the nature of this relationship open to speculation. 58. On Dewey’s conception of inquiry, see William R. Caspary, “Education for Democratic Citizenship from Critical Thinking to Inquiry Learning,” in The Handbook of Dewey’s Educational Theory and Practice, ed. Charles L. Lowery and Patrick M. Jenlink (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 113–33. See also Johnston, Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006). 59. Carol Kuhlthau, “Rethinking the 2000 ACRL Standards: Some Things to Consider,” Communications in Information Literacy 7, no. 2 (2013): 92. 60. ACLR, Framework for Information Literacy. Dewey’s most celebrated definition of inquiry appeared in his 1938 Logic, where it was described in terms of a problem or “indeterminate situation” that is transformed into a “unified whole.” John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, Volume 1, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 108. Note, however, that this dialectical account of inquiry is not the only one Dewey provided; see James Scott Johnston, Inquiry and Education: 61. Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes, and Ann K. Caspari, Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 16. See also William Herman and Michele Pinard, “Critically Examining Inquiry-Based Learning: John Dewey in Theory, History, and Practice,” in Inquiry-Based Learning for Multidisci- plinary Programs, ed. Patrick Blessinger and John M. Carfora (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2015), 43–62. 62. See Alison Hicks and Annemaree Lloyd, “Deconstructing Information Literacy Discourse: Peeling Back the Layers in Higher Education,” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, October 26, 2020, https://doi. org/10.1177/0961000620966027. 63. David Hildebrand, “John Dewey,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, November 1, 2018, https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/dewey/. 64. John Dewey, “Our Illiteracy Problem,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, Volume 5: 1929–1930, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 312–19. Pawley, “Information Literacy,” 425. 65. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 9, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 12. 66. See Dewey’s observations on literacy and the rise of fascism in Germany in John Dewey, Freedom and Culture, in The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 13, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Il- linois University Press, 2008), 91–94. 67. John Dewey, Experience and Education, in The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 13, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 7. See also “The Primary Education Fetich,” in John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882–1898: Early Essays, 1895–1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 254–68. 68. John Dewey, “Moral Principles in Education,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 4: 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 272. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 149. 69. Dewey, Experience and Education, 29. 70. On the three Rs and literacy, see Dewey, Democracy and Education, 200. 71. Dewey, Experience and Education, 51. 72. David Perkins, “Constructivism and Troublesome Knowledge,” in Overcoming Barriers to Student Under- standing: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge, ed. Jan Meyer and Ray Land (New York: Routledge, 2006). On the limits of threshold-concept theory, see also Elizabeth Wardle et al., “Recognizing the Limits of Threshold Concept Theory,” in (Re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy, ed. Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2020), 15–35. 73. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 10, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2008), 336. 74. Dewey, Art as Experience, 338. 75. Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2016), 92. 76. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 101. 77. Beth Hennessey, “Creativity in the Classroom,” in The Creativity Reader, ed. Vlad Glaveanu (New York: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000620966027 https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000620966027 https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/dewey/ https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/dewey/ Toward a Framework for Information Creativity 461 Oxford University Press, 2019), 269–88. 78. Ralph Hallman, “The Concept of Creativity in Dewey’s Educational Philosophy,” Educational Theory, no. 17 (1967): 3–13. 79  See Gopnik, “Childhood as a Solution,” and Lucas et al., “When Children Are Better.” Louise M. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995), 27. 80. John Dewey, The School and Society, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 1, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2008), 105. 81. John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 2, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 48. 82. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 53. 83. Edith A. Lathrop, “The Library and the Modern School,” in Normal Instructor and Primary Plans 40, no. 1 (November 1930): 64, 74. Azile Wofford, “School Library Evolution,” Phi Delta Kappan 22, no. 6 (1940): 285–91. 84. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 2, 1925–1953: 1925–1927, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 349. 85. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 350. Dewey’s views here on art and news recall his youthful involve- ment in a failed effort to create Thought News, a newspaper in which events of the day would be made whole by being treated in a philosophical and artistic way. See Lewis S. Feuer, “John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement in American Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 4 (October 1959): 545–68, https://doi. org/10.2307/2707891. 86. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 350. 87. On the potential for libraries to play a role in community news organizations, see Chris LeBeau, “Librar- ies and Local News: Expanding Journalism, Another User Service Grounded in Reference,” Reference & User Services Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 234–37. Mark Nonkes, “When a Small Market Newspaper Closes: A Literature Review,” Emerging Library & Information Perspectives 3, no. 1 (October 2020): 157–83, https://doi.org/10.5206/elip. v3i1.8596. 88. John Dewey, “Introduction,” in Henry Evelyn Bliss, The Organization of Knowledge and the System of the Sciences (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1929), vii–ix. John Dewey, Report and Recommendation upon Turkish Education, in The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 299–320. John Dewey, “The Russian School System,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, Volume 15: 1923–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). See also James Elmborg, “The Other Dewey: John Dewey’s Democracy and Education and Information Literacy,” in Student Engagement and Information Literacy, ed. Craig Gibson (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association, 2006), 1–15. 89. An earlier version of this definition appears in Mark Dahlquist, “‘Begin with a Moment:’ A Pilot Study of a Method for Supporting Information Creativity in First Year Writing Instruction.” Paper presented at Library Instruction Tennessee Conference, Clarksville, TN, June 3, 2019. https://hdl.handle.net/2374.MIA/6415 90. Jela Steinerova, “Looking for Creative Information Strategies and Ecological Literacy,” in Information Literacy: Moving Toward Sustainability, Communications in Computer and Information Science 552 (Switzerland: Springer, 2015), 3–12. 91. Martin Aurand, “Teaching and Learning with Collections: The Library as a Site for Exploration and Inspiration,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 30, no. 1 (April 2011): 12–20, https://doi.org/10.1086/adx.30.1.27949562. 92. On the popular association between creativity and libraries, see John B. Horrigan, “Libraries 2016” (Wash- ington, DC: Pew Research Center, September 2016), 8, http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/09/2016/Libraries-2016/. 93. Patricia Durisin, Information Literacy Programs: Successes and Challenges (New York: Routledge, 2002), 128. 94. Taylor V. Gara, Liane Brouillette, and George Farkas, “Did the Frequency of Early Elementary Classroom Arts Instruction Decrease during the No Child Left Behind Era? If So, for Whom?” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 45 (October 2018): 263–76, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.01.004. Dominic Wyse and Alice Bradbury, “Reading Wars or Reading Reconciliation? A Critical Examination of Robust Research Evidence, Curriculum Policy and Teachers’ Practices for Teaching Phonics and Reading,” Review of Education 10, no. 1 (2022): e3314, https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3314. Dewey, Experience and Education, 62. 95. Cheng-Ping Chang et al., “The Influence of Students Information Literacy Competency on Creativity under the Regulation of Classroom Climate,” Creative Education 7 (January 2016): 1551–60, https://doi.org/10.4236/ ce.2016.711160. Jonathan A. Plucker, Matthew C. Makel, and Meihua Qian, “Assessment of Creativity,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, ed. James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 44–68, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316979839.005. James C. Kaufman, Jonathan A. Plucker, and John Baer, Essentials of Creativity Assessment (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). https://doi.org/10.2307/2707891 https://doi.org/10.2307/2707891 https://doi.org/10.5206/elip.v3i1.8596 https://doi.org/10.5206/elip.v3i1.8596 https://hdl.handle.net/2374.MIA/6415 https://doi.org/10.1086/adx.30.1.27949562 http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/09/2016/Libraries-2016/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.01.004 https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3314 https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2016.711160 https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2016.711160 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316979839.005 462 College & Research Libraries May 2023 96. Taylor, “The Influence of Dewey on Race Theory,” 35. 97. See Hans Joas, “The Inspiration of Pragmatism,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 190–198; James, “Pragmatism and Radical Social Justice”; Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, eds., Pragmatism and Justice, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Veith Selk and Dirk Jörke, “Back to the Future! Habermas and Dewey on Democracy in Capitalist Times,” Constellations 27, no. 1 (2020): 36–49, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467- 8675.12423. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12423 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12423