I found this article on the main page of Library Quarterly‘s website as one of the most cited when I went looking for Archie Dick’s 1988 article on epistemologies in LIS [to be discussed soon].

I quite enjoyed this article as for me the upshot, in essence, is that they align information literacy with a domain-centric viewpoint.

The authors, whom I have read several papers by, whether together or with other authors, are social constructionists.  I am not quite sure how this theory and its close “rivals” fit in with my work. They all have distinct advantages to their way of looking at the world, but none of them focus on all that is relevant. As of now, I am a pluralist as far as these theories go. I feel that slavish adherence to one and only one would cause one to miss other relevant and important ways of viewing the world, or the slice of the world one is trying to analyze. [See my upcoming comments on A. Dick's holistic perspectivism.]

As it stands, social constructionism seems only slightly orthogonal to Hjørland’s domain analytic view.

Let me state up front that information literacy (hereafter IL or info lit) is not my arena.  Also, this paper is 5 years old so some of the critiques that it makes of our professional organizations’ formal statements on IL may have been addressed. Then again, as fast as our professional organizations move I would not count on that either.

Outline of article:

• Introduction
• The Background of the Information Literacy Movement
• The IL Debate
• Conceptions of Information and Learners in the Generic Skills Approach
• The Social Context of Information Literacy
• Information Literacy as a Sociotechnical Problem
• Conclusion

I am not going to cover much in the way of their critiques of these formal statements. But I will say that I fully agree with them.  I guess I’ll quote this passage as a reasonable summation of their critique but be aware it is more varied and detailed than this makes it sound:

“The IL movement has not often seriously attempted to call its own premises into question or to suspend the obvious and, as a result, has been preoccupied with the binary logic of discerning facts from nonfacts and biased from nonbiased information. Such dichotomies reflect the values of traditional print culture, however, rather than the social and multimodal networked technological environments. In interactive digital environments, actors can simultaneously be readers and writers, consumers, and producers of knowledge. Knowledge is not located in texts as such—or in the individual’s head. Rather, it involves the coconstruction of situated meanings [33, p. 48] and takes place in networks of actors and artifacts” (337-8).

[33] Kapitzke, Cushla. (see below)

The authors’ critique of info lit comes from the literature on “The IL Debate.” It begins with a simple but important observation attributed to Mutch. “The difficulties with the IL concept stem partly from the fact that it marries two concepts (information and literacy) that in themselves are ambiguous and resist exact definitions [29]” (332).

[29] Mutch, Alistair. “Information Literacy: An Exploration.” International Journal of Information Management 17, no. 5 (1997): 377-86

That simple critique, in and of itself, ought give one pause regarding any attempt at defining “information literacy.” [Damn! I know I written about definitions on my blog in the past but I cannot find anything useful. I really and truly need a powerful blog search engine for my own blog; natively, that is. Anyway, this reminds me that I really need to reread Harris and Hutton on definition and write a one-page statement of my views on the topic.]

“The term “practice” shifts the focus away from the behavior, action, motives, and skills of monologic individuals.  Teams, groups, and organizations can be seen as the entities that become information literate in a specific knowledge domain, that is, they enact information practices and use suitable technical tools. Seeing IL as consisting of sociotechnical practices that differ from one knowledge domain to another mandates empirical research efforts that concentrate on actual organizational environments and on routine and mundane ways of performing situated actions and interactions with and through social and technical resources needed for their accomplishment.

What we propose here is that as practices give rise to individuals as epistemic subjects in the fist place, they are primary in understanding the acts and deeds of individuals” (339).

There is much more in this article that should help one rethink, or think about for the first time, the traditional, and mostly implicit, assumptions of information literacy. This view does, in fact, complicate IL but then many of our concepts need a little (or a lot of) complication.

I find it powerful and useful in that it makes IL more about the actual processes of human communication; more social, as literacy is; and firmly situates IL in domain practices.

Highly recommended.