Radical information literacy: reclaiming the political heart of the IL movement / 9781843347484, 1843347482

Citation preview

Radical Information Literacy CHANDOS INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL SERIES Series Editor: Ruth Rikowski (email: [email protected]) Chandos’ new series of books is aimed at the busy information professional. They have been specially commissioned to provide the reader with an authoritative view of current thinking. They are designed to provide easy-to-read and (most importantly) practical coverage of topics that are of interest to librarians and other information professionals. If you would like a full listing of current and forthcoming titles, please visit www.chandospublishing.com. New authors: we are always pleased to receive ideas for new titles; if you would like to write a book for Chandos, please contact Dr Glyn Jones on [email protected] or telephone +44 (0) 1865 843000.

Radical Information Literacy Reclaiming the Political Heart of the IL Movement ANDREW WHITWORTH

AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • CAMBRIDGE • HEIDELBERG • LONDON NEW YORK • OXFORD • PARIS • SAN DIEGO SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier Chandos Publishing Elsevier Limited The Boulevard Langford Lane Kidlington Oxford OX5 1GB UK store.elsevier.com/Chandos-Publishing-/IMP_207/ Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier Limited Tel: +44 (0) 1865 843000 Fax: +44 (0) 1865 843010 store.elsevier.com First published in 2014 ISBN: 978-1-84334-748-4 (print) ISBN: 978-1-78063-429-6 (online) Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938140

© A Whitworth, 2014 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the Publishers. This publication may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without the prior consent of the Publishers. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The publishers make no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this publication and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions. The material contained in this publication constitutes general guidelines only and does not represent to be advice on any particular matter. No reader or purchaser should act on the basis of material contained in this publication without first taking professional advice appropriate to their particular circumstances. Any screenshots in this publication are the copyright of the website owner(s), unless indicated otherwise. Typeset by Domex e-Data Pvt. Ltd., India Printed in the UK and USA. Contents

List of tables vii About the author ix Introduction 1 Part 1: Deconstructing IL 9 1 Basic concepts and terminology 11 2 The early days of IL 27 3 The diversity of IL 47 4 The institutionalising of IL 73 Part 2: Reconstructing IL 97 5 Colonising IL 99 6 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL

119 7 Practising IL 149 8 Reclaiming IL 167 Bibliography 205 Index 229 v This page intentionally left blank List of tables 4.1 IL literature by disciplinary classification (WoS only) 76 4.2 IL literature by sector 77 4.3 Categories for analysis 80 4.4

Views of IL present in the literature 80 vii This page intentionally left blank About the author Andrew Whitworth is Senior Lecturer in the School of Environment, Education and Development at the University of Manchester, UK. He is Programme Director of the MA: Digital Technologies, Communication and Education, which in 2012 was the winner of a Blackboard Catalyst award for innovative communications strategies. He has been keynote speaker at several international information literacy conferences including “Creating Knowledge VI” in Bergen, Norway, in 2010, “Information Literacy: a way of life?” in Denmark in 2011, and the UNESCO/IFLA conference on Media and Information Literacy in Moscow in 2012, at which he was also one of the authors of the UNESCO Declaration on Media and Information Literacy. When not working he prefers to be found up a mountain somewhere, usually in the English Lake District. In his previous book, Information Obesity (2009, also published by Chandos), he was scolded by a reviewer for mentioning too often in the main text that he lives in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, and supports Brighton and Hove Albion FC. So he hasn’t mentioned either fact in this book. Well, apart from just then. ix This page intentionally left blank

Introduction This is a work of social, political and educational theory that critically explores, and then contests, the field of information literacy (IL), by attending to its relationship with power and authority, and how these shape the generation of knowledge. The central argument of the book is that, since its emergence in the 1970s, IL has constructed and then institutionalised itself around a monologic approach that stands in a fundamental tension with the dialogic nature of learning, knowledge-formation, and the use of language (Linell 2009). This argument is based on a more expansive view of IL than is typical, one that addresses issues of dialogue, discourse, power, and authority over information exchange, and that has, as its field of interest, the collective creation of knowledge. Individual literacy – facility with information – is at the root of this, but this is always manifested within technological, organisational, social and linguistic structures that already exist and which impose cognitive authority (Wilson 1983) over information. This authority often goes unscrutinised. This book will argue that institutionalised, monologic forms of IL do not permit scrutiny of cognitive authority, but only reinforce it in ways that ultimately weaken the quality of collective decision making and knowledge formation in communities, in organisations, and in society. Hence, the need for a ‘radical information literacy’: the application of principles of informed, direct democracy to the scrutiny of information exchange within organisations and communities. Radical IL does not attempt to annul authority, but nor does it simply reinforce what cognitive authority exists; rather, it explores ways to more widely distribute authority over information practices. To develop and justify radical IL, attention must be given to how IL has so far been theorised. It is theory, not practice, that the IL literature is lacking (Lloyd 2013; Bruce 2013). IL is supported by theories 1

Radical Information Literacy developed elsewhere, but not yet synthesised into a theory that IL can call its own; a philosophy of not only IL but also information science (Tomic 2010). Presently, IL finds its principal theoretical bases in: library and information science (LIS), and the design of information systems (e.g. Zurkowski 1974; Saracevic 1975; Breivik and Gee 1989); sociocultural practice theory (e.g. Lloyd 2010b; Limberg, Sundin and Talja 2012); personal construct psychology (PCP) (Kuhlthau 1993); phenomenographic studies of education/phenomenographic pedagogy and variation theory (e.g. Bruce 1997; Bruce et al 2006; Edwards 2006), and finally, albeit less influentially, critical theory (e.g. Andersen 2006; Elmborg 2006; Whitworth 2007; 2009). This book reviews the contributions of each field to IL. To this mix is then added Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of discourse. His theories permit a fuller exploration of the notion of authority. It is authority which pulls together the other theories, and the forms of IL derived from them. Ultimately, IL must attend to the ways in which cognitive authority becomes embedded in information systems, organisations, texts, and language itself. Through exploring the links between the various fields of IL mentioned above – particularly phenomenography and practice theory – this book describes how IL can help social actors discover in practice, and not just in theory, their own potential to democratically transform structures of authority over information exchange, and then maintain scrutiny over this authority. *** Chapter 1 outlines the key concepts which will drive the argument, principally the notion of dialogism, and why this demands constant attention to contexts. It is in local contexts, or “information landscapes” (Lloyd 2010), that cognitive authority is determined by the various communities that reside within, and are constantly constructing, these landscapes. Chapter 2 then explores the origins of IL, and

suggests that at these early stages, IL potentially had a sensitivity to literacy’s political nature, and the role of information in both empowerment and disempowerment, that has since been lost. More precisely, it has been obscured by other, contemporaneous perspectives on the subject. Understanding why the political heart of IL was lost reveals biases in the systems used to organise the production and consumption of information in society, including the educational system. These systems are based on a particular notion of authority; that it is centralised, exclusionary and unitary, instead of distributed, participatory and polyvocal 2 Introduction (many-voiced). These alternative forms of authority provoke not only the need for individuals and groups to learn about the patterns of information exchange and cognitive authority within their landscapes, but also how to transform these and maintain vigilance over authority. The seed of such an alternative view of IL is visible in a paper by Hamelink (1976), but its potential is undeveloped. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate how IL did develop, both as a field of academic study and in practice. These chapters offer a brief political history of IL, with particular attention to the contributions of LIS, PCP, and phenomenography. The latter offers a very well-developed view of IL as learning – that is, something which changes the way we become aware of and experience our world. But most IL is taught, practiced and studied in limited ways, and chapter 4 presents evidence for the institutionalisation of a monologic view of the subject. Institutionalisation is a key contributor to the lack of scrutiny of cognitive authority: thus, it is opposed to direct democratic practice. Therefore, this institutionalisation, and its consequences for practice, must be specifically addressed by a radical IL.

Chapter 4 also notes that the most well-developed architecture, not only for understanding the contexts within which people experience information, but also for transforming these contexts, comes from those applying practice theory to work in IL. These authors include Lloyd, particularly her work on information landscapes (Lloyd 2010), and others, largely based in Scandinavia (e.g. Limberg et al 2012; Tuominen et al 2005; Sundin 2008). However, institutionalised forms of IL have not been fundamentally challenged by this approach. I argue that this is in part because there is currently no full, theoretical integration of the practice-based view with the phenomenographic, educational view – one that recognises the fundamentally dialogic and political nature of knowledge formation in society. The second part of the book (chapters 5–8) is therefore devoted to this task of integration. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the political and linguistic theories which are the foundation of the dialogic view of IL, first through assessing (but ultimately rejecting) the contribution of Jürgen Habermas to the field (chapter 5), then, in chapter 6, considering the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. This is an original application of Bakhtin, whose work has not yet featured significantly in discussions of IL, despite a shared interest in dialogue. Chapter 6 explores these theories and draws out from them the notion of authority, and eventually, an intersubjective view of IL that stresses the necessary democratic transformation of 3 Radical Information Literacy information landscapes as an outcome of IL. The key methodological connection (explored in chapter 7) between the phenomenographic and practice-based traditions lies in the way variation in perceptions of the information landscape are accommodated. This reveals the role of authority in the genesis and ongoing transformation of context-specific information landscapes, and how these landscapes can be seen as an outcome of learning. Finally, chapter 8 returns to the idea that a radical IL would enhance actors’ ability to perceive, scrutinize, and transform the structures of authority over information exchange and, based on the preceding theoretical synthesis, explores what work has already been

undertaken in this area and proposes agendas for both research and practice in radical IL. *** This book is a critical theory of education, but it is one that specifically challenges notions that education is something limited to formalised institutions. The book is intended for all practitioners of IL, wherever they may be located: in libraries, in schools, in community organisations, activist groups, or businesses. In their detailed and influential exploration of educational theory, Carr and Kemmis (1986, 41) state that: “the development of a critical theory of education must be related intrinsically to the professional development of teachers.” While radical IL is certainly educational, however, it is key to the argument of this book that it be viewed as relevant to all educational processes in society, including, but going well beyond, formal education such as that practiced in schools or colleges. The ways we view the role of the ‘teacher’ – and how these different views impact, in turn, on approaches to teachers developing their competencies, and helping learners to do the same – are integrated into the structures through which authority and institutionalisation are sustained. Exploring in a broader sense what it means ‘to teach information literacy’ allows this book to make contributions to the social and political theories of communication and knowledgeformation, and to explore how this takes place not only in the formal arena of the classroom, with its relatively prescribed structure and close monitoring by various high-level agencies, but in many other arenas including workplaces, the family, the media, and social networks. The book takes an exploratory approach to IL, rather than an evaluative one (Lundh, Limberg and Lloyd 2013). That is, it does not accept one or more definitions of IL as givens, or standards, then discuss 4 Introduction

how educators can design and evaluate programmes of teaching to help improve learners’ progress towards these standards. Nor, however, does it ignore these programmes and the standards on which they are based. Standards are evidence of a monologic approach to IL, but that means they must be engaged with, not ignored or dismissed as inappropriate. IL standards are evidence of the role of cognitive authority and power in IL; but like all such authorities, they can be turned into positive resources for learning if subjected to scrutiny by those working with the standards. Only through taking this view is there a chance that IL’s theorypractice gap can be closed. For similar reasons, the book also turns a critical eye on the role of the library in IL. As chapter 4 will show, the institutionalisation of IL in the library is an actively damaging phenomenon. But to effectively challenge the isolation of IL in the library – a call to arms made frequently by librarians writing on the subject (e.g. Badke 2012; Secker and Coonan 2013) – one must also investigate why it exists; that is, what the isolation is evidence of. This cannot be done solely within the bounds of LIS. The theories that this book draws on most heavily are not, with one exception (Kuhlthau’s work, described in chapter 3), theories of librarianship. Nor is radical IL a ‘library practice’, although it may be undertaken in a library, by librarians. Nevertheless, as the book seeks to inspire the transformation of practice, there are points at which it directly addresses library practitioners. The book is a critique of the library’s dominant role in IL, albeit one that offers at least some tools that practitioners can use to understand and change this role from within. Beyond the library, the book should also be useful for anyone interested in theories of information, information behaviour, and workplace learning, whether or not they are members of the LIS profession or other disciplines.

The development of a radical IL must also be technologyindependent. The emergence and present ubiquity of information and communications technologies (ICTs) are clearly significant influences within the information landscapes of society, and critical views of ICT’s potentially negative impact on learning have long been advanced (e.g. Roszak 1986; Robins and Webster 1987). ICT, rather than innately being a tool for autonomous learning and personal enlightenment, may be more accurately identified as part of the structure by which the powerful in society maintain their capital. In Information Obesity (Whitworth 2009) I reviewed the history of ICT in education using the same broad critical theoretical background as used in this book. This time, however, ICT’s role is tangential. The arguments herein draw on theories of learning, 5 Radical Information Literacy practice, and democracy as they play out in an environment in which there is rapid technological change, but which are not driven by these changes except insofar as they provoke learning needs which must then be solved. I will go so far at this point to state that if the notion of ‘ information literacy’ is to have any hope of acquiring an independent theoretical base, it must be a technologically-neutral theory. What this book is, ultimately, is a methodology: an exploration and evaluation of a set of cognitive tools, provided by other authors but synthesised here into a framework by which we (meaning, participants in real discourses) can learn to see the potential for transforming systems of informational exchange into more democratic forms, and thus more widely distributing cognitive authority. *** I must gratefully acknowledge the friends, colleagues and institutions who helped me write this book. Most of the work was done between

January and August 2013, thanks to a sabbatical from the Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester, UK. There, I thank Helen Gunter, Julian Williams and my colleagues on the MA: Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (Gary Motteram, Susan Brown, Alan Jervis, Mike O’Donoghue, and Marilena Aspioti). My students on the Media and Information Literacy course unit have patiently helped me explore these ideas over the years: this book is the culmination of that process so far, but not, I hope, its end. Stephen Pearson of the University of Manchester Library undertook a literature search for me and I thank him for his time and attention to a task that proved invaluable, considering my “shabby skills” (Badke 2011, 133) in this area. At this European end of operations, Fred Garnett, Susie Andretta, Anna Hampson Lundh, Geoff Walton, Anne Kakkonen, Maria Carme Torras i Calvo, Ricardo Blaug, and A. Wainwright have also helped, in various ways. My sabbatical was spent largely in Australia, courtesy of an invitation from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), where I must thank Christine Bruce, Helen Partridge, Christine Yates, Ellie Abdi, Deb Ponting, Michael Rosemann and, for smoothing my stay in Brisbane, Fiona Doyle, Manuela Leemann, Debi Waters, and Wendy and Chris at the Kookaburra Inn, Spring Hill. Outside QUT I must also give thanks to Annemaree Lloyd, Bhuva Narayan, Stephen Kemmis, Caroline Bailey, Sharon Edwards, and Michael and Sharon Wray – not to mention Joy Division, Jello Biafra, Led Zeppelin, LCD Soundsystem, Neil Young, and 6 Introduction sundry others – for all contributing in different ways to my personal information landscape and the inspiration I could draw from it over those months in the Southern Hemisphere. And a ‘stop press’ thank you to Peter Leigh, who helped recover the digital version of the manuscript of this book when my MacBook Pro’s hard disk failed literally the day before I was due to submit it to the publisher in December 2013.

Finally, there would be no point to any of it without Clare and Joe, who put up with my foibles and absences well beyond the call of duty, and my families and friends in the UK who probably wonder why, but help anyway. Thank you to everyone; a big, deep-down thank you. 7 This page intentionally left blank Part 1: Deconstructing IL “I need some information!” “Sam, this is information retrieval, not information dispersal.” Sam (Jonathan Pryce) and Jack (Michael Palin) in Brazil [dir: Terry Gilliam] This page intentionally left blank 1 Basic concepts and terminology Abstract: This chapter introduces key concepts and clarifies terminology, setting the scene for the discussions of IL which follow. It presents information as a specifically human property, one that links the subjective and personal, and intersubjective, collective realms. It explores the nature of dialogic and monologic approaches to meaning-making, recognises the importance of context and the existence of inequalities and irregularities in information landscapes. It discusses the role played in information exchange by creations such as artifacts, organisations, and communities, and the different ways these embody dialogic and monologic forms of thinking.

Key Words: Dialogism, monologism, intersubjectivity, context, information landscapes, artifacts, communities, cognitive authority. This book, like all academic works, adopts a particular perspective on its subject. It takes a specifically sociopolitical view of IL, being concerned with relationships and dialogues between conscious human beings who act within the world and transform the world as a result. ‘Information’ is a concept with diverse definitions (Bawden 2001; Cover and Thomas 2012) and it is possible to view information purely technically, as a mere property, transmitted via a network or system. This technical view therefore also considers information a property of biological systems, even of the universe as a whole. To study information literacy, however, it is necessary to focus on information as a human property. Information can be generated through some kind of interaction with non-human environmental elements, but most is generated through interactions with other people, within a variety of contexts. It is by contextualising, through active cognitive work at a particular place and time, that raw data becomes information and, in turn, develops into knowledge. Information, knowledge, and communication are enmeshed with one 11 Radical Information Literacy another. Thus, information is essential for learning, and the consequent transformation of the world. Interpretations of the world are necessary in order to interact with it, and these interpretations originate with cognition. Linell (2009, 14) defines cognition as: “intelligent or non-random coping with the world (in perception, thinking, acting and preparing to act etc.)”. It involves interaction with the world, though not always with people at each and every moment. In this process, it is not information processing that is central, but meaning (Linell 2009, 221); cognition is therefore the making of meaning or sense.

Yet to consider human cognition as solely an individual, and thus essentially biological, property is a fallacy. For a start, it is difficult to deny the notion of an “extended mind” ( ibid, 146–7), seeing cognition as dependent on not only the human brain but various tools, props, artifacts, texts and technologies. The enhancement of human cognition, through the ever-improving design of supplements like these, is the basic driver of information science. And, once one looks beyond the individual human brain and its biochemical operations as the sole basis of cognition, one is also forced to acknowledge that ‘mind’ (as opposed to ‘brain’) is a relational phenomenon. The human mind is a point of interaction – of dialogue – between various systems (Linell 2009, 147). In monologic views of cognition ( ibid, 45): “There is no active role for recipients. They only have to understand, that is... retrieve and reconstruct the sender’s intentions.” ‘Literacy’ in this perspective can be seen as those cognitive processes, in the recipient, which ensure the message is received as the sender intended. But the dialogic view sees meaning as constructed during communication, rather than existing prior to the communication ( ibid, 38). That is, messages or utterances (Linell 2009, 238–9; Bakhtin 1986; chapter 6 below) “do not ‘contain’ meaning... but they prompt people to make meaning” (Linell 2009, 224). The dialogic view of communication therefore posits that knowledge formation is not subjective (that is, a matter of information absorption and cognition at the personal level), but intersubjective, created between people who draw on and transform informational resources from the world as they do so. Indeed, it is this ongoing use and transformation of resources in which intersubjective knowledge formation can be viewed as residing. The idea of a collective mind, or ‘noösphere’, does not have to be a mystical phenomenon (cf. Teilhard de Chardin 1959, Misztal 2003). Instead, the noösphere, though intangible, is real and continually constructed by the activities of the thinking organisms (people) and the 12 Basic concepts and terminology environments that it penetrates (Samson and Pitt 1999; Whitworth 2009, 3–10). Just as the process

of biological reproduction works to sustain and evolve the biosphere, so the processes of communication sustain and evolve the noösphere. As Linell (2009, 361) says: The dialogical stance... does not posit an abstract, spiritual or Cartesian mental world; on the contrary, it insists that meanings cannot occur unless there are human beings with their bodies, brains and minds acting in the external world. This holds... to cognitive processes in thinking, imaging etc., which are distributed over brain, body and world. Thus, the world of information is not some mystical ‘out-there’ phenomenon. It is created by us, exists within us, but is also encoded into the tangible world in bodies, acts, texts, technologies and social relations. Knowledge is intentional (Linell 2009, 241): “never disinterested; rather, it is always the product of particular groups of people who find themselves in specific circumstances in which they are engaged in definite projects.” And knowledge is “dependent on communication between individuals for its genesis, evolution and maintenance, and for its disappearance; knowledge wilts away if it is never communicatively sustained across generations” ( ibid). *** Intersubjectivity allows for the distribution of knowledge, but this distribution is not necessarily smooth. Knowledge can be “unequally accessed by different people” (Linell 2009, 82). This inequality can arise for many reasons including differences in status, literacy, familiarity with a context, and so on, and revealing the nature of such inequality is the fundamental purpose of this book, and of radical IL. However, at this stage, this ‘lumpy’ distribution can be considered in a more abstract way; as the fundamental characteristic of the noösphere, and the basis of the ideas to be explored in this section: that is, context and the information landscape.

As Calhoun (1992, 37) says, the noösphere is: “a field of discursive connections.... In nearly any imaginable case there will be clusters of relatively greater density of communication within the looser overall field...” In the most general sense possible, these clusters are the various contexts in which every one of us exists and from which we draw the resources we need in order to engage in activity and practice. Dialogism 13 Radical Information Literacy “implies a thoroughly contextual theory of sense-making” (Linell 2009, 361), and Linell ( ibid, 16) draws a further distinction between realised contexts, that is, those aspects, or resources, made “communicatively relevant by participants in situ”, and contextual resources, that is, “various meaningful phenomena which are (in one sense or another) accessible and could potentially be made relevant”. Both realised contexts and contextual resources include concrete situations, observations and perceptions of these, texts, background knowledge, artifacts, and social representations all of which contain “potentialities to evoke particular types of discourses, actions, attitudes etc.” ( ibid, 242). Lloyd (2010, 2) describes information landscapes as “the communicative spaces that are created by people who co-participate in a field of practice”, and it is this metaphor which will be adopted in this book to name the various contexts within which these practices occur, whether they are located in a workplace (as Lloyd tends to use the term), in a university, school, or among friends and family. Because the noösphere and information are intangible, we are almost obliged to use metaphors to describe it: indeed, these metaphors are “really almost our basic vocabulary for talk about thinking and learning” (Wilson 1983, 3). Yet the idea of a ‘landscape’ remains a productive analogy for thinking about how to describe information in context. All tangible, geographical landscapes are comprised of the same basic elements (water, rock,

life), but the number of possible combinations and forms of these elements give rise to their incredible diversity: each landscape is essentially unique. However, general forms (mountain landscapes, deserts) still exist and can be described. Landscapes are also shaped by activity at the micro-scale, iterated again and again to bring about large-scale transformations over longer periods of time. All these things are equally true of information landscapes. The landscape is also something one experiences and explores, an engagement which “allows [one]... to map the landscape, constructing an understanding of how it is shaped” (Lloyd 2010, 2). Exploring, and mapping, an information landscape “requires the act of becoming informed”; that is, to form an idea about the relevant resources within the landscape and “to understand and make judgments about these activities in the context of what is considered acceptable practice by others who share the same contextual space” ( ibid). From this it can be stated that ( ibid): (T)he process of becoming information literate requires the whole person to be aware of themselves within the world... to experience information through the opportunities that are 14 Basic concepts and terminology furnished by the landscape or context; to recognise these experiences as contributing to learning; and, to take into account how the context and its sanctioned practices, sayings and doings enable and constrain information use. The information landscape does not represent the totality of human existence: we still engage with the world at an even more fundamental level of bodily need and visceral experience. But it can be argued that anything with informative potential is part of the landscape, including not just textual information but other people (and their own bodily needs and experiences) and created artifacts and tools. These two particular ideas need more exploration. The notion of ‘community’ is important for the argument developed here, and that term is used in preference to ‘group’, which, though it refers to a collective, does not capture the idea of connections

between members in the same way. A community may be defined in many ways: as people who live in a particular village, neighbourhood, city or other geographical location; as the worshippers of a particular religion; followers of a particular sports team (Whitworth 2009, 17–18); colleagues in a workplace, with shared learning needs (a community of practice (Wenger 1998)); learners on the same course; even sufferers from the same disease. The common factor is that, within communities, things are shared. People are not members of the same local community simply because they live in the same town, but because of shared perceptions, a common view of issues (Clarke 1996, p. 24): A community is a set of shared relations understood internally more than it is a set of objective behaviours. In a significant sense it resides in the imaginations of the members of that community. In building a shared identity a community comes to have a set of shared intentions and dispositions about its past, its general account of its origins, of its place in the cosmos, of paradigmatic figures and personages that come to represent significant perceptions of its history and events that mark significant moments in its shared memory... This does not imply consensus, for example that members of a community all share political views. It does, however, mean that community members, as well as drawing on their own subjective perspective, make judgments with reference to a “collective matrix of 15 Radical Information Literacy interpretation” (Wellmer 1991, 197) that arises within a particular information landscape, the creation of which has been a joint effort. At the same time, social and collective needs are influenced by individual needs (Maceviciute 2006). Thus, subjectivity and intersubjectivity are closely related, and individual cognition has a profoundly intersubjective character (Fleck 1935, 42 quoted in Douglas 1986, 12): “Cognition is the most sociallyconditioned activity of man [ sic], and knowledge is the paramount social creation”.

These communities or “thought collectives” (Fleck 1935), can take diverse forms. Some are “transient and accidental” (Douglas 1986, 12), but some are stable and disciplined, infrastructures for the perpetuation of certain values, such as churches, trade unions, and political parties. This is why the notion of a ‘collective memory’ requires no mysticism to explain. Collective memories are stored in landscapes, their communities, and the information-processing systems which infiltrate them. There is no need to idealise the community. Some communities may foster trust, but others are dysfunctional (Douglas 1986, 25). One might be considered a member of a community by others even if one does not accept the label, or the community interpretation of a situation. Rose (1996, 334) writes that sometimes “our allegiance to... communities is something that we have to be made aware of, requiring the work of educators, campaigns, activists, manipulators of symbols, narratives and identifications”. Communities can be exclusionary, even totalitarian (the cult, say). They can be, not the opposite of governance, an arena in which self-empowerment can be permitted to flourish, but the means of governance (Rose 1996, 335). Communities can also prevent knowledge formation. Špiranec and Zorica (2010, 149) claim that the Web 2.0 era has allowed a proliferation of learning communities, “characterized by intense activities of knowledge acquisition, information use and sharing”. Yet this proliferation is also criticised by Shenk (1997) as contributing to a fragmentation of understanding, with tools such as ‘intelligent’ search engines and social media encouraging us to draw on only the views of a phenomenon with which we already agree. On the other hand, the notion of ‘community’ is highly fluid. A community is not a firmly-drawn zone, just as its information landscape is not. Communities and landscapes are diffuse, their boundaries unclear, just as a physical landscape may suddenly change but may also have wide zones of transition, visible at different scales from micro to macro.

Most people are part of many communities, and can thus draw on a range of collective matrices of interpretation. Some individuals straddle 16 Basic concepts and terminology boundaries, acting, transiently or more permanently, as brokers or crossing points between these matrices (cf. Star 1989), but others may keep their membership of particular communities quite separate from others, even secret. Either way, communities and their intersubjective matrices of interpretation are, clearly, essential tools for the making of judgments about information and the development of practice. Yet their fundamental importance means their influence is often invisible and unarticulated: “The power of socially approved knowledge is so extended that what the whole in-group approves – ways of thinking and acting, such as mores, folkways, habits – is simply taken for granted... although the source of such knowledge remains entirely hidden in its anonymity” (Schutz 1964, 133). *** The role of artifacts in the information landscape also needs exploration. Artifacts are constituent parts of information landscapes, but they are produced in different ways from the community, with its basis in dialogue. Practical knowledge has always been embedded into artifacts (Burkitt 1999, 38–9). As noted above, cognition is distributed through brain, body, and world, and in every case artifacts play a mediating role. Artifacts are the product of cognition and collaboration, and through interaction with them, further insights are formed. The artifact has “replaced the gene as the mode of transmission and change within societies” (Burkitt 1999, 41; see also: Limberg et al 2012, 104 ff;

Vygotsky 1978; Engeström, Miettinen and Punamäki 1999). Not all artifacts are technological: a particular way of thinking, or the result of a process of intellectual inquiry, may also be encoded into a cognitive artifact such as a methodology, a set of standards, or the definition of a particular word, given form as an artifact by being encoded in a dictionary. Even insights and experiences which may stem directly from emotions, personal observations, epiphanies, and so on still need to be filtered through the artifacts of a given information landscape before they can be meaningfully expressed. Therefore (Limberg et al 2012, 106): “Information is not viewed dualistically as either placed within an individual or within an artifact; instead information and the meaning of information is seen as shaped through dialogue with artifacts in practices.” Burkitt links this with Gibson’s (1979) idea of affordance. Affordances are properties that are not innate to an artifact, but are instead social constructs, assigned even to artifacts that occur ‘naturally’ in the 17 Radical Information Literacy environment (Burkitt 1999, 36). An example of the latter would be the way the affordances of a tree could lead to it being perceived as something to climb, something to photograph, something to use as shelter in hot or rainy weather, something that is in the way and should be cut down, or something to burn. Affordance is related to a slew of factors including the physical appearance or design of an artifact, but also the user’s prior (subjective) experiences with a particular artifact, or type of artifact, and the intersubjectively agreed-upon, negotiated meanings that have developed around the artifact1. Thus, the artifact is a crystallisation of prior activities that have used that artifact, and “our way of ‘being-in-the-world’, of acting, knowing and thinking, is largely dependent on artifacts and how they re-form embodiment” (Burkitt 1999, 36). Limberg et al (2012, 108) say that: Tools are not neutral to our activities, they are impregnated with perspectives, norms and values which mediate our understanding of the world (Wertsch 1998, 40). They make us do and see things in ways that we are not always conscious of. For information literacy education this implies that it is important to reveal and make explicit the perspectives, values and

beliefs connected to specific tools for information seeking and how the application and understanding of these tools differ in different practices. Yet the “perspectives, norms and values” with which tools are “impregnated” are often not available for scrutiny. This is because artifacts are not dialogic (Linell 2009, 421–2). They cannot speak and converse. Affordances are both social and technical, and one can see the former kind as based in dialogue and communication about the artifact; this kind of dialogue may also permit scrutiny of an artifact’s technical affordances. Nevertheless, even if this takes place, one cannot converse with the artifact. One cannot persuade it to change the way it functions or processes information. Though artifacts can therefore be repurposed and reused in various different ways, they also have an element of ‘built-in-ness’; they are, in essence, congealed products of earlier dialogues (Bakhtin 1986, 185). The artifact is therefore a means by which dialogue transforms into monologue. Any given artifact has encoded within it a set of assumptions and perspectives on the world that may or may not have been consciously designed into it, but which have shaped it nonetheless, and the artifact will, in turn, mediate activity (Winner 1986; Williams and Edge 1996; Engestrom et al 1999). 18 Basic concepts and terminology The impact of modernity on human social relations has been most profoundly felt in the wide spread of artifacts that are no longer being developed by the communities they penetrate. Local, indigenous, and contextualised forms of knowledge are de-emphasised in favour of generic rules, ‘best practices’, and tools developed elsewhere and then imported into a particular context. The artifactual elements of the information landscape, around which practices form and which are shaped by these practices, are, due to industrialisation, no longer seen as something over which communities have ownership (Burkitt 1999, 136): With machine production and the rise of more sophisticated

communications technology, people no longer felt that their own social being was embodied in the artifacts they produced. This is part of the experience Marx has referred to... as alienation... the artifact does not appear as the product of the social relations in which the person is involved, but as a sign of capital. Empowerment within a particular information landscape is therefore, in part, a matter of how one retains control over the artifacts that mediate information exchanges within that landscape. These artifacts increasingly include ICT, hence the substantial overlaps between digital (or computer, ICT) literacy and information literacy (cf Wenger, White and Smith 2009), but are not limited to such technologies. It is precisely because artifacts are the congealed products of earlier dialogues that their role in a given information landscape – the relevance of a particular technology or procedure at a particular point in time – should be subject to ongoing scrutiny. Making such a statement requires one to be cautious, however. It should not be argued that monologic knowledge, manifested in artifacts, is somehow a less desirable form of knowledge than dialogism. To do so would lead to a range of intellectual fallacies and pathologies, including relativism and counterknowledge, which Thompson’s polemic (2008) defines as ways of thinking which may be (intersubjectively) agreed upon by many people, but which have no scientific validity. Astrology is a good (or bad) example: just because a great many people engage in dialogue about it does not root its claims in the same kind of knowledge as the claims of theoretical physicists about, essentially, the same subject matter (the influence of astronomical objects and forces on earthly, human life). Chapter 6 of this book will explore this critique in more detail, but it is important to prefigure it here as it also highlights the 19 Radical Information Literacy essential nature of both monologic and dialogic means of knowledge formation. Natural science deals with “voiceless things” (Linell 2009, 373), about which authoritative statements can be made by following particular methodologies; that

is, knowledge-forming practices. Science does not use “special tricks of thinking, argument, proof or reasoning”: “its methods of thought are simply refinements of common sense” ( ibid, 84: via Conant 1951). Yet at the same time these are reliable methods: “Science has a territory in which it is without serious competition, it can show strong predictive and technological indications of competence, and it shows, over a wide range, a common front” (Wilson 1983, 85). Scientific statements, being informational resources, can subsequently form the basis of tangible artifacts, or technologies, that serve as a demonstration of the authority invested in the particular statement (Wilson 1983, 84–5). No working artifact has yet been constructed that is based on the principles of astrology: hence there are no grounds to accept it as valid technical knowledge. In essence, then, scientific inquiry is the prime means by which cognitive authority is asserted. The pronouncements of science are presented as if they have an authority that is not subjectively determined – a matter of opinion – but has objective, generalisable qualities. In his seminal discussion, Wilson ( ibid, 15) offers this basic definition of cognitive authority: “influence on one’s thoughts that one would consciously recognize as proper”. Although we engage with a wide range of informational resources as we make our way through life, our horizons – those elements of information landscapes that we are aware of and can engage with, at least potentially – remain unavoidably limited. Most of our knowledge comes to us not through direct experience, but at second hand, through meanings and concepts provided by others, via communications media. We recognise cognitive authority not only in individuals, but also in books, instruments and organisations ( ibid, 81). Wilson’s book is a detailed investigation of the question: among all these possible meanings and concepts, how do we make selections, and decide which, or whose, point of view to believe? In this judgement rests the

assignation of cognitive authority, and it is a complex activity. Professional specialisation and the holding of an advanced degree in a subject are formal signs of cognitive authority that are recognised in a court of law (thus, permit a person seen as holding such authority to be called as an expert witness) – but the authority will only extend as far as the area of specialisation. Wilson describes how in everyday life we use many other techniques for judging authority. 20 Basic concepts and terminology Cognitive authority cannot be simply claimed, but nor can it be entirely reduced to some kind of objective principle, including scientific method (as there are disagreements about what constitutes valid method). Thus, assigning cognitive authority is always a fallible process, involving a variety of inquiries (formal, systematic or informal, casual) and also habits, deference to the authority of others, delegation of the cognitive work required and, inevitably, errors of judgement and/or deliberate ignorance. Nevertheless, even if scientific inquiry is not the sole means of asserting cognitive authority, claiming a primacy for it seems selfevident. Yet it must also be remembered that while natural science cannot engage in dialogue with its objects of enquiry, it remains dialogic at the level of analysis ( ibid). If it were not, it could not progress – any given investigation, or artifact, once completed and constructed, would represent the definitive view of its subject. This is clearly not the case. Scientists can and do disagree with one another; there are rival methods and schools of thought, and ongoing scrutiny of even the most fundamental postulates of natural science. Such channels for critical attention are, in principle, built into the structures of scientific knowledge-formation within society. That is, the genre of science itself, and its various devices and characteristics, which include publication, peer review, presentation of one’s methodology, open discussion at conferences, freedom of

speech and reply, intellectual independence, and so on. Thus, though it is always necessary for knowledge formation to (monologically) assert some kind of position at the end of a process of inquiry (Linell 2009, 383), this remains only a “locally monological” position, and is embedded in a broader, dialogic environment, a tradition of logical sense-making (Linell 2009, 374). That is, any claims to objectivity remain open to intersubjective scrutiny (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 121–2): (S)cientific ‘objectivity’ is not something that can be secured by mechanically applying some logical proof or by appealing to a realm of uninterpreted neutral ‘facts’. ‘Objectivity’ involves not a naive belief in neutrality so much as a shared intersubjective agreement about the sort of norms of enquiry and standards of rationality which will ensure that theories can be critically assessed without the undue intervention of subjective bias and personal prejudice… ‘objective’ reality is itself that which corresponds to the intersubjective agreement of a community of enquirers whose deliberations are 21 Radical Information Literacy conducted in accordance with shared standards of rationality. ‘Objectivity’, therefore, is achieved when participants reveal a willingness to make their views and preconceptions available for critical inspection and to engage in discussion and argument that is open and impartial. This last sentence provides an excellent definition of the notion of scrutiny. This kind of “critical inspection” is not a threat to the validity of science: in fact, it confirms it. The value – the authority – of science arises exactly because it permits such scrutiny of its own validity claims, through its methodologies and methods, and as a result requires the maintenance of “a critical community of enquirers which is open and pluralistic, where all are free to criticize the

thinking of others and everyone can actively participate on equal terms” (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 122). And in order that such a community be sustainable, this attention must also be directed towards itself; that is, keeping its knowledge-formation processes under review, and, through dialogue, scrutinising them rather than reifying them. Thus, “it also requires an appreciation of the historical and social context within which questions arise and possibilities for action are shaped and regulated” ( ibid). This process of review includes scholarly work and debate about methodologies and methods, but it also requires attention to the practices which shape this landscape. Here, however, is where the apparently self-evident value of scientific knowledge-formation must be called into question. In the first place, while the methods described here are appropriate for understanding the ‘voiceless’ subjects of natural scientific enquiry, the human or social sciences are also dialogic at the level of their subject matter, as well as the level of analysis. Natural sciences deal with phenomena that are difficult or impossible to appreciate without some form of technical aid, either in terms of instrumentation, such as that necessary to observe processes at microscopic scales, or at a great distance, or by using cognitive tools such as mathematics. On the other hand, “[t]he business of the social sciences is everybody’s business and not left by default to academic social scientists to investigate” (Wilson 1983, 89). The social sciences thus have far less compelling claims to cognitive authority than the natural sciences. It may be less “information literate” to go to one’s spouse for information on the Higgs Boson rather than a scientific text2, but few would say the same were one seeking advice on how to avoid a stressful situation at work. In the latter case, cognitive authority may be invested in a scientific investigation of the causes of stress – but the results of this 22 Basic concepts and terminology investigation would still have to be applied in one’s own context. In fact, it is through such application

that the ‘products’ of social science are validated by their users. Practice therefore becomes the test of these insights in the way that artifacts are for more technical enquiries (Carr and Kemmis 1986; Wilson 1983). Yet practices, like artifacts, do not always remain ‘owned’ by the communities that engage with them, and for the same reason – that the resources available for knowledge formation are not uniformly distributed. People can be actively excluded from participation in the discourse, denied access to the necessary spaces. Validity claims may be concealed. Harding (1993), building on Freeman (1984), points out how asserting that any discourse is free of these distortions in fact masks the distortions that remain. Carr and Kemmis, in the quotation above, warn against the dangers of a “naive neutrality”, and thanks to writers like Kuhn (1970) and Goldacre (2008), few would now see all scientific texts as ideologically neutral and innately objective. But Harding would say that the “shared intersubjective agreement” which Carr and Kemmis then mention is an exclusionary one. For Harding, this exclusion is based on patriarchy, with male bias deeply hidden in the empiricist and positivist bias of most science, but she notes (1993, 50) that other social movements, concerned with addressing the failure of knowledge-formation structures in society to meet their needs, are also ill-served by these epistemologies. The ability to critically attend to the claims to objectivity is one largely restricted to other scientists. Thus, the scientific (and for Harding, patriarchal) establishment pulls toward it the necessary forms of enquiry, meaning and other features of the relevant information landscapes which can be used as resources; these are taken away from those ‘outside’ the professional boundaries who may wish to engage in critical scrutiny of the claims of those ‘inside’. A classic case of this came after the 1980s Chernobyl nuclear disaster, when sheep farmers in Wales challenged governmental, science-based reactions to the problem of fallout that would have resulted in their flocks being killed. Instead, the farming community was able to present its own

evidence to the contrary, that was eventually accepted (Wynne 1989). “Every society, every epoch in human history is characterized by what it considers as legitimate knowledge, itself a historically contingent category. Therefore, every epoch has its own view on what counts as legitimate information sources” (Andersen 2006, 215). The resources needed to engage in the kind of enquiries which provide this legitimacy may be financial or technological; they may also be intellectual or 23 Radical Information Literacy linguistic. Access to these resources may be restricted in various ways. Cognitive authority may be based not on active scrutiny of claims, but on a lack of awareness of alternatives. *** One cannot remove normative considerations from IL (see Lundh et al 2013) without risking counterknowledge and relativism – that is, the fallacy that a poisoner could be ‘information literate’ if they go about researching the manufacture of ricin in an approved manner, and then applying this knowledge to their desired end. An information literate person must understand the reasons why cognitive authority is invested in certain texts, people and methods, as well as related issues such as ethics and legalities. Nevertheless, cognitive authority (including that which resides in standards, ethics and laws) can be and must be challenged in certain circumstances. There is no way of defining what such circumstances will be in advance; instead, these are judgements made through dialogue and reflection in particular contexts. Thus, IL should be seen as the scrutiny of claims to cognitive authority in particular contexts. It is far from inevitable that such scrutiny will take place at a given place and time. Wilson (1983, 21) points out that we rarely get the chance to conduct a direct test of knowledge and, in any case, would find this difficult unless we were already specialists (cognitive

authorities) in the field. I may wonder about the values and assumptions which have gone into the word-processing software that I am using to write these words but, in practice, they are largely irrelevant and not preventing me from working, so I do not think about them. I may have a layperson’s interest in physics and be interested in the consequences of the recent confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson, but I do not have the time to actively scrutinise the claims of the team who discovered it, nor of Prof Higgs himself. Most people do not take the time to investigate these kinds of matters, whether the subject matter is everyday or not. Time is limited, and we are predisposed to reduce the amount of cognitive work we must undertake in a given situation, falling back on established patterns, habits, routines and assumptions (Blaug 2007; 2010). Judgements about cognitive authority are made precisely because we delegate this kind of work, whether by consulting a textbook or asking a friend or associate (Wilson 1983, 139). We may also delegate authority more passively, by submitting to the administrative authority that is invested in an organisational hierarchy; in essence, letting an organisation do our thinking for us. 24 Basic concepts and terminology Organisations – whether formal (like a limited company) or informal (like a community) – affect the way we think and process information. These arguments, based principally on Blaug (2007), were written up in chapter 9 of Information Obesity (Whitworth 2009) and will not be repeated here in detail, but the key point was that organisations ‘push’ ways of thinking at their members, through information systems. The systems are artifacts, manifestations of particular ways of thinking (Blaug uses the term “cognitive schema” (Bartlett 1932)) that are more likely to originate from those in superior positions in the organisational hierarchy.

In fact, these systems constitute the hierarchy, in every practical sense. Different patterns of information exchange pertain in different contexts, just as do different patterns of economic exchange. In the latter case, Graeber (2012, ch. 5) notes that many economic exchanges at the micro-level are “communistic”, based on reciprocity and not tallied, that is, not counting money owed and credited. He explains that while these exchanges operate frequently, particularly within groups of friends, families and other close communities, through human history they have become subservient to hierarchical, non-reciprocal patterns of exchange. Through these, debts are accrued, which Graeber identifies as the key driver of capitalism, war and other major historical events. There also exist pure exchange relations, which are accounted for by monetary transactions that may stem from debt, but which are not accompanied by obligations for the subordinate member, as they are in hierarchical relationships of exchange. Though these latter relations complicate matters somewhat, Graeber’s basic opposition – reciprocal versus non- reciprocal/hierarchical exchanges – can also be used to classify information exchanges. Although, as with any other worldly sphere (cf. Whitworth 2009, ch. 1), information landscapes exist at multiple scales and always contain elements (genres, practices) that do not conform to their general pattern, those which are more hierarchical have a greater concentration of authority within them than those which are more reciprocal. In a hierarchical information landscape, information tends to flow one way, towards those with power in the hierarchy. This information is typically gathered through audits, monitoring, ‘reporting up’, etc. Conversely, the deliberations and decisions of those at the top of the hierarchy are less frequently open to scrutiny from those below. These imbalances do not prevent those outside the hierarchy pushing information onto the power-holders, whether through voiced or published critique, protests of some kind, withdrawal of consent, etc. Sometimes this can be accommodated

by power-holders by a Gramscian “passive revolution” (Gramsci 1971): 25 Radical Information Literacy office holders may change; new practices may be designed at the system level and then imposed on the landscape. Through manipulation of meaning this may be displayed as yielding to pressure, but such changes have not redistributed authority within the information landscape. Practical investigations of how authority can be distributed within a social setting have absorbed humanity for millennia, as this is the study of politics. From Pericles’ Funeral Oration (see Blaug and Schwarzmantel 2001, 25–27), through Machiavelli’s study of how the populace would always take better decisions than a monarch ( ibid, 34–7), and into studies of small-group decision-making and how this can be facilitated (e.g. Gastil 1993), a great deal of guidance exists in this area even if, as Blaug noted (1999b), research and rhetoric in this area tends to ignore the small-scale, informal and contextspecific practices which make up the bulk of political activity. What must be done from this point on is consider how IL and these practices can be integrated, to mutual benefit. Hierarchy is not an innately bad thing under all circumstances, but there is a need to remain vigilant over it, in order that its benefits can be maximised and its costs reduced. These costs include alienation, other social maladies, and environmental destruction, but the costs are also cognitive. They fall on communities and individuals in terms of reductions in their ability to learn, to process information effectively and avoid information obesity (Whitworth 2009), in the quality of resources available to communities, and in overt restrictions placed on their ability to access information, whether barriers are physical, linguistic or related to status and practice. Yet these negative effects are neither inevitable nor irreversible. Radical information literacy is the set of practices through which these challenges can not only be recognised, but actively countered. This chapter has outlined the most significant concepts underlying this book: dialogism; context; information landscapes; communities;

artifacts; cognitive authority, and scrutiny. What it has not really dealt with yet is information literacy itself, but that is the subject matter of the next three chapters. Notes 1. See Sadler and Given (2007) for studies of the affordances of the information system that is the library. 2. Unless one happens to be married to a theoretical physicist. 26 2 The early days of IL Abstract: This chapter examines how IL emerged as a theoretical and practical concept in the 1970s, with a particular focus on three papers: Zurkowski (1974), which is representative of the knowledge management approach to IL; Burchinal (1976), representative of the educational approach, and Hamelink (1976), representative of the transformational. It sees in Hamelink’s paper the roots of a radical approach to IL, but one that has remained undeveloped. Key Words: Origins of information literacy, information science, knowledge management, education, transformation, hegemony. There are many definitions of information literacy. These definitions generally coalesce around the idea that IL is a set of “purposeful information practices” (Limberg et al 2012, 95). How these practices are understood varies greatly, depending on the theoretical perspective in use, even where that theory is not explicit (Limberg et al 2012). This diversity will be explored throughout the remainder of part 1, which is also the story of how certain IL definitions have become dominant.

I begin by revisiting three papers that appeared between the years 1974–76. These papers do not cover the entirety of IL’s foundation as an empirical field, but are representative of three distinct traditions that developed from a point in history when, with the emergence of large databases, the impact of ICT on knowledge formation, patterns of work, and economic relationships was becoming visible. The papers discussed are by Zurkowski (1974), which is representative of the knowledge management approach to IL, Burchinal (1976), representative of the educational approach, and Hamelink (1976), representative of the transformational. *** 27 Radical Information Literacy IL begins – or, at least, was first defined – within library and information science (LIS). This is by no means the only relevant theoretical tradition. As will be explained later, seeing IL as only the province of LIS is one problem with how the field conceptualises itself. But nevertheless the contributions of LIS to IL are significant, particularly in its early days. Saracevic’s history of relevance’ is simultaneously a history of information science (19751). He opens with this definition: Information science is a field and a subject that is concerned with problems arising in communication of knowledge in general and with records in such communication in particular, from both applied and basic points of view. It shares this concern with other fields, notably those… of librarianship and of documentation; thus, the sharing of concerns specifies the fundamental relationship between information science and librarianship… Saracevic investigates how the search for relevance drives the development of information systems (applied information science). The ideal information system delivers 100% relevant information; exactly what the user wants, always. This is a complex design

problem because of the context-dependent nature of relevance, its depending on both what is already known by the user, and what is generally known. From the 1940s, LIS addressed this problem via the principle that an information system is instantiated not only in its technical elements, but also its human ones. Thus, the development of information systems is a sociotechnical process (Luna-Reyes et al 2005). Partly this means that librarians, programmers, or other information professionals can be seen as components of the system, and thus, LIS is concerned with integrating the technical components of the system with its human ones most effectively. However, it also means that information use becomes a design factor. In systems like plumbing, why the user wants water, how the tap is turned on (how he/ she ‘phrases the query’ for water) and what is done with the water are ultimately irrelevant to its effective delivery. In an information system this is not the case. The ability to access the product of an information system therefore depends not just on its functional operations, nor mere physical access to the system (Kuhlthau 1993, p. xvii): The objective of library and information services is to increase access to resources and information. Basic access is provided through selection, acquisition and organization of resources... 28 The early days of IL Increased or enhanced access is provided primarily through two services, reference and instruction. Enhanced access encompasses intellectual as well as physical access. Physical access addresses the location of resources and information. Intellectual access addresses interpretation of information and ideas within resources.

LIS therefore has an interest in ‘instruction’, or user education: optimising use of the system, helping users shape requests in forms that can be effectively processed, and helping them make further judgements about relevance should the system provide too much information. In this concern lies the origins of IL, at least as it emerged from LIS. Lancaster (1970, 56) is an early example of such work: The need for education of users of information services has been recognized for some time. In 1963 the President’s Science Advisory Committee recommended that schools and colleges should develop programs to teach students how to retrieve and use published information. Unfortunately, very little appears to have been done along these lines either in the United States or abroad.... American universities, through schools of library and information science, are training information scientists and technologists but are doing very little to assist other departments of the university in producing research workers capable of exploiting the literature to fullest advantage. Lancaster could have used the term ‘information literacy’, but did not. Instead this was first introduced in Zurkowski’s 1974 position paper presented to the US National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. “Developing information literacy” is the first section heading. Zurkowski immediately notes that an “overabundance of information” – defined as the availability of information exceeding our capacity to handle it (cf. Whitworth 2009) – is a universal condition (Zurkowski 1974, 1). He takes an expansive view of what constitutes an information landscape, including all printed and computer-based media, and the skills necessary for the landscape to function and be sustained. Users are not a homogeneous group; instead ( ibid, 2, emphasis in original): “The individual user has many facets and shows different needs to the information sources at different times for different purposes. Anticipating these changing needs and

packaging concepts and ideas to meet them is a major evolving economic activity”. 29 Radical Information Literacy The emphasis displays the defining characteristic of Zurkowski’s argument: its overt economic and political liberalism. Provision of quality information, and the resources needed to find and process it, are driven by the profit motive ( ibid, 5): either directly (by providing information, organisations make a profit and raise taxes) or indirectly, as what he calls a healthy “Information Service Environment” is essential for the continued economic success of US industry. Zurkowski argues that hyper-competitiveness in information provision drives innovation, and there will be a market for any services that enhance users’ control over information ( ibid, 6). Zurkowski then says ( ibid): People trained in the application of information resources to their work can be called information literates. They have learned techniques and skills for utilizing the wide range of information tools as well as primary sources in molding information solutions to their problems. He speculates ( ibid, 7): “While the population of the US today is nearly 100% literate, only a small portion – perhaps one-sixth – could be characterized as information literates.” He informally suggests that members of the “medical, governmental, business, sci/tech” professions are among that small proportion. This proportion should be increased, and “the work of the Commission should be viewed in terms of achieving total information literacy for the nation” ( ibid, 8). For Zurkowski, the information economy already has the necessary “pluralistic” structure ( ibid) and maximising its benefits should therefore be a policy priority. Information is not like air, a “free good” ( ibid, 6); work in processing and understanding it is needed before it is usable information ( ibid,

1). The capacity to undertake this work, using available resources in an optimal way, is therefore an essential aspect of the Information Service Environment. Spreading this capacity is what helps provide the intellectual, and also the political, support for the investment of financial resources (profit and taxes) the Environment represents. The remainder of the paper develops, not the notion of IL (which from that point, Zurkowski mostly sidelines), but the nature of this Information Service Environment. Zurkowski explores the assumptions which underlay the “Reading Services Environment”, the pre-digital information infrastructure. That environment, comprised of entities such as public libraries, educators, and private interests (including publishers, donors) was ( ibid, 23): 30 The early days of IL (A) healthy, dynamic institutional framework for harnessing the nation’s pluralistic resources to the task of creating a reading literate society and a competitive marketplace of ideas... Three major time tested policies contributed to the success of the Reading Service Environment and their application to the Information Service Environment is essential to its successful operation: 1) Individual fulfilment, the advancement of knowledge and the discovering of truth, participation in decision making by all members of society, and achieving an adaptable and stable community depends on a system of freedom of expression. 2) Govenment should not perform services for citizens which citizens are capable of performing for themselves. 3) Government has a legitimate responsibility for assuring educational opportunities for all.

But the rise of ICT has brought about changes in the balance of the Reading Services Environment, particularly between libraries and industry, who may now see themselves in a state of competition when it comes to information provision. Zurkowski’s part II describes the emergence of “information banks”; large electronic databases, machine-readable files and so on, offered by several institutions including Standard and Poor’s and the New York Times. Parts III and IV discuss the evolving relationship between libraries and industry, describing new products and markets that are opened up by the development of information banks and new media for storing and transmitting information. Zurkowski suggests that to maintain the healthy pluralism of the Reading Service Environment, policy changes are required, that acknowledge how ICT shifts relationships between publishers, readers, libraries and information providers. This is the key passage ( ibid, 23): With the introduction of new information processing technologies the line between marketplace and subsidized functions in some respects has become blurred. The process of achieving information literacy involves defining that line clearly and realistically, and in defining an institutional framework for the Information Service Environment. In our age of information overabundance, being information literate means being able to find out what is known or knowable on any subject. The tools and techniques and the organizations providing them for doing that form this institutional framework. 31 Radical Information Literacy These tools, according to Zurkowski, must be built around the three core principles of the Reading Service Environment, described earlier. But the Information Service Environment would only become accessible to those who had achieved information literacy. Therefore, at the end of his document Zurkowski reiterates the need for the Commission to establish a programme aimed at achieving “universal” IL within ten years, which he says will (p. 27):

(I)nvolve the coordination and funding of a massive effort to train all citizens in the use of the information tools now available as well as those in the development and testing states…. Until the population as a whole is prepared to utilize and benefit across the board from the capabilities of the Information Service Environment, proposals to create systems serving the elite alone will lack the popular political support needed to obtain the level of government funding suggested in the Report of the Commission. This review of Zurkowski’s argument serves to highlight the assumptions which informed his early call for IL. His position is one of economic pragmatism, wholly situated within a US context. Zurkowski’s liberalist stance holds that the US government’s role should be to sustain free market competition. As informational resources are taking on forms which a minority of the population are currently equipped to handle, more information literates need to be produced, to sustain the nation’s economic competitiveness and political liberalism. But beyond this, Zurkowski offers no view of agency. No particular mention is made of learning: “education” gets a section heading at the end ( ibid, 27), but this is a short conclusion, quoted above almost in its entirety. There are no references to specific educational institutions, whether universities, schools or training companies, nor to pedagogy. In addition, Zurkowski’s emphasis on “information banks” obscures the broader nature of information landscapes, and the recognition that IL skills can, and should, be applicable to stocks of information held outside such databases, in oral, embodied or cultural forms. And finally, Zurkowski makes no mention of the individual’s ability to judge relevance, filter information, be aware of intellectual property and copyright, and so on, though these are all implied as properties of the information systems which are being developed. This latter observation, viewed through the framework for analysis outlined in chapter 1 above, permits the conclusion that all the economic, 32 The early days of IL

even the political, benefits that Zurkowski sees as flowing from widespread “information literacy” could be secured by optimising the non-human elements of the information system. Mastering data mining tools, or an automated information filtering service, could count as “information literacy” by this definition. Therefore, there is a depersonalising element in Zurkowski’s work, one that is already prefigured in LIS and exacerbated precisely by the emergence of giant information banks, resources which extend beyond the compass of single human consciousnesses and their immediate networks and communities. These issues of scale had emerged before; Vannevar Bush (1945), with the memex, for example, had offered a technical response. Zurkowski’s work fits into this tradition, with IL a way of thinking that would optimise the human elements of information systems. His aim is to train people’s imperfections away, through means specified by others. Arguably, what has developed from this particular seed is not IL at all, but information and knowledge management. Yet, coupled with Zurkowski’s economic liberalism there is his political liberalism, his emphasis on a plurality of voices and opinions, freedom of expression, and individuals’ rights “not only... to speak, but also to be heard” ( ibid, 25). These simultaneously give his appeal for IL a universalist character, positioning it as something which is fundamental not just to the health of an economy, but also to a political system and decision-making in society as a whole. The details may be absent but the higher-level position is clear: information literacy is for everyone, it is a fundamental aspect of communication, a shaper of possibilities. To repeat a quote given earlier ( ibid, 23): “In our age of information overabundance, being information literate means being able to find out what is known or knowable on any subject. The tools and techniques and the organizations providing them for doing that form this institutional framework.” The words “known or knowable” are essential. Information landscapes are dynamic, not static; what we will need to know in future situations is not predictable. Therefore, to sustain the

liberal, politico-economic system, Zurkowski implies that the increased availability of information requires us to attend, at least, to the way we shape knowledge – and perhaps, to change how we do this, if old means of knowledge-formation (cognitive authorities) are no longer appropriate and/or the institutions which support these are no longer fit for purpose. Thus, Zurkowski offers IL more as an epistemology than a form of learning, a way of understanding how we can know what there is to know (Grix 2002). He believes it would be a means towards particular political and moral ends, or at least, contribute to an environment that made those ends more achievable. *** 33 Radical Information Literacy The next seminal IL paper was a speech made by Lee Burchinal in 1976 at the Texas A & M library conference in 1976, the US’s bicentennial year (hence its calling the communications revolution “America’s Third Century Challenge”). It is worth highlighting next because, while it shares many concerns with Zurkowski’s paper – the need to prepare for imminent changes in the informational environment, wrought by digital technologies – it ends with a more specific appeal to education as the realm in which IL could be nurtured. The speech has been little cited since, and even then, not always correctly. Pinto et al’s recent (2013) reference calls it a contribution from “journalism”, which is at best misleading. Burchinal was a sociologist at Iowa State, with many 1950s-60s publications on the family, marriage, and parenting. The reason he addressed the library conference was his role in developing ERIC, the Educational Research Information Center, which became one of “the world’s most authoritative, computer-based, knowledge-exchange services” (Dentler 2002, 120), and an exemplar of an information bank.

Most of Burchinal’s speech offered evidence for claims that the information industries had, by 1976, become the most significant sector of the US economy, larger than manufacturing, agriculture and services combined. Real costs of communication were dwindling, and bearing in mind this and other drivers, such as a need to conserve energy (Burchinal 1976, 10–11), Burchinal correctly anticipated a future in which more jobs and personal experience – banking, purchasing, communications with friends and work associates – would use terminals ( ibid, 11). He acknowledged that some universities, in engineering, science, and business administration, had begun to instruct students in computer operations, and LIS instruction was also “in healthy ferment” ( ibid). But more was necessary, he said, repeating Zurkowski’s call to “set about systematically to create ‘information literacy’ for all adults in the nation, so each can function effectively in our emerging society” ( ibid). At this point Burchinal did two things differently from Zurkowski: he defined IL more precisely, and he suggested an institutional location for the work of creating IL. IL, he said ( ibid, 11): (R)equires a new set of skills. These include how to efficiently and effectively locate and use information needed for problem-solving and decisionmaking. Such skills have wide applicability for occupational as well as personal activities. Part of such competency includes comfortable use of a computer terminal for sifting through available information from various data banks to select useful data for resolving the problem at hand. 34 The early days of IL Burchinal did therefore include digital literacy as a part of IL, but only a part. He defined it similarly to his contemporary Nevison (1976; see Whitworth 2009, 84–5), as the ability to use a computer, although with less of a focus on programming and more on information searching.

Whereas Zurkowski’s argument was presented in libertarian terms, Burchinal used more instrumental language. The project to create IL should be “systematic”, and IL itself was about “effectiveness” and “efficiency”. Burchinal did not, even implicitly, call into doubt any aspect of the emerging information society (cf. Webster 2002); his argument was that it is upon us, and thus society has a responsibility to train everyone in the needed new skills. Specifically, this was an educational issue. Universities that did not address this would be damaging their graduates’ prospects ( ibid, 12), not only in occupational life, but in personal and home life too. A significant passage followed ( ibid): “As these technologies become more common, elementary schools will take over the responsibility for creating information literate citizens. Universities, however, can ill afford to wait. Also university experience, as in so many fields, can become the basis for subsequent school programs.” Burchinal clearly saw universities’ teaching of IL as a transitional stage. Universities might come to offer similar assistance as they do to primary and secondary teaching in other subjects (training teachers, researching pedagogy, offering advanced curricula), but the bulk of IL education should eventually take place in schools. Taken as a whole, and looked at with nearly four decades’ hindsight, Burchinal’s speech offers little that seems exceptional. Had it not been cited in Behrens (1994) it may have been lost2. Nevertheless, it is an example of how IL began to sprout from the seed Zurkowski planted, and an early case study of IL trends that became dominant in the 1980s, particularly in the US (see below). With Burchinal, IL becomes identified as a specifically educational problem: how to develop in people the skills needed for the effective and efficient seeking of information, for problem-solving and decision-making. Therefore, though Burchinal, like Zurkowski, takes a high-level view, IL is presented as something more concrete than an epistemology. Not skills to establish what is knowable, but what is already known.

*** The third paper may represent the first use of the term ‘IL’ outside the US. The Dutch writer Cees Hamelink’s “An Alternative to News” appeared in 35 Radical Information Literacy the Journal of Communication in 1976, and outlines a different form of IL. Hamelink retains Zurkowski’s emphasis on freedom of expression, but with a stronger critique, through invoking Freire’s view of literacy as the basis for IL. Hamelink does not see IL as a skill that must be acquired so a person can be fitted into a technology- and information-rich system that is currently being designed by others, but a more bottom-up, personal characteristic that allows this systematisation to be countered and critiqued. This view is made clear in the first sentence, typeset as a heading (1976, 120): “A new ‘information literacy’ is necessary for liberation from the oppressive effects of the institutionalized public media.” Hamelink describes how individuals act within information landscapes that are predefined and filtered by dominant interests in society ( ibid): (W)hat is actually communicated [in the public media] is the outcome of a decision between possible alternatives which is made on the basis of the most powerful interests (economic, hierarchical, intellectual). Because these interests “select items for the public agenda” ( ibid): “(I)nformation” functions as an oppressive tool since, by its manner of presentation, it keeps people from shaping their own world. The incoherent fragments preclude the wholistic perspective which enables insight into the interdependence between happenings, into the involvement of one’s own context, and into the possibility of acting upon the challenge thus posed. The ready-made explanations preclude the insight of the world as something problematic and changeable.

These are crucial points. Zurkowski and Burchinal see IL as something that needs to be developed in populations in order to assimilate them into the emerging ICT- and information-rich society. Hamelink sees IL as something that has to be developed by populations so they can defend themselves against the cognitive costs of that society ( ibid, 120–1): If, however, people are to be given the chance to intervene in their reality, then information channels have to be created that do permit the coherent organization of information.... [This] would require (a) the presentation of perspectives otherwise suppressed, (b) user orientation (in the sense of relating to genuine needs), (c) the generation of information (the sharing of insights). 36 The early days of IL Hamelink writes ( ibid, 122) that “the first step toward ‘information literacy’ is to recognize that access to information starts from where the information users are”. Therefore ( ibid), “their situational context... is central”. Information is not merely something to be given to people, or retrieved by them, but formed and then shared by them, as a response to people’s felt needs and through their own efforts. This dialogue is how connections are made between “unrelated fragments” offered by the media ( ibid) . Dialogue may develop within some kind of formal learning process, but as recognised by Freire (1970), such learning has to be sensitive to the needs, and political/social context, of the learners, and not something which has had its content and context determined by others, in a paternalistic way. When one population colonises or oppresses another, the very meaning of the term ‘literacy’ becomes skewed towards the texts and values of the coloniser, and imposed through the educational system. For example, examinations will be set in the dominant language, requiring it to be used in schools, where children study canonical

texts (in book form) from the coloniser’s culture and history rather than their own (where these narratives may exist only orally). These were common tendencies in Africa and South Asia throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and for minority languages within developed countries (e.g. Catalan, Welsh). Freire’s political literacy education involves not just instruction in the technical aspects of reading and writing, but dialogue that raises awareness of the value of one’s own culture, history, and associated information landscapes. Literacy education can thereby liberate and empower a population who are having their information landscapes shaped by interests that are not their own, and in fact are actively oppressing them. This directly informs Hamelink’s view of IL. He goes into more detail than Zurkowski and Burchinal regarding how and where IL can be implemented, writing that ( ibid, 123): (A) vital step towards ‘information literacy’ is the implementation of community centers which give access to a set of information resources with which the user can interact, i.e., ask for and receive information at his own initiative and in his own perceived selfinterest. To avoid sophisticated forms of well-intended paternalism, such centers would have to be designed and developed with a major input from those who are supposed to benefit from them. 37 Radical Information Literacy Zurkowski’s notion of ‘information banks’ is thus turned on its head. The banks are now not giant databases; that is, specific objects, with technological features that shape interactions with the information, and require a certain type of organisation and management to be effective. Instead, the ‘bank’ is transmuted into a location in which a range of resources can be found that are specific to context and over which

the user has some control. Within this environment ( ibid), IL depends not just on offering people skills (though it does this in part), but also on raising awareness of possibilities for transformation ( ibid), via discussion, debate and simulation: The process of becoming the object of one’s history has to start with the awareness of the immediate context and the consciousness that this context is changeable.... The information search-and-find procedure would have to be complemented with the awareness of the meaning of new alternatives. Those who used these alternatives would need to become conscious of their creative potential... One important experience in this regard would be to create opportunities for the information-powerful and the information-powerless to reverse roles. Community decision-making would also have to be simulated to make visible what is at stake in terms of the power, interests, motives, and assumptions invested in these communication processes. Finally, situations should be simulated in which people can experience how far-reaching and powerful their information can be. Through this work, informational resources are actively shaped by the users, in accordance with their needs, rather than just being a ‘bank’ from which withdrawals are made on the terms of those who control it (note the link with Freire’s ‘banking’ model of education). Hamelink does not discount the role of the ‘expert’ in this shaping, making specific reference to the work of certain media organisations ( ibid, 121). But he firmly recognises that such work cannot make others ‘literate’ on their own terms: literacy cannot be reduced to a set of generic capabilities or skills, but varies according to need and context. Hamelink’s is therefore a firmly political definition of IL which recognises differences between people and interests, and presents IL as something which is oriented towards empowering the usually disempowered in society. ***

38 The early days of IL These are not the only three 1970s authors whose work could have been quoted here. Behrens (1994) cites contributions by Taylor (1979), who wrote specifically about librarianship and noted, among other things, the difference between a continual “informing process” and the on-the-spot “information [retrieval] process”. Owens (1976, 27) wrote of IL as an essential element of democracy: (V)oters with information literacy are in a position to make more intelligent decisions than citizens who are information illiterates. The application of information resources to the process of decisionmaking to fulfill civic responsibilities is a vital necessity. ‘Political’ as this is, Owens still casts the information literate individual in much the same way as Burchinal and Zurkowski: as suffering from a skills deficit that, writ large, threatens the stability of existing institutions. The idea of democracy existing outside these institutions – and being central to the workings of communities and how they maintain their information landscapes – is not present in the same way as in Hamelink’s paper. What the three papers – Zurkowski, Burchinal and Hamelink – jointly reveal is a key theme of radical IL: that it is essential to see information as context-specific. Hamelink acknowledges – where Burchinal and Zurkowski do not – that the various contexts within which information is processed are not equal. They manifest different ways of thinking and forms of cognitive authority, and so, within them, information is validated differently. These differences are not simply technical characteristics, that can be allowed for in the design of an information system, but political, and result in practices and artifacts developed in one context being inappropriately applied in

another, through the development of information systems that instantiate cognitive authority in particular ways. As a result, the information system in use becomes inappropriate for certain users, and the relevance of informational resources within the system for these users is reduced. In that the previous sentence can be classed, more or less, as a statement of pure information science (cf Saracevic 1975), this shows that information systems and information literacy cannot be investigated without appreciating their political nature. The institutional location of IL, and the reasons why it is being called for and practiced in certain ways, are political questions. 39 Radical Information Literacy Freire is the only person cited by Hamelink in this paper, but the work of another writer is clearly invoked, if not explicitly cited: Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci recognised that control within a society was not usually asserted by direct oppression and force, but rather through the channels of hegemony. Hegemony is (Gramsci 1971, 12): 1. The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. 2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively. Hegemony does not require the use of force. If the state needs to use force to maintain itself, asserted through an army or police, then it has lost its hegemony ( ibid). Rather, consent to the existing order

is manipulated through the control of societal elements such as law, education, political parties, the media, and language. These channels are used to deflect the impact of crises (for example, economic recessions) away from the ruling classes that cause them (Adamson 1980, 11). Hegemony is not totalitarian. The media which sustain it are all potentially available to a counterhegemony, a necessary part of any political transformation (Holub 1992, 91). Transformation needs to occur in multiple arenas (economic, cultural, sociological, linguistic, etc), and is not a single ‘rupture’ between old and new. Such revolutionary moments can be defused by a dominant group using the channels of hegemony (Adamson 1980, 225). Instead, a counterhegemony creates conditions in which alternatives can flourish: communicative spaces, values, practices, and forms of cognitive authority that collectively change the resources available to groups and communities (Simon 1991, 29). Hegemony is not a fixed condition, but a communicative process, which must constantly update itself, reacting to ongoing events, if it is to remain uncoercive (Urbinati 1998). To justify itself without coercion, an elite must open up, for public display and scrutiny, certain claims on which its position is based. This will produce a range of discourses, which may be in contradiction with one another. These claims become 40 The early days of IL resources available for exploitation, particularly if they do not accord with the subjective experience of those subject to elite rule (Scott 1990: see also chapter 6 below). Critiques of any political system which base themselves on contradictions in the validity claims of elites are legitimate critiques by definition (Scott 1990, 106). Thus, change is inherent in the uncertainties of language and the shifting nature of the claims used by the powerful to validate their position: no discourse can ever represent the totality of social life (Melucci 1996, 212–3). And though (Holub 1992, 115–6): (L)anguage, in its form as a structure of values, and mediated by agents of the hegemonic class, can keep the subaltern social

classes in check... subaltern classes can invent new structures of value designed to subvert this hegemonic design... For Gramsci, this invention of counterhegemonies is in part contingent of the very structure of language itself. Because education is one of the conduits of hegemony – a means through which the hierarchical and inegalitarian structures of a society can be presented as natural and normal – it is also a conduit of counterhegemony. As his counterhegemonic educational agent, Gramsci names the “organic intellectual”: an identity that expresses the “intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain state of development” (Gramsci 1971, 9). Everyone has the potential to learn about alternatives and enact them at the personal level. For change to happen, in any context, conditions must be developed which nurture an organic intellectual stratum, as part of the self-transformation which will mean that “every citizen can govern”, or at least places him or her “in a general condition to achieve this [capacity]” ( ibid, 40). Mobilising this power does not just involve communication, and “consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions” ( ibid, 10), but requires activity, oriented towards the “building of an alternative culture, one through which the values and aspirations of a class can be expressed” (Adamson 1980, 42). This “alternative culture” would be supported by what Landry et al (1985) called a radical infrastructure – a way of organising information and non-informational resources in ways that make them useful for organic intellectuals. Gramsci’s model of hegemony and counterhegemony helps illuminate the kind of work Hamelink is advocating. What this involves in detail, 41

Radical Information Literacy intellectually, practically and educationally – and what role IL plays here – requires further discussion. Elaborating this argument simultaneously develops a radical IL. Radical IL contributes to the development of a counterhegemonic information infrastructure, through supporting and, where necessary, transforming context-specific ways of thinking and making decisions that more widely distribute authority over informational resources. *** Hamelink’s ideas are underdeveloped. His paper presented key concepts, but no more, and no work done with it since has enhanced his framework. Most subsequent citations are in literature reviews (e.g. Pinto et al 2013; Dudziak 2010 [in Portuguese]). Bawden’s comprehensive review (2001) mentions Hamelink in passing as an example of media literacy. Downing (1988) and Kenny (2009) invoke his work in the same field. At the UNESCO/IFLA conference on Media and Information Literacy, Kurbanoǧ lu (2012) cited Hamelink, but still as an example of media literacy rather than IL, though the conference aimed to bring both areas together. One could debate whether Hamelink should be assigned to the ‘media literacy’ school rather than ‘information literacy’, but I suggest the distinction is irrelevant. It should already be clear that a radical IL must attend to the hegemonic role of the broadcast media. Luyt and Azura (2010, no pagination) discuss how IL could become a tool of hegemony, and these include a lack of attention to: (T)he use of information literacy to push the norms of intellectual property protection... the effects produced by a lack of attention to media monopolization in information literacy initiatives... [and] by not challenging the positivist conception of knowledge that animates much of the library and information field, oppression is further enabled as it continues a tradition in educational institutions of ignoring the conditions of textual production, which allows the work of bureaucratic inscription to continue unimpeded.

‘Media literacy’ should not be discarded as a term, for the same reasons that scientific literacy, financial literacy, or visual literacy should not (Norton 2008). Instead, each ‘multiliteracy’ can be seen as a particular application of a wider discipline: information literacy. 42 The early days of IL O’Farrill (2008, 167) suggests dropping the term ‘information’ from IL altogether, asking: (C)an The Seven Faces of Information Literacy (Bruce 1997) be conceived of as The Seven Faces of Literacy?.... Can we think of workplace literacy rather than of workplace information literacy? If we answer ‘yes’ to these questions, we are agreeing that information literacy is just an aspect of literacy, or rather, that literacy means engaging with information in all of its modalities. Here, the ‘I’ in IL will be retained, but O’Farrill’s point is salient. The themes and practices of radical IL deal with communication as a whole, while at the same time foregrounding the importance of context. Thus, media literacy can be defined as information literacy with a specific focus on the texts, structures, and values of the broadcast media: radical media literacy would attend to the concentration of authority over this media, and the production of texts for distribution through alternative, more democratic channels. Scientific literacy can be defined as information literacy with a specific focus on the texts, structures, and values of the scientific establishment: radical scientific literacy would focus on how authority is or is not distributed through these media3. And so on (cf. Thompson 2007). This is why IL explicitly transcends technology. Digital or ICT literacy should also be seen as subsets of information literacy. Information processing is fundamental to humanity. Information technologies – that is, means for recording and processing information (Bawden

2001, 96), which include cognitive tools such as methodologies and logic – long predate the computer (Grafstein 2007). Technology is congealed cognitive authority of one form or another, manifesting various conceptions of democracy, organisation, and information exchange (Williams and Edge 1996). “Social practices and technologies mutually constitute each other” (Tuominen et al 2005, 338). Technologies, in this perspective, count as text, as parts of the information landscapes within which we all must act. A radical IL should provide tools to help with the scrutiny of claims made by an information system, just as with any other text (cf. Shapiro and Hughes 1996). As noted earlier, scrutiny of this kind is a learning process, and if the outcome of this learning is the creation of one’s own knowledge, an information landscape that is relevant to oneself, this is empowering. Snavely and Cooper (1997, 11) suggest using the term “information 43 Radical Information Literacy empowerment” instead of IL, but admit that though “[i]nformation empowerment is an admirable goal... objections arise immediately when used in context. ‘An information empowerment program’... brings groans from many who hear the phrase.” Hepworth and Walton (2009, 3) clearly link IL with a more general empowerment of the literate population: better information leads to better choices, use of resources, and so on. Government rhetoric at least pays some lip service to this, with democratic theory founded on the notion of access to information in order to inform choices (as noted by Zurkowski). This kind of work does not need to be specifically termed ‘IL’ to be empowering. What Hamelink is talking about is a tendency, just as democracy and counterhegemony are tendencies that do not need to be named explicitly in a given discourse. One can, clearly, be acting in a fundamentally democratic way without having to explicitly invoke that term to describe what one is doing. The same is true of information literacy, which may arise in many situations yet not be explicitly invoked. Indeed, it is when the term IL is reserved only for a much

more specific set of practices that its institutionalisation can be said to begin: a claim explored in more detail in chapters 3 and 4. The three branches of the IL tree, epitomised by Zurkowski, Burchinal and Hamelink, have not grown into completely separate organisms. Their growth has intertwined them, and sometimes they can be seen as one. Like real trees, when looking at the whole, one sees a fractal entity, a mass of branches, twigs and leaves, but when one examines more closely, a pattern of growth can be discerned. External environmental factors have also played a part in how the tree has developed. Chapter 3 carries the narrative of this development forward into the 1980s and 1990s, the period of time over which the task of defining IL – of bringing the embryonic visions of Zurkowski, Burchinal, and Hamelink into more concrete form – largely took place. Notes 1. He updated the review with two later papers (2007a; 2007b). 2. This author, even with the help of his university library, found it difficult to locate a copy for consultation. The British Library would not allow the 44 The early days of IL document outside their reference library, implying they hold the UK’s only copy. To facilitate further scholarship, a digital version has been made available at http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/drew.whitworth/ burchinal.html with the permission of Texas A & M University and Prof Burchinal.

3. As already discussed in chapter 1, this is not advocating the dismantling of the structures of scientific method, nor the valourising of counterknowledge (Thompson 2008), but of understanding how science is dialogic and giving critical attention to how ‘objectivity’ is asserted within it. 45 This page intentionally left blank 3 The diversity of IL Abstract: This chapter investigates how IL developed through the 1980s and 1990s, focusing on three particular strands of the narrative: the advocacy of the US library profession and the development of the first IL standards; the work of Carol Kuhlthau on information anxiety, psychology, and the role librarians can play as information mediators; and the work of those who have investigated IL through a phenomenographical lens, particularly Christine Bruce. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of this latter field, which reveals the diversity of IL and the importance of experiencing variation within a context, as a learning tool. Key Words: Standards, mediation, psychology, personal constructs, phenomenography, experience of variation, outcome space Chapter 2 reviewed early moves towards defining information literacy, and argued that IL, from the start, was used to describe diverse ways of thinking and acting in the world. This chapter continues that story into the 1980s and 1990s, during which time IL moved from obscurity to become a common reference within LIS, standards were developed, and investigations took place into the role of the academic library in delivering IL. Particular attention is here paid to the work of two authors who have done much to draw attention to IL’s personal dimensions: Carol Kuhlthau, whose work brings a psychological dimension into IL, but remains rooted in the specific context of library use, and Christine Bruce, whose work (along with

associates such as Lupton, Edwards, and Partridge) has drawn on phenomenography as a methodology for studying and practising IL. Both view IL as a continuous activity, rather than a series of one-off information searches (cf. Taylor 1979, cited in Behrens 1994, 311), and Bruce, more than Kuhlthau, sees information literacy as something that is non-linear, multifaceted and rooted in general processes 47 Radical Information Literacy of learning, rather than the library specifically. IL, for Bruce, is a complex of ways of experiencing information that include objective and generic rules or standards but also personal and collective matrices of interpretation. These ideas are explored throughout this chapter. The history of how the ACRL information literacy standards were developed in the US has been frequently told (once again Behrens (1994) provides an excellent review). For some, this is the history of IL: certainly it is treated as the dominant strand. Eisenberg, Lowe, and Spitzer’s history (2004) begins with immediate citations of Zurkowski, Burchinal, then Owens; it then summarises developments from the 1989 ALA report on. There is no mention of Hamelink, nor any other developments between 1976 and 1989. The authors’ perspective is clear from this passage (Eisenberg et al 2004, 11): Whatever our personal definition of information literacy may be, it is likely to stem from the definition offered in the Final Report of the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy... (1989, p.1). As we have seen, this definition is reflective not only of the work of Zurkowski but of others who have sought to shape the concept. The most significant trend of the 1980s and 1990s to which IL responded was that use of a computer (or terminal) to access information moved from specialist locations (libraries, universities, or information providers like those listed by Zurkowski), and came into the home. By 1999 the world anticipated by Burchinal (1976, 11), where banking, purchasing, and communications had become

home- and computer-based, was a reality. These changes required the development of new skills in the general population, as noted by Demo (1986). Unlike Burchinal and Zurkowski, Demo could draw on detailed working definitions of IL, particularly those emanating from the Auraria library of the University of Colorado (Behrens 1994, 312). Their schema recognised that IL was more than just information retrieval, but also encompassed understanding and use, and that though IL complemented digital or computer literacy, it was not the same. For Behrens ( ibid, 313), the Auraria work suggested “the wide parameters of possible information resources, and implies that information seeking is not confined to locating information in libraries.” Yet it was libraries that retained ownership of the term IL. This became significant as the 1980s matured. A US report entitled A Nation at Risk (Gardner 1983), which drew a pessimistic picture of US education and future economic prospects, was strongly criticised by the LIS 48 The diversity of IL profession for omitting to mention the actual or potential role of libraries (Breivik and Gee 2006, 35): (L)ibraries remained all but invisible in the literature on the information society that began emerging in the 1980s.... Of all the education reform reports of the 1980s, only the 1986 Carnegie Foundation Report, College, gave substantive consideration to the role of libraries in addressing the challenges facing higher education. Breivik became a leading voice in the profession’s efforts to reverse this neglect. This bore some fruit later in the decade. She and Gee claim ( ibid) that 1987, and the publication of Libraries and the

Search for Academic Excellence, was the “initial attempt by leaders in higher education and librarianship to look beneath surface impressions and consider a greater institutional role for libraries”. IL was adopted as the standard bearer for this campaign. It was identified as the added value that the library could bring, not just to a university and its students but also the learning infrastructure of society as a whole. IL was seen by Breivik and her colleagues as a necessary skill “for integrated learning and preparation for lifelong learning and active citizenship” ( ibid, 40) and these, in turn, are “the proper focus for quality undergraduate education in an information society” ( ibid). Libraries offered the best environment for IL to be both developed and applied: “Libraries provide a model for the information environment in which graduates will need to work and live. Libraries offer a natural environment for problem-solving within the unlimited universe of information” ( ibid). In this worldview, the road to information literacy lay through the library, epitomised by the title of Gwyer, Stubbings, and Walton’s (2012) collection of papers from the 2012 IFLA Satellite conference on IL: The Road to Information Literacy: Librarians as facilitators of learning. Libraries offered the institution a broad “strategic edge”, supporting not just teaching and learning, but administration, community service, and revenue-raising (Breivik and Gee 2006). This evangelising resulted in the development of the ALA (1989), then ACRL (2000) standards for information literacy, which have driven IL practice and policy in the US ever since. The consequent focus in much literature is on developing assessment tools, or rubrics (e.g. Hoffmann and LaBonte 2012), the appropriate application of instructional design (e.g. Lavoie, Rosman and Sharma 2011), and new technological approaches (e.g. Kammer and Thompson 2011) to IL instruction, and integration with other curricula (e.g. Ragains 2001; Rockman 2004; many others).

49 Radical Information Literacy In most of this literature, the ACRL standards drive practice, and the practice emerges within the academic library1. This view was criticised as early as 1991 by McCrank, who wondered whether IL was simply a “bandwagon” term that librarians were keen to claim without having considered the implications of adopting a pedagogical role. Badke has more than once (2008; 2012) bemoaned the isolation of IL in the library, considered a service subject if taught at all, not a credit-bearing discipline integrated with other curricula. There is plenty of work going on in the US that does not accord with this paradigm: for example, work by Chip Bruce in the largely Puerto Rican district of Paseo Boricua in Chicago (Bruce and Bishop 2008; chapter 8 below) and, at a more theoretical level, see Julien and Williamson (2011) amongst others. But while more needs to be said about the role IL plays within – and outside – the university, this is a discussion best left until the next chapter. For now, it is useful to review how IL developed elsewhere in the world during this period. *** The IL literature from the United Kingdom draws on a more critical and exploratory tradition than the US, while nevertheless remaining centred in formal education. UK-specific IL standards exist, and are library-oriented, developed under the aegis of SCONUL, the Standing Conference of National and University Libraries (1999). While these tend to be interpreted and applied more loosely than the ACRL standards in the US, they remain linear. They assume that the highest-order thinking skills, and the development of critical knowledge, are only possible in the most advanced learners; that is, postgraduate students (see the critique of the ACRL, SCONUL and ANZIIL [Australia and New Zealand]

standards in Andretta 2005, 41–54). The problem with this is ( ibid, 48): This perspective... is not always confirmed by practice, as the level of competence of each learner is not dictated by his or her academic status but by the individual learner’s ability to engage with complex problem-solving conditions and their capacity for independent learning at the outset. What Andretta also neglects to mention is that these conditions may be met by – or developed in – learners outside the HE system. They will be outside it either because they cannot gain access to it, or because their query or area of interest is not something that formalised HE concerns itself with (for example, ‘how to save a local woodland from being cleared for development’). 50 The diversity of IL This focus on HE, as in the US, characterises much of UK IL, bar a few exceptions (e.g. Crawford and Irving 2011). The area where the UK differs most from the US is in IL pedagogy. There is a strongly constructivist and, at times, critical pedagogical tradition in the UK (this being true of HE pedagogy more generally, at least in terms of the literature, if not always practice (Fry, Ketteridge and Marshall 1999)). Several IL teaching ‘handbooks’ have emerged, but these rely less on instructional design, rubrics, and published standards, and more on interpretive, holistic approaches such as inquiry-based learning (e.g. Hepworth and Walton 2009; Andretta 2005; 2012; Whitworth, Fishwick and McIndoe 2011). Innovation in pedagogy, as in the US, also extends to the use of technologies such as Second Life (Webber 2010) and, generally, there is a close relationship between IL and digital literacy (Markless 2009; Beetham, McGill and Littlejohn

2009). In the UK, however, practitioners feel the same sense of isolation from academic colleagues as elsewhere, and the UK government has never set national-level policies, or even made statements, on IL. A recent publication edited by Secker and Coonan (2013) reflects many characteristics of the UK IL literature. This collection contains 10 chapters which collectively discuss how the subject matter of an IL course could expand beyond information retrieval, but while there is mention made, in the introduction, of the importance of the school sector, every chapter is based on an HE case. There is a sense of familiarity to the pleas in the introduction (Secker and Coonan 2013, xvi): “...if you are a librarian reading this book we urge you to pass it on to a teacher or a lecturer, or better still a principal or dean or even an education policy maker...”, followed by this lament ( ibid, xviii): (I)n rethinking information literacy we must recognize that librarians are not islands in the education sphere. Neither are they the owners of ‘information literacy’. That may be seen by some as revolutionary, but if we are truly committed to information literacy we will recognize that it is too important to remain the preserve of the library. We must seek out partnerships to work interprofessionally in our schools, colleges and universities. We must ensure that the new curriculum for information literacy has support at the highest level in our organizations. And we must lobby policy makers to ensure that governments recognize the central importance of information literacy in learning... 51 Radical Information Literacy Like Badke’s work (2008; 2012) this reads like an oration from a politician, a “call to arms” (Pope and Walton use this phrase directly: 2011, 8). Yet, it is little different from pleas made in the 1980s for a more holistic and integrated approach to teaching these skills, and for the bridging of gaps between librarians and academics. Pope and Walton (2011) take a pragmatic

view, talking of “infiltrating the curriculum”: integration with HE curricula is still the aim, but they are more prepared to acknowledge the impact of differences in perspective and how these affect the receipt of IL outside the teacher/librarian community (Pope and Walton 2011, 10): (I)nformation literacy is about deep learning, participation and making a real contribution leading to an enriched and empowered population... but therein lies an identity crisis aptly identified by Thornton (2010) who sees a real disconnect between how we (the librarian and information professional) see IL and how the rest of the world perceives it... ‘a few dull lessons taken by a librarian as part of a – probably rather dull – research skills module, rather than a vehicle of empowerment and political liberation’ (Thornton 2010, 8). Pope and Walton advocate that librarians “become equal and involved”, “stop wondering whether we are librarians or teachers” and ask what “they can uniquely bring to the business of educating employable graduates and fostering a real sense of economic and political engagement” (Pope and Walton 2011, 11). These are laudable aims, and the work of IL advocates mentioned throughout this section, and presented in conferences such as LILAC (the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference: www.lilacconference.com) shows that the UK IL tradition is a healthy one. Yet despite its constructivist and innovative pedagogical tradition, and its clear desire to integrate, it has failed to break out of the library and HE sector in any significant way. Even within this sector IL’s clear contribution to documents such as the Researcher Development Framework2 is not directly cited, and the experience of its most active advocates has been represented more by frustration than progress (Andretta 2011). (A possible exception is Hepworth and Walton 2009).

Is IL innately a library domain? Does its having emerged from LIS result in it being so wedded to the assumptions of that discipline that bridges to others cannot be built? It may be tempting to conclude this, but none of the three seminal papers mentioned libraries directly. Only Burchinal mentioned HE, and there noted that any teaching role in IL 52 The diversity of IL should quickly be handed to schools. Yet the library/HE theme is beginning to seem dominant in the US and UK literature. In both locations, IL has become almost entirely the concern of libraries in HE, and even within these there is a sense of disconnection and a lack of outside integration. To cover developments in the rest of the world in a brief section may assert a typical Anglo-American bias. A defence can be offered, however. Developments in two other countries, Sweden and Australia, will be discussed in detail after this point, with IL research from these two countries forming the basis of radical IL. Chapter 4 will conduct an analysis of literature from around the world, and the present author has already undertaken a review of IL (Whitworth 2010) which suggested that key themes from the UK and US contexts were just as present elsewhere, in locations as diverse as Finland, Hong Kong, and South Africa. Empirically, the ACRL standards, and the forms of thinking which underpin them, do have a strong influence on IL policies worldwide, particularly outside Europe, though there also exist examples of work that attempts to find more locally-specific standards and ways of working (see chapter 8 of this book). The SCONUL standards have also spread abroad, including to South Africa (Tiemensma 2012). Papers presented at the 2012 IFLA Satellite conference on IL (Gwyer, Stubbings and Walton 2012) reinforce these assessments.

Although unfortunately dated now, Virkus’s review (2003) remains an excellent source for tracing developments in Europe, and there also exists a repository of IL practice drawn from a range of European countries (Basili 2011). Some broad themes can be discerned in these different national traditions. Macevičiūte (2006) reviewed the literature from Russia and Lithuania, noting that though writers from this region and the ‘Western’ literature tend not to cite each other, there are notable similarities in their concerns, although in Russia/Lithuania, the idea that the information user can be a collective is more fully developed. The Nordic countries (Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden) share a common interest in social democratic pedagogy, with IL given more prominence here, including in policy, than is common elsewhere in the world (Lonka 2012; Tolonen and Toivonen 2010), although the much-lauded ‘Finnish model’, with IL recognised at national level to a degree that exceeds other countries (noted in page 6 of the Alexandria Proclamation (2006)), does not necessarily equate to a policy that supports all aspects of IL (Whitworth 2010). Through the provision of fora such as the Nordic Journal of Information Literacy ( http://noril.uib.no) and the 53 Radical Information Literacy Creating Knowledge conferences, a healthy IL community is sustained in Scandinavia. In other countries around Europe, particular ‘champions’ are apparent in the literature – at least, that which has been translated into English at this time – e.g. Špiranec and Zorica (2010) in Croatia, Pinto and associates in Spain (2013). Outside Europe there are pockets of activity in certain locations, including southern Africa, with a number of papers emerging from South Africa (de Boer, Bothma and du Toit 2012; Fourie 2011) and Botswana (Oladokun and Aina 2011). Taiwan (Chen, Lin and Chang 2011, Chang and Liu 2011) and Brazil (Tavares, Hepworth and Costa 2011) have also seen activity. International agencies such as UNESCO have played a clear role, having catalysed declarations such as the Alexandria Proclamation (2006), the Prague Declaration (2003), and the Moscow Declaration on Media and Information Literacy (2012).

Statements like these serve a dual purpose: they connect IL to worldwide concerns such as human rights, development, poverty, and environmental sustainability (here see also Sturges and Gastinger 2010; Tavares et al 2011; and chapter 8 below), and assert that education is a means to an end, not an end-in-itself. In addition, the declarations serve as resources that practitioners can use for inspiration and to which, in principle, national governments should respond via new policies. Yet this is difficult to translate into practice, even in countries which are sympathetic to these goals. Once again, common themes emerge worldwide (Whitworth 2010, 317–8): Ponjuan (2010) makes the general point that any national IL policy is challenging to implement because very few countries have experience working with the library and information science field as well as educational communities like teachers: the links between these different groups are weak in most places. Consequently, IL is rarely recognized at the highest political level, being “subsumed within an ‘information society’ agenda focusing primarily on the promotion and development of ICT skills and infrastructure” (Russell and O’Brien 2009, p. 102: see also Whitworth 2009). This brief review of developments in the last three decades cannot adequately cover even the most significant papers. As well as reviews already cited, like Virkus (2003), the works of Mutch (1997), Rader (2002), Lundh et al (2013), Markless and Streatfield (2007), Aharony (2010), Pinto, Cordón and Diáz (2010), and Weiner (2011) are useful reviews or bibliographies of work in the field. There also exists a 54 The diversity of IL substantial sub-genre of work in IL in the medical and public health disciplines, including reviews by Wyer and Silva (2009), Fourie (2009), Frisch, Camerini, Diviani and Schulz (2011), and Ngoh (2009). Yet the sense of a relative dearth of work outside the

library/HE nexus is enhanced by the intimate nature of the literature reviews carried out by Williamson and Asla (2009), into IL amongst the very old (drawing only on two projects), and Partridge, Bruce, and Tilley (2008), who look at community IL through reviews of just three papers. Within the HE library, much work outside the US and UK continues to reflect the same concerns, namely training in skills and competencies, developing rubrics or criteria for assessment, and trying to secure collaborations between libraries and academics. It may seem irrelevant – or, viewed positively, as a sign of the strength and applicability of standards – that the ACRL definition of IL has a clear influence over IL teaching in, say, Taiwan (Lin, Cheng, Liao and Yen 2012) or Iran (Babalhavaeji, Isfandyari-Moghaddam, Aqili and Shakooii 2009). Yet standards direct practice in education by setting a definition of ‘what should be’, and thus, influencing what is looked for in educational outcomes, and ultimately, what is taught . By their nature, educational standards (and, more loosely, ‘best practices’) have two essential characteristics: they strive to be generic, not context-dependent; they are monologic, not dialogic. Yet standards nevertheless emerge from particular contexts, at particular times, and are driven by the assumptions and needs of their creators, not of those who may adopt the standards elsewhere. This does not make them valueless, but it does mean that for their worth to be validated, standards and practices must be applied by educational practitioners (Carr and Kemmis 1986) – in other words, these providers need to engage in a dialogue with the standards, following the application with evaluation, action, research, and the development of communities in which practices can be shared (Wenger 1998). To some extent, papers like those cited here are undertaking this research. Yet the application of generic theories or best practices must also be essentially subjective and intersubjective, involving reflection and personal development,

discussion, and the sharing of insights with colleagues (Carr and Kemmis 1986). Whitworth (2012) goes into more detail about the role of reflective practice in the professional development of the IL educator, and practical examples are offered by, for example, Fourie (2011), who uses mind maps. The process attends not just to the evaluation of practices that are oriented towards meeting specified goals, but also to paying critical attention to those goals, and review of them where necessary. 55 Radical Information Literacy This is the distinction explored by Argyris and Schön (1999), who call the first approach single-loop learning and the latter double-loop learning. In double-loop learning, the relevance of the justifications and goals of an act are questioned, whereas in single-loop learning, only the actions are questioned, with justifications and goals left unscrutinised. In the IL literature, double-loop learning – meaning, here, investigation and research into the fundamental postulates of IL – does emerge, but this review has suggested that the majority of work is single-loop, assessing work being done to teach students in HE, through the library, to better accord with IL standards. This suggestion can be further supported through more quantitative methods of analysis, but that will be left until chapter 4. *** IL was never conceived as a wholly technical project: Zurkowski, Burchinal and Hamelink, to varying degrees, differentiated IL from IS by introducing a non-systematisable human element. That is, seeing people not as akin to components in a machine or information system, but as manifesting essential aspects of knowledge formation

which cannot be systematised. Intuition, psychology, affect, emotion, chance and, most of all, creativity are aspects of the human condition where control breaks down. They introduce unpredictability into decision-making, action and knowledge formation, and help explain not only the subjective, personal aspects of information processing, but intersubjective ones as well (Edwards 2006, 25). The work of Carol Kuhlthau, particularly her book Seeking Meaning (1993), is the best example of a psychological approach to IL (and LIS more broadly). It was claimed by Julien and Williamson (2011) to be one of the few, perhaps the only, extant attempts to bring together the disciplines of information seeking (focused on by information scientists) and IL (focused on by practitioners), and to integrate psychology into IL, as called for by Marcum (2002) amongst others. In her introduction, Kuhlthau (1993, xvii-xviii) notes that librarianship is a practice-oriented field, and her work is an attempt to define theories on which the practice can become based. She critiques studies of the library which examine the effectiveness of the library qua system, judged through quantitative evaluations (financial health, footfall, large-scale surveys, percentage of searches which were successful, etc) ( ibid, 79). Instead she calls for, and conducts, user-focused studies, to give deeper insight into the personal motivations and qualities affecting user interactions ( ibid, 80). Through these studies, she transcends the emphasis on cognitive change that 56 The diversity of IL characterises work in IL pedagogy, to consider learning and information use as also involving affective change. Recognising this, her aim is to explore how library practices can accommodate the psychology of information seeking. Kuhlthau’s foundation is the Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) of George Kelly (1963). Kelly added an affective dimension to theories of thinking and learning by finding ways to observe this

dimension (Kuhlthau 1993, xix). Adding this dimension means that for Kelly, and thus Kuhlthau, cognitive change, affective change, and changes in actions are a unified whole (Kuhlthau 1993, p. 26). Thus, so are learning and transformation at the personal scale ( ibid, xix): Our view of the world is constantly being constructed by new experiences. This process begins with uncertainty which increases as we encounter inconsistencies and incompatibilities within the new information itself and with our previously established constructs. Construction takes place through a process of formulating tentative hypotheses for testing, assessing, defining, refining, and reconstruing. Ultimately, new constructs are formed; these alter and expand the existing system – in other words, we learn. The personal constructs that shape our experience of learning and transformation can therefore be considered forms of cognitive authority: they are “integrated, organized representation[s] of past behaviour and experience which guide individuals in reconstructing previously encountered material...” ( ibid, 24 via Bruner 1973, 5). Constructs shape how new experiences are received, and if there is conflict between existing constructs (authorities) and new experiences (information), uncertainty will be enhanced. Consequences may include anxiety, or other negative psychological effects including denial, anger, and confusion (Fransella and Dalton 2000, 39–43). But though these constructs are sometimes explicit, more often they are unarticulated, and thus concealed. Any personal construct is a way of thinking: a methodology from which springs methods and structures for processing information (Kuhlthau 1993 , 185): “Recall is based on our former constructs (world view) which form a frame of reference for selective remembering.” But ( ibid, 20): the “constructs that we have formed are not easily discarded...”. These can hamper the receipt of challenging new information. We may avoid the change or challenge, entrenching around existing constructs and reaffirming them, becoming 57 Radical Information Literacy

“stuck” (Fransella and Dalton 2000, 14) with a way of thinking that is not necessarily appropriate for changed circumstances. An example of a construct would be ‘I am healthy’. This will probably have originated – perhaps some time before – as a valid and rational assessment of an individual’s physical condition. But if it becomes a construct, that person may reject information – pain, a lump – that might challenge it (a cognitive bias: see Blaug 2007, 30–1; Evans 1989). Concern from a family member, however well-meaning, may be ignored for the same reason. Even a medical diagnosis may not alter behaviour. Counselling may help, or self-reflection, but it may be that the construct never changes. Kelly’s is an applied theory. A psychologist using PCP plays an active role, helping the subject establish how personal constructs can block change. Learning about the constructs and learning about the change come at the same time, and it is the role of the PC psychologist to help with the transformation, raising awareness in the individual about their cognitive structures. The psychologist can use a variety of techniques to reveal these constructs to the subject. The repertory grid is one validated approach (Fransella and Dalton 2000, 51 ff) but Fransella, who has done a great deal to develop Kelly’s work, is insistent that no specific technique is prescribed. (Chapter 8 presents examples.) Kuhlthau uses PCP to reveal stages in the information seeking process, and the impact of affect or emotion at each stage. Her hypothesis is that (1993, xx): “information seeking is a process of construction that begins with uncertainty and anxiety.” From the early stages of the process, where the user anticipates the task, preparing for the work ahead both cognitively (by contemplating possible topics for the search, brainstorming ideas) and affectively (feeling apprehensive, uncertain), through to what Kuhlthau calls the “pre-focus exploration” stage, the user’s cognitive work will likely be accompanied by feelings of confusion and doubt.

Apprehension may prevent the search from commencing altogether. Once these stages are passed, however, and a focus for the information search has been formulated (whether through a “sudden moment of insight” ( ibid, 48) or more gradually, through exploration of the literature in the broader area), Kuhlthau suggests that a more optimistic and confident mindset is generated in the user, and increased interest ( ibid, 46–52). Focus formulation is therefore seen by Kuhlthau as the most significant stage or task, and depends on exploration, and a tolerance for uncertainty (ibid, 114–5). Kuhlthau also notes, however, that ( ibid, 115): 58 The diversity of IL (U)sers often move directly from selecting a general topic or area to the task of collecting information, skipping over the important stage of exploration altogether. Exploratory acts uncover information for formulating new constructs, whereas collecting acts gather information for documenting established constructs. This last sentence directly reflects the difference between doubleand single-loop learning, and also explains why exploration and focus formulation are also those areas which promote the most anxiety, as they are where the new constructs are formed. Therefore, an IL pedagogy that focuses on mere retrieval of information is not promoting creativity, because it is systematised: because it avoids dealing with uncertainty ( ibid, 172). Uncertainty, and hence anxiety, cannot be relieved by the design of a better information system, nor better teaching – just as the construct ‘I am healthy’ may not even be challenged by a professional diagnosis. Uncertainty is more likely a response to design or to certain types of teaching (IL, or otherwise). Thus, information literacy must allow for personal constructs, which contribute to the possible rejection of information, even specifically relevant information. Some constructivist and critical IL pedagogies do address these matters (see, for example, Shor 1996). However,

Kuhlthau is not claiming to offer new insights into pedagogy. Rather, she seeks to integrate psychological issues and the subjective domain into LIS. Through doing so, she shows how ‘information anxiety’ is not a failure of the user, a pathology caused by poor education or apathy; it is instead a natural part of the human condition. Her response is to address, not teaching, but mediation. Mediators play an important role in the information search process. These may be information professionals, such as librarians or teachers, or they may be friends, or texts such as books, newspaper articles or TV programmes. All may help a learner focus their attention on specific elements of their information search by suggesting ways to proceed, and thus, achieve better focus. Mediation helps the learner through the ‘zone of intervention’ – “that area in which a user can do with guidance and assistance what he or she could not do alone” ( ibid, 176; via Vygotsky 1978). The assistance has to be dynamic, constantly reviewing and revising itself, because the zone of intervention alters as the nature of the user’s search, and their knowledge and practices, change. Intervention in areas that lie outside the ‘zone’ may be “intrusive on the one side [if the student has already changed practice], overwhelming on the other” (p. 176). Thus, the mediator and student are ideally in a constant dialogue, each adapting 59 Radical Information Literacy their position with reference to the other (Linell 2009, 86; Laurillard 2002). This complex dance of diagnosis and intervention requires constant reflection-in-action “in which the practitioner relies not only on the patterns and underlying principles of a theoretical framework but also on sound professional experience” ( ibid, 177). Effective mediation has to handle uncertainty, however, and

“[u]ncertainty, the predominant experience in the early stages of the search process, is not being sufficiently addressed in library and information services” (1993, p. 172). Mediation, for Kuhlthau, is still largely seen in LIS as a technical issue (design of systems), or a cognitive one (design of pedagogy), not an affective one. Affect requires the mediator to take on a counselling role: specifically, to help the user reveal personal constructs that are impacting on the search. Kuhlthau recognises various levels of mediation, but only the highest level involves true counselling. In the first three levels ( ibid, 137– 142) – seeing the library as an organiser of information at level 1, a locator at level 2, and identifier at level 3 – only one point of contact between user and library system is expected. In consequence, the encounter can become automated. The user makes a request, the system delivers a single result (a single resource at the organizer and locator levels, a single list of resources at the identifier level), and the conversation is over. At Kuhlthau’s level 4 – advisor – a more complex result is returned, but the implication still remains, that the enquiry is complete. A sequence of information-searching activity is outlined, but there is still a singularity to it. Thus, again, there is the potential to automate this type of mediation. However, at level 5 of mediation, the counsellor, the user’s experience is considered more holistically, their learning allowed for. There is no expectation that a single response will be made to the user’s request, nor that no further contribution from the user will be required. Rather than returning a result, the counsellor “establishes a dialogue” (144), a way “to enable people to explore new ideas” (154): the dialogue is openended, and not finalised after the delivery of the resource. What is being offered at level 5 is not information, or even meaning, but guidance for the user, in their own personal process of seeking meaning ( ibid, 143): The recommended sequence of sources of information emerges as the topic or problem evolves in a highly

individual way. The information is understood from the frame of reference of the user’s past experience and the constructs they hold.... The Counsellor approaches information seeking as a creative, individual process that is dynamic and unique for each person. 60 The diversity of IL The role does not have to be instantiated in only a single person or office. An effective infrastructure for counselling may be developed, integrating the work of many different professionals: teachers, administrators, librarians, and educators ( ibid, 151). This is a view of IL as being, not a response to the design of an information system, but instantiated within it – the system being designed not only to deliver information but promote its own effective use. It is a worthy view. The problems with Kuhlthau’s work, however, vis-à-vis the development of radical IL, are that these insights remain rooted within the library context, most obviously within higher education. This is evident from her methodology. The library users from whom Kuhlthau gathered data were students, usually seeking information to complete an assignment. This is only one kind of ‘information need’, and can be considered as an “abstraction forced on the student” (Edwards 2006, 36: cf Saracevic 2007b). Would the same feelings of anxiety be present in library users engaged in entirely different search tasks? More broadly, despite advocating changes in practice, and discussing, albeit briefly, how this transformation could be attended to (via reflective practice: Kuhlthau 1993, 177), the paradigm of IL as

being an outgrowth of bibliographic instruction, and thus, located within the library, is not questioned. Kuhlthau sees cognitive authority as still invested in the system, or library-as-text, and the expertise of the individual, professional librarian. Arguably, she sees anxiety and uncertainty as things which block, not learning as such, but use of the library. It is clearly stated that the theory she is developing is a “process theory for library and information services” ( ibid, xxiii); the aim is to understand uncertainty and anxiety, but as additional inputs into the system. She says ( ibid, xxv) that “this book is written as a tool for reflective librarians and information professionals to articulate a theoretical perspective for designing intervention services that recognize and respond to users’ needs for counselling in the process of learning from information access and use.” Uncertainty, at least in principle, can be accommodated in a system ( ibid, 108, via Bates 1986; see also “soft systems methodology” (Checkland and Holwell 1998)), and she notes ( ibid, 133) that “after a problem has been well-defined and formulated, the library system works fairly efficiently”. What she is trying to do is seek a fuller problem definition, a way for the library system to accommodate the uncertainty of the earlier stages, and help the user reach a point, after which they would be able to use the library system without further difficulty. 61 Radical Information Literacy There is also the implication that the information sources will in principle be held in a library. With this single sentence ( ibid, 153, emphasis added), Kuhlthau states what her limits are: “The broader view of information education enables students to learn how to learn in the library.” This means that structural elements in the landscape are not considered – including the library itself. What this perspective does not account for are cognitive conflicts between the library and its users. Students do not necessarily have the cognitive architecture to engage with the

library in this way. The students that she researched “lacked constructs that would prompt them to request mediation from a librarian” ( ibid, 129), even for simple tasks such as information collection. The library was seen as a self-service environment, and seeking help from a librarian was not judged a wholly “legitimate” approach to researching a topic ( ibid, 130). Elmborg (2002) observed how students are unfamiliar with the conventions of the reference interview. Thus it may be their encounter with the library itself that foments anxiety, rather than their understanding of the material found. In the end, though her work is a valuable statement of the links between learning and transformation at a subjective level, Kuhlthau never really moves beyond the subjective. Her theoretical focus remains on the individual user and their psychology, and the need to see this psychology as a form of data, an input into the system; something which, if only it were understood better, would contribute to the transformation of library practice. She does not account for the impact of the institutionalisation of IL, the way that changes in user education may come to challenge the constructs on which librarianship is based - and which may therefore be deflected, denied, and absorbed by similar processes as Kelly describes, but this time acting at the intersubjective level. Essentially, the library – or any other IL educator – needs to account for its own cognitive structures. Personal constructs can be intersubjectively maintained, a response to ways of thinking that may have been embedded in technology, creating the sort of cognitive conflicts that provoke learning in the first place. To understand any such constructs it is necessary to engage in double-loop learning. PCP is explicit about how this works at the individual level (Fransella and Dalton 2000), but the transformation of any working practice also requires this level of reflection among a collective, as well. Nevertheless, Kuhlthau’s work is important. She makes key connections between learning and transformation, standing on a wider theoretical base than LIS had previously. PCP helps IL

educators understand not just how anxiety and uncertainty can be designed for, but how identities are 62 The diversity of IL formed, information needs provoked or repressed, and ideologies and assumptions which drive action can be hidden, even to the person holding them and undertaking the activity (Russell 2003, 126). *** With such a multiplicity of personal constructs, perceptions, and actions influencing communication, it should be clear that IL cannot be generic. What information is important and relevant, what forms of authority pertain in a given place and time – these will all differ from landscape to landscape, and thus it is reasonable to state that IL will also differ. At the same time, one cannot ignore normative issues. In the end, IL is about making judgements of one sort or another, and if these judgements are themselves to be judged then some kind of normative core must remain, without this being simply a way of seeing one form of IL or other practice as ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ and privileging it over others. What IL therefore needs are normative foundations for plurality. Securing these normative foundations must begin by establishing the plurality of views of information and IL. This has been done well by researchers working within the phenomenographic tradition. Phenomenography is named as one of the three key theories of IL by Limberg et al (2012), along with sociocultural practice theory (discussed in this book in chapter 7), and Foucauldian discourse analysis (not discussed directly, but the work on Bakhtin in chapter 6 takes up a similar task). An excellent review of phenomenography’s contribution to IL research is also contributed by Andretta (2007b).

Phenomenography3 is a research methodology that emerged from work done in Sweden by Marton (1981). It was originally applied to the study of IL by Bruce (1997) and subsequently extended by her and other colleagues at the Queensland University of Technology (e.g. Bruce 2008; Lupton 2004; Hughes, Bruce and Edwards 2007; Yates, Partridge and Bruce 2009; Gunton 2011; Sayyad Abdi, Partridge and Bruce 2013) and elsewhere (Smith and Hepworth 2012). In essence, it is a way of learning about variation in people’s experience of some aspect of the world (Marton 1981); a methodology for understanding different ways of being aware of, or experiencing, a phenomenon and, through doing so, building a picture of a phenomenon as a whole. Phenomenography seeks not to make statements about the world (a ‘first-order perspective’), but rather, statements about how other people experience their world (Edwards 2006, p. 53 via Marton 1981): the ‘second-order perspective’. Its area of exploration is not how the individual makes meaning and learns, but 63 Radical Information Literacy how these things take place collectively, building on, but transcending, individual perceptions. Experience, and thus meaning, are formed within the relations that exist between people and their experienced world. Bruce’s key insight was to take this research methodology and, through applying it to IL, establish how revealing variation in information to learners can also be an IL pedagogy. Edwards provides the best summary of how this can be done (2006, 49): At the core of variation theory, and its influence on learning then, we must understand all the aspects or elements that are possible to be discerned in an experience, and understand the varying ways of experiencing the object of learning. Having done this we can then restructure the learning environment to encourage students to experience all the possible variations.

If we wish to do this in our learning environments then phenomenography is the approach needed. We need to use phenomenography to understand and draw out the variation in the categories, and then we use variation theory to apply the identified variations in practice in our learning environment. Phenomenographic categories reveal the space of the variation, or, the varying ways of seeing the phenomenon. They also reveal the central focus of each experience and the different dimensions within the experience that are simultaneously noticed, or ignored. Having found the variations, and having identified the varying aspects in the group awareness, we can use them to identify ways to encourage people to discern another aspect of the experience, an aspect they have previously not discerned. Though this is clearly a methodology, there is no emphasis placed on particular methods of gathering data. One can undertake phenomenographical research through surveys, hermeneutics (the analysis of text), in-depth research interviews, concept mapping, and so on. But whatever tool is used, the data gathering process must elicit variation, without imposing views of the phenomenon on informants. Whatever data is generated ( ibid, 61): (T)he researcher develops the categories of description of the phenomenon. In other words, these categories are the researcher’s interpretation, based on data analysis, of the variation in the group’s account of the way they experience 64 The diversity of IL the phenomenon.... Each category represents a sub-group, or conception, of the whole phenomenon; they represent one way in which the phenomenon is experienced. Each category reflects a particular structure of awareness (Booth 1992); the meaning of the phenomenon, but one derived through concrete experience, things that have actually happened in the world

rather than theoretical constructs. What is in particular focus in participants’ structure of awareness? What is at the margins? What are the key categories? These are all ‘moving streams’; core areas or themes are focused on, from within a more general ‘thematic field’ that has some marginal aspects. This notion was later refined into ideas of internal and external horizons (Marton, Dall’Alba and Beaty 1993). These different categories of experiencing a phenomenon within a community of participants are manifested in the outcome space (Edwards 2006, p. 62): Having identified the categories of description and the corresponding structure of awareness, the next step in a phenomenographic study is the development of an outcome space to show the world, simply, your findings. That is, having identified the categories, a picture of the relationship between the categories found is drawn. In its simplest form, the outcome space is a map showing what critically different categories have been found by the research. This picture may be graphic in form, but also textual, such as a table. Outcome spaces are not intended to amalgamate second-order perspectives into a first-order perspective: that is, to be a definition of a phenomenon. Rather, they are tools for exploring and revealing variation (Andretta 2007b, 156). Marton conceives of the outcome space as a text – a tabular or diagrammatic representation of some kind, which may be paper-based or digital (Edwards (2006) provides the best example of the latter; also Steinerová 2010). The space maps the variation in awareness of whatever aspect of the world is involved in the inquiry. Thus, an outcome space becomes a map of the collective experience of the phenomenon: one possible map of the information landscape. As differences are evident between maps of rural or mountainous landscapes (more commonly used by walkers, and therefore mapping features like contours, streams, fields) and maps of cities (aimed at drivers and so omitting those details, but emphasising roads), an outcome space will 65

Radical Information Literacy only focus on certain things. Or, emphasis may vary between elements of the outcome space, depending upon the audience for the space (map). Russell (2003, 127) writes that phenomenography “is particularly useful for research in previously understudied areas... where one needs to do introductory work to ascertain the range of experiences.” It is a “mapping method, which will point to areas, which need further, more detailed, exploration” (see also Wandersee 1990). In sum, it is a method of raising awareness about variation within a context. The significant question for IL is what happens to the outcome space after this text has been produced. Bruce’s move was toward using this awareness of variation as a teaching tool. This was a two-stage process. Firstly, her own outcome space was presented in several publications, such as Bruce (1997), which described what she called the “seven faces” of IL, these being categories describing different ways information is experienced: as information technology, information sources, information process, information control, knowledge construction, knowledge extension, and wisdom. It was then suggested that ( ibid, 44): The seven faces of information literacy, and their corresponding workplace processes, provide a curriculum framework for information managers with an interest in training and educating their clientele to effectively use the organisation’s information services, and for providers of beginning and continuing professional education. Understanding more about how information is effectively utilised by practising professionals is likely to help educators design a curriculum which is relevant and transferable to professional practice. Similar claims can be made in other aspects of education, as well as workplace training. This interest in application drove Bruce to a more

specific investigation of information literacy education. An investigation of how IL was taught needed to pull together other phenomenographical investigations, including participants’ views of teaching and learning, as well as information and IL itself. This more multifaceted investigation was presented in Bruce et al (2006), the “six frames of information literacy education”. Briefly, these frames are: Content: IL is knowledge about the world of information Competency: IL is a set of competencies or skills Learning to learn: IL is a way of learning 66 The diversity of IL Personal relevance: IL is learned in context and is different for different people/groups Social impact: IL issues are important to society Relational: IL is a complex of different ways of interacting with information. A holistic programme of IL education would need to incorporate all of these to be effective (Whitworth et al 2011). The relational frame is the most significant vis-à-vis IL pedagogy. Bruce et al suggest that the relational frame brings together, at least, the content and learning to learn frames ( ibid, 42)4: “learning in this frame is understood as coming to discern things in new or more complex ways”, and learning occurs when variation in ways of understanding or experiencing are revealed. This will “expand focal awareness” (Andretta 2007b, 156). Put more simply, it will give learners something new to think about. Personal constructs may, as noted above, lead to them rejecting the new information, but

personal constructs can themselves be the focus of teaching in the relational frame. The second part of Bruce et al (2006, 43–55) describes some case studies of relational IL teaching, and other authors have contributed similar investigations (e.g. Whitworth 2009b). Bruce also developed the model in her book (2008), Informed Learning, which “draws on contemporary HE teaching and learning theory to suggest ways forward to build a learning agenda that values the need for engaging with the wider world of information”, offering practical teaching techniques that can be applied in academic disciplines, professions, communities, the workplace and the research community itself. The six frames have also been drawn on to analyse national IL policies (Whitworth 2010) and are used in chapter 4 below to assist the analysis of a selection of IL papers. Other authors have used phenomenographic methods in different ways. Edwards (2006) sought to capture variation in how students searched for Internet information, with her four categories being “looking for a needle in a haystack”, “finding a way through a maze”, “using the tools as a filter”, and “panning for gold”. Edwards wants to look for triggers to help students move to a higher level of searching sophistication. Her digital outcome space, a Flash movie, is an exemplar of the idea ( http:// www.netlenses.scitech.qut.edu.au/). Yates has looked at health literacy through phenomenographic methods (e.g. Yates et al 2009), and O’Farrill (2008b) used it in a study of NHS-24, a telephone helpline, in Scotland. *** 67 Radical Information Literacy Shenton and Hay-Gibson (2011, 167) call IL “among the ultimate in transdisciplinary phenomena”, with

transdisciplinarity being “essentially acontextual” and applicable across all different subjects, and Tomic (2010) sees in Bruce’s work the potential for it to be considered an underlying philosophy of information, one that can unify studies of information behaviour, information retrieval, and critical thinking. So the stakes are high, and care is required before these claims can be endorsed. The outcomes of phenomenographic enquiry should not be seen as definitions of any given field. Rather, they are categories of description drawn from one particular exploration. To treat them as indicating an end-point of some kind would be to reify them, turning them from contributions to a dialogue into monologic pronouncements. Instead, they should be seen as representations that suggest avenues of further exploration. This is what a good map does. Russell (2003, 128) argues that phenomenographic results permit “fellow researchers to analyze, then connect and contrast results with their own research, as well as make their own decisions about potential applications”. As with any other text, these results can be tested by being opened to scrutiny and related to other investigations, other experiences of the phenomenon, to collectively judge whether there are mutual insights to be gained from the inquiry. Thus, the insights are validated, and may continue to evolve. It is here that one can see the value of phenomenography to the dialogic view of IL being developed in this book. Inquiries that develop the experience of variation allow for the scrutiny of existing forms of cognitive authority in a particular landscape, by helping community members discern alternatives (Wilson 1983, 124): “Awareness of the existence of alternatives is the first step towards weakening the hold of cognitive monopolies.” This does not mean that, nihilistically, every assertion of cognitive authority should be challenged. But it does mean that the teacher, the information professional, seeking ways to make their teaching more effective, can find methods for exploring and scrutinising the cognitive authorities which reside in a particular setting.

To this end (Limberg et al 2012, 103): “phenomenographic categories of description are applicable as objects of learning to consciously use in collective interaction in classrooms and libraries in order to enable different views of information practices to diverge and be challenged.” Methodologically, then, the outcome space becomes an informational resource for further investigations of the phenomenon. Outcome spaces do not have to be ‘texts’ or ‘diagrams’ in a literal sense, and they certainly are unlikely to remain as such: they may become options on a computer menu or tick boxes on a rubric: in other words, reified aspects of an 68 The diversity of IL information system. Or, they may be kept at the forefront of awareness, used as resources for open reflection and discussion, and contribute to the transformation of a particular context. Thus, a link is made between learning and practice, within the phenomenographical paradigm. This link is needed, because Säljö (1997) has argued against Marton’s notion that experience is fundamental – that, as he put it in the title of a paper (Marton 1995) which answered an earlier critique of Säljö’s (1994): “I experience, therefore I am”. For Säljö, one’s experience of something cannot in fact be separated from cultural practices. The phenomenographic research interview itself imposes an authority, of a sort, on the experience of variation that the interviewee is able to express. And even though this kind of formal research is not the only arena from which outcome spaces will emerge, not all experiences of variation will be welcomed, or treated equally. Some experiences of variation, certain categories, particular structures of awareness; these may be incompatible with existing cognitive authorities and the information systems in which they are embedded and, as a result, may be actively challenging to authority structures within an information landscape. These authorities may reassert themselves at

various stages in the process of the enquiry: certain categories of description may be prevented from being expressed; outcomes may be ignored or repressed; the enquiry may be prevented from starting in the first place, either directly or indirectly (e.g., there is no workload allowance for professional development, no space in a standards-oriented IL curriculum). Users may be forced to fit the requirements of a system, and while this is not necessarily a disempowering process (depending on how the system has been designed), it will risk effacing context and thus the experience of variation. A more technical, and less user-centred, programme of education will, at best, be the result: at worst either the system may be rejected by the user or the value of their own context and understanding will be erased altogether. Yet it must also be remembered that for knowledge to progress, as noted in chapter 1, there must always be some monologism, some way of fixing and asserting cognitive authority. The question is whether, within a given information landscape, such authority can be scrutinised when necessary. Bearing these observations in mind, it is surprising that the notion of critical phenomenography has not gained more currency in the literature. The only reference found was by Russell (2003, 128), and that in passing. The reflective process that she describes helps the researcher become aware of the ideologies that lie within a context; a social system, a particular tool, or any other phenomenon open to phenomenographical 69 Radical Information Literacy enquiry. Thus, critical phenomenography addresses such questions as: What power structures are revealed within the phenomenon? How can the experience of variation be used to shed light on what is valued and what is not valued, and how does this understanding affect the usefulness of the outcome space as a subsequent resource for learning? These questions are aimed at preventing the products of phenomenographic investigation (outcome spaces) becoming

concealed or repressed. John Dewey wrote that (1909, 48): “Most persons are unaware of the distinguishing peculiarities of their own mental habit. They take their own mental operations for granted and unconsciously make them the standard for judging the mental processes of others.” A critical phenomenography would not only seek to reveal these hidden “mental operations” to learners, but also to investigate how such operations – through technologies, standards, procedures, and other cognitive authorities – are imposed from without, how they affect information exchange, and how authority structures built around them may be transformed. O’Farrill attempts to make a connection between phenomenography and practice-based views of information landscapes, linking them via the notion of critical realism. The phenomenographic view risks being just interpretive, but this can be overcome if one sees social structures as real, not just perceived, influences over practice (O’Farrill 2008, 162). These structural elements are dynamic, but always “pre-date practices at a given point in time” ( ibid). How, then, do these elements come to be, and why are some more likely to influence practice than others: in other words, why do they have more authority within information landscapes than others? Asking questions like these turns the inquiry into a critical one (cf. Fay 1975). Phenomenography is only one possible approach to the study of IL, but it has proven a productive one. Engaging with it, particularly with a critical slant, focuses attention on the relationship between learning and transformation. Therefore, in the form of a critical phenomenography, it is a crucial pillar of radical IL. *** Chapter 2 concluded that information is context-specific, and information literacy must account for this. What chapter 3 has done is suggest how much information is context-specific, right down to

the micro- and individual levels. In turn, an individual may occupy multiple contexts. Learning takes place through – and therefore depends on – interacting 70 The diversity of IL with different contexts, and situations in which there is an element of uncertainty, but because of the ways we handle uncertainty, there is always a risk that instead of becoming a resource for learning, new information will be rejected. IL is about not only helping an individual retrieve information, therefore, but also helping them to understand it, absorb it, and learn from it. Chapter 3 has also suggested that IL itself must be sensitive to the plurality of different contexts, without collapsing into relativism. Not all contexts are equal, and experiencing variation may be challenging to authority. Constructs, values, and assumptions which form significant parts of the exchange structures within one landscape may be antithetical to information exchanges in a different context, but if the relationship between these two contexts is unequal or hierarchical, they may come to shape activity in the second context in any case. This will stimulate learning, but if that learning results in challenges to the authorities rooted within the initial context, either the results of learning may be rejected, or the whole learning process suppressed. Chapter 4 will now go on to show how this kind of thing is not just something that happens outside IL, but also within it. Notes 1. An informal quantification to be more fully justified in chapter 4. 2. See http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/428241/ResearcherDevelopment-Framework.html: a framework for developing the postaward employability of PhD students and researchers.

3. Not to be confused with phenomenology: a distinction summarised by Andretta (2007b, 153–4). 4. Whitworth et al (2011, 48) subsequently argued that the relational frame in fact brought together all five of the other frames. 71 This page intentionally left blank 4 The institutionalising of IL Abstract: This chapter first undertakes a content analysis of a sample of IL literature published since 1990, in order to suggest that despite the range of potential approaches summarised in the last chapter, the field remains dominated by a perspective focused on higher education and competency-based approaches. This supports a conclusion that IL has become institutionalised within library and information science, and the academic library. This institutionalisation has damaged the development of IL, by neglecting community-based, intersubjective judgments about information, and maintaining a theory-practice gap. Key Words: Institutionalisation, academic libraries, standards, monologism, theory-practice gap. So far, this book has presented IL as based around sensitivity to different contexts and attending not only to the retrieval of information but its use, formulation, and (re-) production. An information literate person is not only competent at retrieving information, but is also able to understand possible variations between the context in which the information was produced and the context in which it must subsequently be understood and used. He/she would account for these differences when making

judgements about the cognitive authority, relevance, and validity of the information. IL is aided by a facility with various tools for processing information, including ICT, but also encompassing other technologies, practices, ways of thinking, and defining words. The question of which of these tools are significant has answers that vary from context to context; therefore, these tools can, and should, themselves be read and judged as texts. Information literacy, therefore, becomes not just attention to particular texts at particular times, but also an ongoing process of nurturing the information landscapes within 73 Radical Information Literacy which individuals and their communities exist and learn. These things are direct consequences of the dialogic perspective. Yet a great deal of IL literature and practice does not accord with this view. This statement will be justified by the opening section of this chapter, which conducts a relatively comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the IL literature that emerged after the publication of the first IL standards by the ALA (1989). Around what themes does the literature cluster? Conversely, what aspects of IL are neglected, why does this neglect matter, and how can it be explained? Answers to the latter question are sought in the phenomenon of institutionalisation (Douglas 1986). The chapter will conclude by suggesting that institutionalisation of a certain view of IL has damaged the whole field by neglecting community-based IL and also by creating, and maintaining, a theory-practice gap (Carr and Kemmis 1986). The existence of this gap in IL (Pilerot and Lindberg 2011) is evidence of the reasons why a radical IL is required, and helps illustrate the form it needs to take. ***

How does one conceptualise a phenomenon through an analysis of the research that has been done into that phenomenon? If the search is for intellectual themes, found via an in-depth, qualitative analysis, then the literature review is appropriate, conducted of either a few papers (as with chapter 2 above) or a larger number (as with chapter 3). But literature reviews, like other qualitative analyses, have to be selective (see Lundh et al 2013, for example). At the other extreme one can conduct analyses on large datasets using automated techniques like data mining. An example is Weiner’s (2011) review of IL, encompassing around 16,000 papers. Other, systematic analyses of IL exist, using smaller but still comprehensive samples, e.g. Pinto et al (2010; 2013), Aharony (2010), Rader (2002); and see also Urquhart (2010), a meta-review, or ‘review of reviews’. Each of these, as well as Stevens (2007), support the observation that IL research is skewed towards particular views of the subject and particular locations for its practice. Rader estimates, for example, that about 60% of all published IL research up to 2002 focused on HE. Aharony (2010) and Pinto et al (2010) both note that LIS remains the most common disciplinary classification for IL literature, though noted reasonably high proportions also in the health sector and the academic discipline of Education. The review conducted here is not a systematic or a bibliometric review; that would add little to the work of these other authors. Nor is it a phenomenographic study, as no new outcome space is being sought, 74 The institutionalising of IL although it does pay homage to the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenography (Franz 1994), analysing texts that were created for other purposes and existed prior to the activity of the researcher. Hermeneutics, generally, is a research approach which seeks to understand a text and its interpretation as a single whole, building bridges between the intentions and perceptions of both author and reader, thus investigating variation in how texts are interpreted (Hasselgren and Beach 1997, 198).

In hermeneutics, knowledge is dependent upon context and perspective. Texts are shaped by external factors. That is, any variation in them is not entirely innate, but also a factor of the shape of the general field; the information landscape. A critical perspective can be added by noting, as at the end of chapter 3, that variation in a landscape is not uniform, but ‘lumpy’. Certain signs, definitions, and authorities will play more or less significant roles within it, directing practice, becoming embedded into technologies, and thus shaping meaning. The collective effect of such shaping could be considered hegemonic. Texts encode ideologies, and as revealing these is the aim of a critical study (Russell 2003), critical and hermeneutic approaches can complement one another. A hermeneutic study, of a wider sample of texts than could be incorporated within a literature review, can produce quantitative data that might support qualitative assessments already made of the landscape under investigation: here, the academic study of IL theory and practice. Such data was sought from the database, Web of Science (WoS)1, plus the contents of two other journals not listed there: the Journal of Information Literacy (JIL) and Communications in Information Literacy (CIL). By looking for the search term ‘information literacy’, and removing book reviews, editorial material and other sundries such as letters, meeting abstracts, and corrections, 1,377 papers were retrieved to serve as a representative sample of work in IL. The earliest papers date from 1990, and the latest from December 2012. Simple bibliometric analyses can be conducted on the dataset. The first, by disciplinary classification, follows Stevens (2007). She asked whether IL research was “preaching to the choir” or, conversely, being published outside the LIS presses, thereby disseminating terminology and concepts to a wider audience and helping integrate IL into other academic traditions, as demanded by its advocates (e.g.

Breivik and Gee 1989). The aim of the latter would be to introduce its assumptions, terminology, results, and conclusions to other disciplinary areas, permitting these to be criticised and analysed from the perspective of other disciplines. Stevens saw limited evidence of this up to 2007. 75 Radical Information Literacy The analysis here uses the disciplinary heading assigned to the paper in WoS2. Where more than one subject was recorded, the primary heading was used. In table 4.1, some related subjects have been combined for clarity, and papers published since 2010 have been counted separately from those published in 2009 and earlier, permitting judgements about more recent trends. Library and Information Science remains the most significant discipline, though it has recently declined proportionally. Links exist between LIS practitioners and researchers and computer scientists, with 48.3% of the papers classified primarily as Computer Science being classified secondarily as LIS (though these largely include papers with a relatively technical approach, redolent of Zurkowski’s 1974 vision). IL has a growing presence in the field of education and health care/medicine (with the proportionate decline in computer science IL papers partly the result of growth in these other areas). Other fields make little contribution. IL in the business, economics, and management field is largely discussed in conference proceedings, and in linguistics, social science, and communication, each of which could be relevant, very few papers specifically refer to IL. These general observations accord with the conclusions of systematic reviews such as Aharony (2010) and Pinto et al (2010). Table 4.1 IL literature by disciplinary classification (WoS only) 2009 and

Classification 2010–12 All previously Business, economics, management 3.1% 1.9% 2.3% Communication 2.4% 0.6% 1.2% Computer science 17.9% 23.8% 21.8% Education & educational research 12.7% 8.4% 9.9%

Engineering, physical sciences, 3.3% 1.3% 2.0% metallurgy, chemistry, biochemistry Social sciences (incl. human geography, government and law, public 2.1% 0.5% 1.1% administration) Health care sciences and services, nursing, pharmacy, other clinical & 7.2% 5.1% 5.8% para-clinical disciplines Information science & library science 50.0% 57.0%

54.6% Linguistics 1.2% 0.3% 0.6% Music 0.0% 1.1% 0.7% 76 The institutionalising of IL The texts were also analysed by sector, with each paper classified as either: HE: IL in higher education (universities, community colleges) K-12: primary through secondary education Community: IL in informal learning, community settings, sports clubs, etc. Workplace: IL amongst employees of an organisation (including teachers, where teachers’ own IL is the focus, as opposed to how they teach IL). Public health: treated separately rather than amalgamated with

‘community’. Note that papers dealing with the training of nurses, doctors, or other clinicians were classified as ‘HE’; papers in this category were concerned largely with ‘health literacy’, that is, the information-seeking behaviour of patients and the general public (Frisch et al 2012). Cross-sector: papers discussing IL in general terms, without a specific sector being identifiable. A small number of papers (45) can be assigned to more than one category, therefore percentages add up to slightly more than 100. Proportionally, there has been a recent rise in the number of papers written on IL in the community, and to a less significant extent, K-12 and public health. These sectors, however, remain small in comparison with the papers published on HE. Little has changed since 2002, when Rader reported a similar figure of 60%. These figures are skewed by the CIL and JIL journals, particularly the former. Every one of the 63 papers in the CIL archive was classified as HE, with only two requiring an Table 4.2 IL literature by sector Sector 2010–12 2009 and earlier Total HE 60.9% 67.0%

64.7% K-12 11.8% 9.2% 10.2% Community 7.2% 4.8% 5.7% Workplace 7.2% 7.2% 7.2% Public health 7.2% 6.2% 6.6% Cross-sector 9.1% 9.2%

9.1% 77 Radical Information Literacy additional sector, one being HE plus K12, and one HE plus community. JIL’s papers were not so singularly focused: nevertheless, 54 of its 75 papers were classified solely as HE, with two more classified as HE plus one other category, amounting to 75%. Even without these two journals, papers with an HE focus outnumbered those in every other category combined. The growing IL presence in the areas of public health and nursing education has been noted before (Aharony 2010; Wyer and Silva 2009). Growth in ‘Evidence Based Medicine’ (EBM) or ‘Evidence Based Practice’ (EBP) is driving this. Wyer and Silva (2009, 893) write that: (T)he impetus for something fitting the description of what in 1991 would be dubbed ‘evidence-based medicine’ was driven by these two related but distinct imperatives: the need to harness and codify the explosion of clinically relevant published research, and the need to develop rubrics for the evaluation of such research that would facilitate literacy and informed consumption on the part of clinicians, and even the lay public. Wyer and Silva argue, however, that the model of IL at the basis of EBM/ EBP is linear, based on instruction ( ibid). Thus, the relatively successful integration of IL into the clinical and medical professions is based largely on the competency frame. This may explain the antagonistic position that many clinicians continue to adopt towards EBM. As Wyer and Silva say ( ibid): “It limits the kinds of questions that can be asked and the ways that potential answers found in

research literature can be interpreted. It ultimately impedes the ability of EBM, as an instructional method, to fully empower clinicians to be ‘evidence literate’ within the richness of today’s clinical research environment.” This criticism anticipates the third analysis, which considers the view of IL in evidence in the dataset. This analysis adopts a pre-existing set of categories: the six frames of information literacy (Bruce et al 2006). Using the six frames in this way has been done before, for example by Andretta (2007a, 7–8). She asked her participants “to identify two of the six statements devised by Bruce et al (2006) to describe the approach to information literacy education adopted by their [HE] institutions”. She used the subsequent analysis to support her suggestion (2007, 1) that: “the Content and Competency frames seem to dominate the Higher Education scene at the expense of the remaining four.” She also suggested a reason for this ( ibid): “Such a preference is based on the fact that 78 The institutionalising of IL Content and Competency frames emphasise, and most importantly assess, types and levels of skills developed by the learners that suit the universities’ requirements for ‘objective’ testing of students’ academic performance.” Her conclusions were based on a survey of practitioners at a conference, and thus specifically tied to HE, but I suggest that the six frames can also form the basis of a broader hermeneutic analysis of the research field. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel, as long as the six frames are not reified: that is, seen as the only possibilities, into which every text must fit. They are used here more for convenience, as a way of organising data, as with Andretta’s survey. Additional categories of description may be present. Certainly this is true if the six frames are considered only to be

capturing (as they were originally intended to do) the educational variation in IL. Nevertheless, even if an educational mission is not explicit, it is still clear in, say, Zurkowski’s general attention to the use of particular information banks (which would fall under Bruce et al’s content frame) and the skills and competencies required to make best use of these (competency frame). It is also present in Hamelink’s Freirean view of literacy, as something which can change social relationships and power structures (thus, Bruce et al’s social impact frame). The individual and subjective relationships to information highlighted by Kuhlthau are addressed in the more subjective frames, learning to learn and personal relevance. Even with such extension, however, the six frames cannot wholly capture the variation in IL research. Limberg et al (2012) stated the importance of sociocultural practice theory to IL: as already noted in this book, the study of IL as practice and transformation may be combined with a study of IL as learning, but should also be considered a separate category of description not captured in Bruce et al’s six frames. There are also papers which investigate IL as a theory and/or philosophy in its own right, considering its methodological, epistemological and ontological assumptions, the meaning of terms (including ‘IL’ itself), and so on. As an example of such a text, the present book is offered. Thus, a total of 8 categories are used in this analysis. These are outlined in table 4.3, along with an indication of the kinds of keywords and concepts which were assigned to the categories (cf. Whitworth 2010). Around 15% of papers in the dataset were consulted in full in order to assign them to categories: the remainder were assigned through reading the abstract only, which may not be an accurate representation of the full text. In any case, even had I read every paper, my assignations to categories would be open to challenge. However, the intent is not to make declarations about individual papers, but to look for features and 79 Radical Information Literacy Table 4.3

Categories for analysis Category Keywords and concepts What sources users draw on, directing users to certain Content sources, copyright, anti-plagiarism, usage of library or other information services Skills, instruction, readiness, measuring competency Competency and the effectiveness of instruction, assessment rubrics Problembased learning, enquiry-based learning, Learning to learn metacognition, discipline-specific IL, learning styles, continuing professional development Reflection, affective dimensions, sense-making in Personal relevance personal contexts Social inclusion, digital divides, political impact of Social impact information or IL, social capital, empowerment Phenomenographic approaches, variation, informed Relational learning Information practice, organisational issues, decision Practice making, evidence-based practice Philosophy Theories of IL, metaliteracy, multimodality

trends in the dataset as a whole. That being the case, the results are presented with an acknowledgement of the inevitability of sampling error, and the percentages in table 4.4 below are advisory, not precise. Some papers (15 newer (2010–12) and 32 older papers) could not be allocated to a category because investigation revealed that they weren’t actually about IL. For example, several papers discussed elearning techniques with an IL module as a case study, but no contribution was Table 4.4 Views of IL present in the literature Category 2010–12 2009 and previously All Content 14.0% 17.7% 16.3% Competency 52.2% 62.6% 58.8% Learning to learn 18.9%

17.7% 18.1% Personal relevance 7.2% 5.3% 6.0% Social impact 8.6% 4.7% 6.1% Relational 3.1% 2.9% 3.0% Practice 15.1% 11.1% 12.6% Philosophy 5.0%

5.6% 5.4% 80 The institutionalising of IL intended to the IL literature. In a few cases, with older papers, no abstract was present in WoS and the full text could not be tracked down. As with the previous analysis, some papers – in this case a relatively large number (342) – could be assigned to more than one of the eight views of IL: that is, the six derived from Bruce et al’s frames of IL, plus IL-as-practice and IL-as-philosophy. For clarity all have been combined in table 4.4. Considering the dataset as a whole, the domination of competencybased approaches is obvious. However, this category, and the content category, both comprise a smaller proportion of papers published in 2010 and subsequently: significantly so, in the case of competency. Except for papers dealing with philosophical aspects of IL, which have shown a slight (but not statistically significant) proportional decline, all the other categories registered proportional increases – and, in the case of papers considering the social impact of IL, a significant one. *** Despite recent signs of change, these analyses support the informal assessment of the field made in chapter 3, and the critique of Tuominen et al (2005, 333), that most texts assume “an individualcentered generic skills definition of IL”. The dominance of LIS and the use of this kind of definition go hand in hand (Pawley 2003, 426): The language that the LIS community uses to develop the concept of information literacy is, of course, heavily dependent on the traditional style of argument and explanation in the field. Since the prevailing

style of LIS discourse uses techno-administrative language to address technical and managerial problems, most professional literature describes applied research into information literacy, provides economic and educational justifications for its existence, and passes on practical tips and recommends methods of evaluation. This “prevailing style” was present in Zurkowski and Burchinal’s views of IL, in Breivik’s, and, to a large extent, in Kuhlthau’s, though this latter author has a distinctive, subjectivist view of “evaluation”. More common is that the evaluation is conducted in accordance with one of two criteria: impact upon student grades (in part the result of so much work focused on HE), and/or rubrics or other measurements of IL that derive from a set of standards, often ACRL but sometimes SCONUL, Big-6 (Eisenberg and Berkowitz 1990), or local organisations (McFarlane 1997, 164). 81 Radical Information Literacy Standards are rarely presented as ends in themselves: as with any other informational resource, there remains scope for different interpretations to emerge. The ACRL standards are student-centred – even Marcum (2002, 11), a critic, says “emphatically” so. Purdue (2003, 654) claims that active citizenship is implied in the ACRL standards, via attention to the ethical use of information. He ( ibid, 654–5) self-reflects on his own research and information searching process with reference to the ACRL standards and finds himself coming up short on many of them, but notes that standards are “an abstraction... never meant to represent a lock-step process” or something that “one either has or hasn’t” ( ibid, 655–6). Instead, the assessment of IL should be constantly dynamic, evolving, unfinalised – one should learn from mistakes, or where one falls short, and reflect, review, retry, striving to improve but realising

there is never a final ideal or end point. The standards can help with this process if considered intellectual resources3. Standards also represent a particular form of thinking, however; they are cognitive authorities and ways of describing the world. Some, including the ACRL standards and also McFarlane’s (1997, 164: see Whitworth 2009, 97–8), strongly imply a linear model of informationseeking. Curl (2001) presents a model, based on one developed for science and engineering disciplines, which is highly linear. She says (2001, 460): “The processes of information production and consumption always begin with an information need”. This cannot be substantiated. Even with active information searches, “needs” are often vaguely stated (cf. Kuhlthau 1993), with searches involving backtracking, iterations, and serendipity (Hepworth and Walton 2009, 52). Moreover, a great deal of information consumption is either passive, with filtering taking place unconsciously or undertaken by third parties, or it takes place in contexts that are much less formalised than that of the ‘model’ information searcher, a model based mostly around research done into students conducting searches for essays they had to write (Saracevic 2007b; Kuhlthau’s work is an example). Standards also imply assessment against the standards; otherwise the standard has no meaning (Inhaber 1976). Thus, these are cognitive authorities which encourage the development of instruments of measurement, rubrics, and examinations of some kind (Wilson 1983, 128). These fit well into existing university systems, which are designed to process grades and progression, but that also means other assumptions come into play. For example, Harris claims this is a key reason why the standards describe information literate individuals rather than groups or collectives (2008; see also below). 82

The institutionalising of IL When information behaviour outside the academy or school, and the formalised discourses of assessment, is researched, what is revealed is not linear, individual processes amenable to encapsulation as standards, but messy, iterative, and collective ones. These take place not in the organised space of the library or even the search engine, but in multifaceted landscapes where one cannot assume that all relevant information is, or ever could be, stored in a library or a Zurkowskian ‘information bank’. IL must therefore also work on tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1962), orally transmitted, or embodied: e.g. the way to handle a patient, make pizza dough, fight a fire, or handle oneself when faced by a potentially violent situation. Criteria for assessment in these contexts are more informal, based on experience and reflection (Lloyd 2012, 778). Information like this is less likely to be encoded in a written, or at least published4, text, and more likely to be embedded in communities, in the minds and bodies of other people. Thus, an information literate person must also, at least potentially, recognise other people and their own experience as valid information sources. These are the kinds of collective investigations from which practices form. Thus, Tuominen et al (2005, 336) point out that: (T)he most important aspects of IL may be those that cannot be measured at the level of the individual alone... researchers and practitioners have imposed ‘invisible constraints’ on IL by seeing it as comprised solely of individual cognitive skills. Such constraints have a long history in LIS research. Saracevic (2007b, 2134–6) notes that studies of information retrieval rarely if ever use more than a single judge per query. Consequently, for systems design, collectives are hard to handle. They are more dialogic, and systems tend towards monologism. Typically, there is inconsistency in how relevance is judged within groups, even where there are procedures designed to secure this agreement. Yet it is

also an empirical fact that within collectives, these kinds of judgements are made all the time, and it is in their imperfections that the potential for further learning lies. At the very least, some kind of amalgamation of individual preferences takes place, via a constant dialogue that collectively negotiates differences in interpretation. We share insights, and IL must allow for this. The term ‘communication’ shows this directly; its etymological link with community is no coincidence. Both derive from the Latin communis, meaning to share, to hold in common. 83 Radical Information Literacy Yet Harris shows how IL standards pay little attention to the collective (2008, 249): The discussion of community is almost completely removed from the IL standards. The only direct mention of community as an influence in information literacy development appears in Standard Four: ‘The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.’ The conscious inclusion of ‘as a member of a group’ in the standard (it is not included in the competency standards or performance indicators to follow) does little to suggest that the group vs. individual situation does not completely change the information literacy event in and of itself. It turns the collaborative and social character of the event into an option instead of a requirement of any situation involving communication. Furthermore, placement suggests that it is only in the process of using information that groups of individuals, communities, are involved in the information literacy event. *** This argument leads to the conclusion that standards are monologic, and this is a form of thinking that characterises a majority of the published IL literature. IL remains largely driven by categories of

description that have been derived from the systems and landscapes of LIS and HE. These have, within IL writ large, created a gap between the idealised, theoretical information user – an individual aware of their information needs and free to make judgements from the full range of information sources – and real information practices, undertaken by individuals (subject to anxiety, pressures of time, cognitive authorities, and other psychological effects), within communities and information landscapes that may help or hinder their experience of variation in different ways. In essence, this is the same gap as Carr and Kemmis (1986) observed between the idealised educational environment, created by technical means and generic research, and the real-world practices of teachers and students in which these idealisations are applied on the ground, and where they may or may not be validated and found relevant. It is a theory-practice gap ( ibid; also Julien and Williamson 2011). The gap can be bridged, and Carr and Kemmis (1986) investigate action research and reflective practice as means by which this can be done, but there exists little empirical work in this area in IL (Lloyd and Williamson 2008; Julien and Williamson 2011; Whitworth 2012). Exhortations that the theory-practice gap be closed will not alone 84 The institutionalising of IL make it happen. If the information landscapes of LIS and HE were conducive to the practices Carr and Kemmis describe, these practices would already be widespread. Why is the gap so persistent? Why have standards, and the competency frame, achieved such a hold over IL despite the richness of variation and collective information behaviour that they neglect to address? Standards are products that, to survive and be accepted as cognitive authorities, must demonstrate they are – or at least, can be perceived as – an improvement over what was there before (older standards, or no standards). Andersen (2006, 215) says that for IL standards to be accepted their proponents must: “make it look as if it is the first time in the history of mankind that a need for a person to

be information literate appears.” As a result of this perception, standards work to attract resources to those who adhere to the standards. This contributes to the institutionalisation of a particular form of IL. Institutionalisation was Douglas’s response (1986) to the question of how “thought styles” reign over “thought worlds”: or, in the terminology used here, how cognitive authority is asserted within information landscapes. She shows that institutionalisation is a cognitive act, based around how information is validated and knowledge is formed. Chapter 1 already demonstrated that social institutions and individual thinking are dependent upon one another (Douglas 1986, 45). But whereas some communities are transient, even momentary (a ‘community’ of pedestrians can gather and be of sufficient shared purpose to create a collective practice – make the cars stop so all community members can cross a road – but then disappear again seconds later), institutions have a stability about them that ( ibid, 46) “needs a parallel cognitive convention to sustain...” These cognitive conventions become embedded into the organisations, systems, technologies, routines, and habits that sustain the institution, shaping what is considered valid in that institution and what is not, and thus controlling and deflecting uncertainty ( ibid, 48): Past experience is encapsulated in an institution’s rules so that it acts as a guide to what to expect from the future. The more fully the institutions encode expectations, the more they put uncertainty under control, with the further effect that behaviour tends to conform to the institutional matrix: if this degree of coordination is achieved, disorder and confusion disappear. Schotter presents institutions as entropy-minimizing devices. They start with rules of thumb and norms; eventually they can end by storing all the useful information. When everything is institutionalized, no history or other storage devices are necessary: “The institution tells all” (Schotter 1981, 139).

85 Radical Information Literacy Douglas acknowledges that what is missing from this analysis is the question of how institutions get started, how they “get enough stability to do all of that” ( ibid). She seeks an explanation in how institutions provide ways for individuals to establish sameness and difference. Thus, institutions allow individuals to save cognitive work, something that cognitive science has shown we are innately inclined to do (see Blaug 2007, 28 ff). Institutions provide classificatory schemes, patterns, and acts of remembering, rooted in habits and routines but also validated by interactions with other members of the institutionalised community, who are constantly confirming them by their own adherence to these habits and routines. Thus, cognitive authority becomes invested in the institution as a whole. Challenges to these institutionalised values will be looked upon as eccentric at best, at worst subversive, possibly illegal (consider how challenges to the institution of heterosexuality are treated around the world). Institutions can facilitate the formation of knowledge, as well as constrain it. The “labels” they provide “stabilise the flux of social life” ( ibid, 100). We need to draw on such pre-existing ways of thinking to do anything at all. If we could not we would need to start each day from first principles; there would be no continuity to our existence5. Yet institutions become institutions by also, to some extent, creating “the realities to which they apply” ( ibid). Institutions routinise practice, keeping it within an established structure, a standard operating procedure (March, Olsen and Christensen 1979, 140–1); Bourdieu (1977) has called this routinisation habitus. Stakeholders within any institution that conform to the habitus develop capital therein: this allows them to attract resources from the institution, reinforcing their position (and the institution’s), through the “Matthew effect”; “to those that hath shall be given” (March et al 1979, 152). Institutions (Douglas 1986, 92): (S)ystematically direct individual memory and channel our perceptions into forms compatible with the relations they authorise. They fix processes that are essentially

dynamic, they hide their influence, and they rouse our emotions to a standardised pitch on standardised issues. Add to all this that they endow themselves with rightness and send their mutual corroboration cascading through all the levels of our information system... the hope of intellectual independence is to resist, and the necessary first step in resistance is to discover how the intellectual grip is laid upon our mind. This is not easy, for what Douglas is describing are procedures that are akin to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony ( ibid, 99): 86 The institutionalising of IL To analyse our own collective representations, we should relate what is shared in our mental furnishing to our common experience of authority and work. To know how to resist the classifying pressures of our institutions, we would like to start an independent classificatory exercise. Unfortunately, all the classifications that we have for thinking with are provided ready-made, along with our social life. For thinking about society we have at hand the categories we use as members of society speaking to each other about ourselves. Yet counterhegemonic activity is possible. Critiques of an institution that are based on the validity claims of that institution are valid critiques by definition. If new classifications are produced – new experiences of variation, ways of thinking and learning that challenge institutionalised ones – then an institution can change, even fall. Institutions, at least in the persistent sense that Douglas means, do not constitute the entirety of our information-processing infrastructure, and many institutions are in tension and contradict with each other. Thus, conditions can be consciously created in which the institution is scrutinised. Institutions govern our thinking, yes, but not deterministically – that is, shaping all possibilities, forever. If such a realm existed then

‘freedom’ would merely mean a choice between pre-filtered alternatives. But institutions are part of the landscapes within which we can develop our own interpretations of the world and, as a result of this learning, transform it. ‘Learning’ is not about selecting something from a limited range of options, but is a process of self-discovery; not being told something is important, but coming for oneself to conceive its importance, its relevance, to one’s own life. This can only be done through practice that is in turn based on learning, and a type of learning that goes beneath the surface content of a discipline and embraces deeper methods such as self-reflection, action research, and critical thinking. There is a need, in short, to bridge the theory-practice gap, and these are methods that have already been shown to do just that. The question is not what the methods are, nor whether the gap needs in fact to be closed, but whether the institutionalisation of IL in the LIS and HE sectors will permit these matters to be addressed. *** A critical study of the IL literature must now draw attention to the inequalities that exist: that is, the field’s ‘lumpiness’. The shape of the 87 Radical Information Literacy field is the result not of random fluctuations, but evidence of structures in the landscape which shape the experience of variation therein. Particular IL discourses have become institutionalised. Although there have been contributions from studies of, say, the social impact of information, constructivist workplace IL pedagogies, and so on, it remains the professional contexts of librarians and other LIS practitioners, higher education, and standards and competencies

that are driving, not so much definitions of the IL field, but its perception. These are what IL has institutionalised itself around. Weiner (2012) discusses the institutionalising of IL as a positive thing, using the term as a way to describe IL’s integration across HE curricula. But Weiner’s paper is clearly focused on HE: it defines IL in the first paragraph ( ibid, 287) as the ACRL standards, it says on the next page ( ibid, 288) that “[f]rom the time that Zurkowski named the concept of information literacy... librarians have sought ways to integrate it into learning in institutions of higher education”, and implicitly – via the first line of the section “Differences in Institutions in Higher Education” which invokes only the US – it is country-specific. Therefore, for all that her insights have value when seeking an understanding of how the organisational structure in HE blocks the integration of IL, it seems fair to claim that this paper is an example of institutionalisation in the more negative sense as well. It draws on context-specific ways of thinking, and generalises them to the whole field. The “Matthew effect” of institutionalisation is the significant driver: the perceived need to attract attention, and thus resources, to support the library’s role in addressing issues raised by A Nation at Risk. McCrank (1991, 42) stated that the ALA/Breivik agenda was “part of librarianship’s angry reaction” to their omission from that report. As noted, IL was defined as the added value the library could offer higher education institutions, and once the standards were formulated in order to express this outcome in terms which meshed with accreditation regimes, IL’s institutionalisation became tangible. As Pawley (2003, 424) notes: “Ownership of so politically charged a term assigns rights and privileges.

It provides justification for resources, including staff, equipment, and research grants and funds for program development.” A contradiction, however, is that while an institution can work well to attract resources from certain sources, it may simultaneously be less effective at attracting resources (capital) from other pools, even when the institution may be based partly around the belief that these other pools help support it. This is certainly true of IL, which regularly reiterates the 88 The institutionalising of IL importance of alliances between library educators, academics, and managers when seeking to integrate IL into curricula and campuswide policy. The lack of such integration is a long standing complaint. Breivik was clear (1986, 47) that “information gathering and evaluation skills must be... learned within existing departments... rather than in stand-alone bibliographic instruction programs”, and (1991, 256) that the Final Report “was not written for librarians or to justify library use” . Yet, justified though the criticism is, to be still hearing it from, e.g., Badke (2012) means that explanations need to be sought elsewhere than the fact that the complaint has simply not been heard. From a library perspective it makes professional sense to promote IL and try to integrate it throughout its local context (the HE institution). Librarianship as a discipline is based around the tenets of LIS, so spreading IL through a local context aims at further optimising the performance of the university’s information system. Spreading IL through a network of alliances, based around this institutionalised value, also makes organisational sense, as success at this task would raise the capital of the library. Nevertheless, if IL can be perceived , even by its sympathisers, as “an effort to deny the ancillary status of librarianship by inventing a social malady with which librarians as ‘information professionals’ are uniquely qualified to deal” (Foster 1993, 344), one needs to look

more deeply at reasons why the hoped-for integration has not taken place. There are two ways of reshaping the query. First, one could ask: is it that IL is not being taught outside the library/HE; or, rather, are librarians and those who write about IL from within this landscape unable to perceive the work that is going on outside their purview, even if those undertaking it are not calling it ‘IL’? Second, what is it about the way the library generates and validates knowledge that is holding open the gap between IL theory – which, more and more, is based on the notion that IL permeates all communicative exchanges, is dialogic, multifaceted, and rooted both in personal psychology and collective decision-making processes – and IL practice, which, at best, struggles to accommodate this view, and at worst, actively represses it in favour of a monologic, technical, standards-based approach? Can libraries/LIS give up information literacy, or at least, recognise that it is a notion that spreads well beyond their own landscape – even if this would strengthen, not weaken their position? Institutionalisation makes this difficult, and it is more insidious for often going unnoticed. A typically frustrated article here came from Kempcke (2002). It serves as an example of how institutionalisation can seep into discourse, manifested as an 89 Radical Information Literacy unscrutinised belief that the library is innately the best place for IL education. Kempcke starts by saying that for librarians to be effective in initating information literacy or other educational reforms on campus, “they must be seen not only as equals [by faculty], but leaders in higher education, as scholars skilled in teaching, and as vital participants in the governance of their institutions” ( ibid, 531). He aggressively bemoans the condescension manifested towards librarians’ teaching credentials, librarians’ limited view of their own

professionalism, and the consequent ghettoisation of IL. Militaristic metaphors abound, from the title of the piece (which invokes Sun Tzu’s Art of War) to his talk of “battles” and suggestion that “war may be inevitable if we are not being granted the position in the organizational culture we deserve” ( ibid, 538). Librarians are described as a “higher stratum [than faculty}, ready and willing to sweep down with comprehensive and awe-inspiring assistance. We are formidable and skilled warriors against the forces of ignorance” ( ibid, 541). Yet what does Kempcke seek? The development of IL in students, or the boosting of librarians’ capital within the university? This passage suggests the latter – or at least, that the former is the route through which the latter will be achieved: “[a]s our influence increases, the direct and indirect benefits to the academic library also increase. The more we skillfully and successfully address the critical problems (such as information illiteracy) facing our campuses, the more likely we are to gain prestige and attract an appropriate distribution of resources” ( ibid, 544). Nevertheless, he is right to recognise that “[t]he ACRL Standards are only a weapon that we can use to win the larger IL war. They are not a victory in and of themselves” ( ibid, 532). Thus, his claim that integration will benefit all is not based on a belief that the standards per se should come to govern any working (or learning) practices outside their original context, the library. He appreciates that librarians need to better “comprehend the organizational culture in which we work”, and focus continuing professional development (CPD) efforts on developing this understanding, for: “[t]here is no article that can tell you how to do it because no author can understand the political climate at every campus. Though there may be similarities, each program needs to be customized to the existing institutional culture” ( ibid, 545). Thus, despite his warlike metaphors, Kempcke is right to recognise that work to integrate IL onto any particular campus – a specific context –

requires an understanding of that context, and not merely generic claims about what IL ‘should be’. Yet the way he presents his case simultaneously depends on an institutionalised, and unscrutinised, belief 90 The institutionalising of IL that only in the library can there be ‘real’ IL; IL that meets certain criteria or standards. But as already asked – what if there already is IL going on, quite healthily, outside this context? What if the reasons why there is no integration come about because the two ‘sides’, facing each other across the gap, have not learned to see the practices of the other – thus, are not experiencing the full variation of the phenomenon? Leckie and Fullerton (1999) analyse the different “pedagogical discourses” of librarians and faculty. They, like many others, call for greater integration of IL but recognise that ( ibid, 1): “numerous studies have shown that academic librarians and faculty do not understand each other’s roles or expectations very well”. Julien and Pecoskie (2009) also describe differing perceptions of role. Their librarian research subjects did not view teaching faculty as their clientele, focusing instead on students. Librarians had a sense of deference towards faculty, seeing faculty giving time as a “gift”, with no reciprocity expected, as revealed by phrases such as faculty “allowing” librarians time to come into their courses, for example. Yet they remain unable to suggest ways out of this unequal relationship beyond just asserting that the relationship needs to equalise. In the conclusion (Julien and Pecoskie 2009, 153) they say: “As in all power relationships, it undoubtedly falls to the lower-status members in those relationships (i.e., librarians) to seek redress. Since teaching faculty value subject expertise primarily, it is proposed that redress be grounded in librarians’ demonstrations of their expertise.” But this will offer no challenge to existing institutionalised perceptions of role and context, despite the fact that, as McCrank noted more than twenty years ago now (1991, 423): “The paradox of information literacy is that it calls upon librarians to change more than users”, yet

(Elmborg 2006, 193), these issues raise “important fundamental questions about libraries and their inability to challenge their own historical definitions of who they are and why they define their work as they do.” *** The lack of integration and the consequent isolation of IL in the academic library are based, ultimately, on a fundamental misunderstanding, but believing that this misunderstanding concerns the question of where IL should be located and who should teach it, is itself a misunderstanding. In fact, the question that has not been properly answered is what information literacy is, and what its underlying theories should be. The library-, HE-, and competencybased paradigm of IL accords very well with the technical, LIS-basis of IL, as developed 91 Radical Information Literacy so influentially by Zurkowski, Burchinal, Demo, and Breivik. But as Kuhlthau, Bruce, and others have shown, even within this broader educational paradigm of IL – seeing the information literate individual or community as something which can be nurtured through developing a broad understanding of learning processes – LIS can only take us so far. Additional theoretical contributions are required from, at least, PCP and phenomenography: these realms help us understand the dialogic interplay between the subjective and intersubjective realms when it comes to making judgements about information, the role of uncertainty and emotion, and how to make the sort of collective judgements that are very difficult, if not impossible, to capture in an information system (Saracevic 2007b). But even this expanded theoretical base, as part 1 has shown, cannot successfully handle issues of authority: how the experience of variation, itself a process of selecting between an essentially infinite number of possibilities, can be governed in various ways. This was the insight that Hamelink brought to IL, which the other authors mentioned so far have, on the whole, left largely implicit: it

comes out most strongly in certain chapters of Informed Learning (Bruce 2008, particularly 107–132), and even in that work there is no explicit discussion of the role of power and hegemony. To fulfil the vision of Hamelink, and reclaim the political heart of IL, one must do more than simply learn about an information landscape: one must transform it, build one’s own, and this will require practices that cannot be captured by a strictly educational approach. This is – emphatically – not arguing that libraries should cease to play a role in the teaching, development, and definition of IL. On the contrary, there is far too much necessary expertise in the sector to dismiss its contributions, whether now or previously. However (Elmborg 2002): In order to provide a working definition of information literacy, we must navigate two competing visions of the library. In one vision, the library retains its status as neutral purveyor of information, and information literacy is based on students mastering the libraries’ tools and systems. In this vision, information literacy is reduced to mastering a set of library skills with traditional tools. In the other more ambitious vision, the library becomes a site for student empowerment, a place where students create genuine questions and construct their own answers. In this vision, the library’s role in perpetuating disciplinary classifications and organizing and disseminating authoritative knowledge becomes part of what students must understand to be information literate, but only part. 92 The institutionalising of IL In a different paper, Elmborg, like Hamelink, invokes Freirean notions of education and literacy (2006, 193), asking: What is the role of the library in the Freirean vision of critical literacy? Is the library a passive information bank where students and faculty make knowledge deposits and withdrawals, or is it a place where students actively engage existing knowledge and shape it to their

own current and future uses? And what is the librarian’s role as an educator in this process? Elmborg claims ( ibid, 193–4) that the lack of attention to schools’ role as “shapers of student consciousness” is a consequence of the LIS research paradigm, which like other essentially technical subjects, decontextualises phenomena and thus separates students “from social and economic contexts”. This is firmly linked to the positivistic approach to science, oriented to prediction and generalised ‘best practice’ (cf. Carr and Kemmis 1986, particularly 51–81). Positivism is a way of thinking – an epistemology – that seeks explanations of events in order that their underlying laws can be discovered, so future events of that type can be predicted and, the implication goes, controlled: “On the basis of these predictions it becomes possible, by manipulating a particular set of variables, to control events so that desirable goals are acheived and undesirable consequences eliminated” (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 67). But once all human activity is seen as essentially context-dependent, that latter phrase prompts the question: desirable to whom? Whose goals are driving the positivistic enquiry? Such questions are seen as irrelevant in positivism, but they are essential to information literacy. Hence, the insufficiency of the LIS paradigm when it comes to understanding real information landscapes. The politics at the heart of Hamelink’s vision of IL was not based around the notion that the information literate person has learned to fit themselves and their enquiries into an existing information system. Rather, it is based on self-development: raising awareness of the value of one’s own culture, history, and associated stock of information, and developing one’s own ways of processing them. It is about increasing “communicative competence in the information age” (Whitworth 2007), enabling students to become more informed and breaking away from the instrumental “template” of IS- and standards-based

approaches (Thornton 2010), and similar work called for by Kapitzke (2003). It attends to all forms of information and the relevant skills and awareness 93 Radical Information Literacy needed to process these forms. Often, this information not only is not accessible through a library or search engine, but never will be, being embodied in the practices, values, and even movements of colleagues or companions. This sort of knowledge – orally transmitted, practical, encoded in a minority language or slang, in the form of imagery, etc. – may often be more relevant to disempowered populations, whether in the developing (Dorner and Gorman 2011) or developed world (Bruce and Bishop 2008). In fact, precisely because it cannot be digitised, this is why the “digital divide” opens up along this fault line. In the end, the problem may not be just IL’s institutionalisation in the academic library, but in academic culture itself. Lamenting the lack of collaboration between librarians and academics therefore misses the point: this is why the continued concentration on HE, little changed since Rader’s 2002 assessment, is so damaging. Elmborg (2006, 197) says that: While all communities rank literacy performance to some extent, academia is relatively unique in its formal and ritualized assessments, with the result that in academia ‘nearly everything is graded in more or less subtle ways’ [Becher and Trowler 1989, 81]. Through institutionalized processes [emphasis added] – such as assigning grades to students, granting tenure and promotion, conducting peer review of books and articles, establishing institutional rankings, and the ranking of publications for prestige – judgments about quality permeate higher education.

But a university education is very far from being the only learning experience that a normal human being will have in their lives. If IL is to be understood dialogically, the consequences of this simple and obvious fact must be understood. And as noted, instead of just continuing to assert the need for change, IL as an academic field of study needs itself to fundamentally change. If a theory-practice gap exists – and in IL, it clearly does – then one way to close it is to retheorise the field around the need to close it, directly addressing the links between the formation of knowledge, learning, practice, transformation, and authority. That is the task of part 2 of this book. 94 The institutionalising of IL Notes 1. The WoS search was undertaken, and the results tabulated, by Stephen Pearson of the University of Manchester library, to whom thanks are again due. 2. The JIL and CIL papers are therefore not included in this analysis. Bearing in mind these are LIS journals, their inclusion would in fact reinforce the bias seen here. 3. Media literacy educators in the US have also promoted a set of core principles for their discipline (Domine 2011, 447–8). See also http://crln.acrl.org/ content/72/7/420.full – standards for IL specifically directed at teacher education in the US. 4. It could potentially be found in a personal diary, an email, a notebook, etc, but though these are written texts, one would be unlikely to find them in a library unless they were archive material. 5. As, for instance, experienced by Guy Pearce’s character in the movie Memento.

95 This page intentionally left blank Part 2: Reconstructing IL “Anyone can cook.” Chef Gusteau, Ratatouille [dir: Brad Bird] This page intentionally left blank 5 Colonising IL Abstract: This chapter begins the process of enquiring more deeply into the nature of cognitive authority, and its influence on IL.. Learning about authority, and understanding the ways in which it can be wielded both to make change, and retard it, is key to transforming practice in any social context. First, the theories of Jürgen Habermas are outlined, as his work offers a very useful framework for distinguishing between forms of rationality and, thus, how both dialogic and monologic approaches, ideally, should combine in a broad view of authority, but in practice are out of balance in the institutions of modernity. However, Habermas’s theories cannot form the only pillar of a radical IL, because he is guilty of over-abstraction, and insufficiently attentive to the nature of democracy as a real, lived experience. Key Words: Critical theory, Habermas, colonisation, organisations, counterpublics, hierarchism, vigilance Part 1 critiqued IL from the perspective of dialogism, concluding that it has become institutionalised around a limited, monologic view of the broad range of interactions and practices which constitute work with information. Part 2 will respond to this critique, but must avoid

falling into the trap of asserting that the closing of IL’s theory-practice gap will come about simply by calling for its closure. Where resistance to change is pervasive, repeating calls for change is counter-productive unless one investigates the nature and source of the resistance. Part 2 will undertake this investigation, enquiring into the role of authority in information exchange, and through doing so, synthesising IL’s educational, learning-based aspects with its practical, transformational ones. Understanding why the theorypractice gap remains open requires an understanding of power and politics, and how these both facilitate and retard change in particular contexts. As Easterby-Smith et al 99 Radical Information Literacy lamented (1998, 262), work on organisational learning and transformation tends to consider power as a limiting factor, something that blocks the creation of a learning organisation. Instead, political factors need to be integrated into theories of learning, including IL. And because political questions – whose goals, whose definitions, which cognitive authorities are shaping the information landscape – are context-specific, and must be investigated and interpreted anew in each landscape, any theoretical investigation of power must also contribute to an innately practical understanding of how information landscapes are shaped by authorities within each setting. Learning about authority, and understanding the ways in which it can be wielded, both to make change and retard it, is key to transforming practice in any social context. Therefore, this learning about authority, about how it is assigned and distributed within information landscapes, and if necessary transformed, is the central pillar of radical IL. I suggest that the lack of such a theory is the reason Hamelink’s Freirean notion of IL has been mostly neglected. This theory of IL has three main elements, explored in chapters 5, 6, and 7. First, the critical theories of Jürgen Habermas will be outlined. These provide a strong foundation for studies of social change, and are particularly attuned to the role of communication therein.

However, over-abstraction prevents Habermas’s theories from fully constituting a radical IL due to their lacking practical and contextualisable elements. IL can be more fully explored using the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, which are firmly rooted in everyday, prosaic communication (Morson and Emerson 1990) and directly consider the nature of cognitive authority. Bakhtin’s ideas, which have not previously been applied to IL in any detailed way, are investigated in chapter 6. Chapter 7 then returns to the field of IL-aspractice and synthesises it with learning-based approaches by developing the methodological link between practice and phenomenography. *** The study of power requires the selection of a path between contrasting tendencies: the problem of “how to make holistic structures or systems weak enough to permit agency and reflection, and yet also strong enough to avoid an idealistic underestimation of their constitutive efficacy and resistance to efforts to change them” (Bohman 1989, 385). Work in IL has tended to underestimate the strength of existing structures in this way, leading to frustration manifested in repeated exhortations for change. On the other hand, critical theories, which previously investigated power and its role in limiting access to information and meaning, have sometimes 100 Colonising IL gone to the other extreme, and found no way through the barriers which emerge. Marcuse (1964), for example, described the deadening effect of the mass media on popular culture and anticipated some of Hamelink’s criticisms of the use of these media to control thought and desire. But neither he, nor fellow Frankfurt School theorists Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), found ways to address these pathologies without collapsing into irrational forms of self-expression such as love or anger (Habermas 1984, 382). What they lacked was an effective agency of change.

One cannot just declare that existing ways of teaching and practicing IL are inadequate. One must also accept that they structure activity regardless and thus, like any institutionalised practice, form an environment that will, at best, be unsupportive of efforts to change it, and may well actively block them. Any attempt to transform practice must therefore understand why and how that practice has become structured in these ways. Nevertheless, through processes of learning and transformation, change in these practices i s possible despite structural biases lined up against it. The theories of Habermas, though inspired by the work of the Frankfurt School, offer greater potential here than his antecedents (see also Whitworth 2007; 2009). However, one must also attend to their limits. A well-developed criticism is that of Blaug (1999a), who suggests that Habermas is too abstract and generic to assist with the design of actual, democratic social structures. Habermas’s theories allow a distinction to be made between an institutionalised IL and more radical forms, as his work can show how systems of information exchange, including educational practices, can be constructed in ways that retard learning, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary. But he is insufficiently aware of democracy as rooted in real, everyday practices and lived experiences. Consequently, his work can constitute one pillar of radical IL, but cannot fully elucidate it. The most fundamentally relevant aspect of Habermas’s work to IL comes with his exploration of alternate forms of rationality, and how these form valid bases for decisions and the communicative acts, the sharing and exchange of information, on which such decisions are based. In this exploration, Habermas sought a way out of the blockages reached by the Frankfurt School. Those critical theorists saw no agent of change as, for them, only one type of rationality was empirically significant: instrumentality, the fulfilling of goals. An instrumentally-rational decision is one that helps move an individual,

group, or organisation towards the successful fulfilment of a predetermined goal. Such decisions tend to be 101 Radical Information Literacy based on information processing that gathers the necessary information, filters it for relevance and credibility, analyses it to assess costs and benefits, and is procedurally firm (Morgan 1999, 11 ff). But instrumental rationality is also convergent, usually seeking the “one best” way to proceed. In its ‘pure’ form it is inflexible, because “when new problems arise they are often ignored because there are no ready made responses... standardised procedures and channels of communication” ( ibid, 29). Instrumental rationality, in short, tends toward monologism, and is based on considerations to which competency-based approaches to IL are well suited. This is not meant to dismiss the value of such cognitive work. Instrumental considerations like these are clearly important in decision-making and, without such work, decisions would risk being based on counterknowledge (Thompson 2008). However, Habermas also defined rationality as “an emergent property of forms of human life and communication” (Outhwaite 1996, 116). He sought to explore intersubjective forms of rationality, where the claim that something is ‘rational’, and thus justifiable, cannot be made by any one subject acting alone, even with reference to objective considerations such as scientific insights. Habermas terms this communicative rationality. Rationality inheres in communication because any speech act raises validity claims that can be criticised and defended (Habermas 1984, 8–10). Habermas believes that, through a process of freely raising, criticizing, and defending claims, actors in any communicative space

can approach the ideal end-point of rational communication: that is, the reaching of a consensus ( ibid, 11). Rationality is manifested in the conscious agreement of multiple subjects acting autonomously but interdependently, drawing on the information available to them and coming together in discussion to jointly establish ways forward. To be communicatively rational, these situations must conform to certain ideals (McCarthy 1984, 306–7): the supposition that consensus is possible and can be distinguished from false consensus; decisions have been taken with reference to the force of the better argument rather than accidental or systematic constraints on communication; all participants have an equal chance to put forward, question, ground or refute any statement. 102 Colonising IL These conditions are met in what Habermas calls the ideal speech situation (ISS). Thus, “rationality can be measured by the degree of openness or closure in communication... [and] the goals of truth, freedom and justice are not mere utopian dreams, but are anticipated in ordinary communication...” (Ray 1993, 26–7). Habermas has here been criticised (e.g. Lyotard 1984) for imposing normative standards on democratic debate in a contradictory way, but as its name indicates, the ISS must be seen as an ideal. Ideals are philosophical constructs against which real situations can be judged, “centres of gravitation” (Wellmer 1985, 61) to which actors can aspire. Communicatively rational decision-making is not a fixed set of practices that can be imposed upon the messiness of real interactions, by external interests. Instead, it is a process of continual checking and adjustment of practice against the ideal, by members of the forum.

Habermas does not discount the value of instrumental rationality, and the forms of knowledge it produces. Both rationalities potentially contribute to learning and transformation in ways that are, ideally, complementary and in balance in any given social space. Without action oriented towards reaching a goal rather than reaching an understanding, decision-making, or indeed any organisational activity, would become mired in endless discussion. However, Habermas analyses how modern society has inexorably valorised instrumental rationality over communicative. Those aspects of the social structure designed to promote communicative rationality – that is, autonomous, context-specific learning, and subsequent transformation – are becoming subservient to technical forms of control over practice. Modern societies therefore have a “distorted understanding of rationality” (Habermas 1984, 66), which promotes certain forms of thinking over others. The de-skilling of the mass of professional workers, and the spread of installations for the monitoring of human behaviour (up to and including mass surveillance), are part of this general tendency. The generation and analysis of data is important for making rational, instrumental decisions, but the modern scale of it has resulted in the creation of information banks that surpass any human scale of understanding. Instrumental rationality works also on the structures of language itself, restricting the meanings of words and other packets of information in monologic ways. Language, information systems, and anything else with informative potential, become, at least potentially, instruments through which dominant interests can fulfil goals regardless of any communicative processes which scrutinise and thus validate these ends or means. 103 Radical Information Literacy Habermas’s early term for these processes appeared in the title of his first major work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989, but first published in German in 1962). Later (1984; 1987), he talked about the “colonisation of the lifeworld”. While the latter is a much more theoretically sophisticated notion, their essential core is shared: the

transformation of communicative spaces from egalitarian fora, in which new ideas could be freely explored, into media that are harder to access, controlled, and largely wielded by dominant interests in society. As Outhwaite writes, “critical assessment of public policy in rational discussion, oriented to a concept of the public interest” – in other words, public scrutiny of decisions and validity claims – is transformed into “a manipulated public sphere in which states and corporations use ‘publicity’ in the modern sense of the word to secure for themselves a kind of plebiscitary acclamation” (Outhwaite 1996, 7). Under conditions of colonisation, information is less likely to be intersubjectively validated by those affected by it (Habermas 1984, 358). Society becomes steered, not by public debate, but by money and power, which come to substitute for these (Habermas 1984, 342; 1987, 180–5). As Hamelink recognised, the broadcast media play a significant role here, as do the legal profession, public relations firms, political consultants, and so on. Within organisations, operations and sanctions such as the withdrawal of resources, or encouragement in the form of reward and promotion structures, seek instrumentally to ensure that the goals of dominant (capital-holding) stakeholders within the organisation are met, regardless of the impact on subordinates, and regardless of their ways of learning and thinking about practice and the environment they inhabit. Habermas’s theories therefore demonstrate a specific concern with how intersubjective dialogue is devalued in organisational decisionmaking and, in a preliminary way, help us perceive structural biases in our knowledge-forming systems. His theories hold relevance for IL because they attend to “the social organization of documents and knowledge in society” (Andersen 2006, 219), and how this is transformed from a more communicative, distributed authority to a more instrumental, centralised authority1. The lifeworld is not a

neutral medium through which communication is transmitted. Instead, the lifeworld, and all its component information landscapes, are structures that have been built over time, significantly shaped by dominant interests (whether in society or in particular local contexts). These structures determine what can be communicated, to whom, and how (Andersen 2006, 220). When we 104 Colonising IL study information exchange through such a lens, we are therefore obliged to notice that communication and information production (Andersen 2008, 359): (A)re carried out for a reason. They accomplish a human communicative purpose that is a part of the organization’s social division of labor, its social organization, developed historically.... It should follow from this statement that insofar as ‘texts help organize social activities and social structure,’ (Bazerman 1988, p. 10), those activities that organize texts for retrieval and documentation are indirectly involved in organizing social activities and social structure. Thus, knowledge organization both supports and transforms social structure. Within organisations, information behaviour is more intensely colonised, because the structures of information exchange and knowledge development – and the potential sanctions for breaking them – are more rigorous and formalised than within less structured entities such as small groups or networks (though communities can still assert powerful sanctions, such as ridicule or exclusion). Job descriptions, formal procedures, requirements to use particular computer systems to process information, all mean that actors in many organisations “act communicatively only with reservation. They know they can have recourse to formal regulations, not only in exceptional but in routine cases; there is no necessity for achieving consensus by communicative means...” (Habermas 1987, 310, but see also Klein and Truex 1996, and below). Thus, the colonised organisation becomes decoupled from the communicative structures

of society, in which its activities can be validated by a wider spectrum of people (Habermas 1987, 145–8). Decisions become taken with reference to, and eventually organised around, instrumental criteria, set and judged only by ‘experts’ in whatever field is under scrutiny. Office holders become subject to formal rules, ways of influencing practice, of making decisions about information, and discouraged from stepping outside the ‘territory’ of their role, making it harder to engage in a dialogue with the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives needed to reach a consensus ( ibid, 355). Instrumental forms of knowledge-processing deliver efficiency gains. However, these come at the price of the scrutiny of decisions taken. One of the dynamics which distinguishes organsations and organisational types from each other (see Mintzberg 1989) hinges around how much 105 Radical Information Literacy debate, autonomy, and creativity is permitted to flourish within an organisation. These are crucial processes in double-loop learning, the questioning of basic assumptions, but organisations also work to channel them into the more effective fulfilment of predetermined, instrumental goals (single-loop learning). Although both these are important within organisational decision making, trade-offs exist between them. When should the claims of a hierarchy, on which its position may be based, be opened up for review? When should debate stop and action start, and who should take responsibility for it? As asked at the end of chapter 1: what are the cognitive costs of hierarchy (Blaug 2007; 2010) – and are these worth paying in particular contexts at particular times? The question of how a community can maintain vigilance over the trade-offs it faces vis-à-vis decision making is key to whether colonisation can be treated as a learning opportunity, rather than as a restriction on learning. To see colonisation as a learning opportunity requires that its operations must be understood by actors within organisations who

may wish to decolonise (and thus transform) these organisations. To reveal colonisation is not always easy. Hegemony involves, at least in part, constructing an environment in which control and externalised authority seem natural, with the opposite – autonomous, empowering, and inclusive activity – treated with suspicion. Assumptions that “to act together successfully in the world necessarily entails a hierarchy of command, centralised control... the institutionalisation of roles of expertise and leadership... the division of labour, the systematisation of tasks and the immunisation of elite decision-makers against input from those defined as lacking expertise” (Blaug 1999b, 35) combine into a paradigm, an unscrutinised (institutionalised) belief that Blaug calls “hierarchism”. The paradigm of hierarchism is self-sustaining in various ways. Without adequate theories, and with communicative forms of decision-making typically devalued (Blaug 1999b), those seeking to learn about alternative organisational forms lack resources on which to base their efforts for transformation. In other words, their information landscape is unsupportive of this enquiry. Meyer and Rowan (1991, 53) describe “institutional isomorphism” as the tendency, over time, for institutions in the same domain to become more alike. This reinforces hierarchies, by attracting resources through the ‘Matthew effect’. Organisations that adopt culturally acceptable forms, and provide information (like accounts) demanded by resource-providers or legal protectorates, acquire legitimacy and can elicit resources from other organisations as a result (DiMaggio and Powell 106 Colonising IL 1983, Friedland and Alford 1991). “Anti-organisations”, or those with mission statements or structures that do not accord with hierarchism, struggle to acquire the same legitimacy. For example, consider the restrictions placed on access to research grants. A community organisation seeking to contribute in this way to the collective learning processes of society would likely find it difficult to acquire funds to support such work without subordinating itself to a formally

constituted HE or R & D institution. Access to resources is thereby limited by instrumental assumptions about what “research” is and who is best placed to undertake it, as Carr and Kemmis (1986) point out. Thus, paradigms of hierarchism contribute to the institutionalisation of instrumental organisational forms and, once institutionalisation is under way, information practices within the organisation become oriented towards sustaining existing sources of legitimacy to keep resources flowing. If problems and uncertainties arise, institutionalisation pressures the organisation to seek to deal with them within the forms, structures, and value systems that it already has (Di Maggio and Powell 1983). Thus, the sociotechnical systems within the organisation – including information technologies, procedures, and the socialisation of recruits (Turner 1971) – are evaluated, and thus designed, with increasingly objective and generic criteria in mind, rather than elements that permit democratic scrutiny, review, and transformation of these criteria by those who work with and are affected by the systems. Hierarchism does not erase communicative rationality from organisations. Klein and Truex (1996, 253) observed communicative actions and reciprocal information exchanges dominating within meetings, concluding that over 80% of exchanges could be considered communicative rather than instrumental. Within the meetings they observed, the aim of participants was to achieve consensus and a mutual understanding of the issue under discussion. Where instrumental action was observed, it involved organising and supervising work that resulted from these decisions. Thus, the communicative actions helped the group interpret the environment and reach an understanding, but were, alone, insufficient for transformation. Without these communicative actions, however, the subsequent instrumental action would either have never taken place, or would have been less adequate, possibly irrational. Instrumental actions therefore do not have to originate

from objective and generic criteria: nor, indeed, from the subjective whims of a leader. The authority to engage in a particular course of action can be intersubjectively invested in a collective. This is, in the end, the democratic ideal. 107 Radical Information Literacy Yet colonisation also works by devaluing communicatively-rational processes in particular contexts. Is the intersubjective view permitted to override the objective (or, in a monarchy, the subjective) authority? Who is permitted to address a problem? Whose learning will be attended to, and how? Whose purposes are served by a learning process? Hierarchism promotes ‘scientific’ decisions, taken by designated experts and consultants, over the deliberative processes of organisational members, oriented towards an ISS that may not be reachable in practice, but which nevertheless serves as an ideal that can be striven towards, and is representative of different knowledge-forming practices. Colonisation results in even the objective rationality of such decisions being made subservient to the interests of money and power, which can distort them, both directly and indirectly. Less moneyed or powerful interests may simply be denied access to the spaces in which the results of their enquiries could be broadly disseminated and thus serve as a resource for others, within an organisation or outside it. Education in a colonised environment also becomes an instrument, manipulated and wielded to help dominant interests meet goals. Curricula and key terms are controlled. What is defined as ‘education’? Who is permitted to call themselves an ‘educational provider’? What must one learn to be considered ‘educated’? For example, Bailey et al (1998) review the Canadian national curriculum statement on ‘scientific literacy’. It “is centered on science education for the development of skilled workers in the science and technology sector of Canada’s economy”, without mention that scientific literacy could potentially address questions of power and individual enlightenment.

This is colonisation par excellence, Robins & Webster’s “instrumental progressivism” (1987), a notion Whitworth (2010) considers deeply integrated into some, though not all, national IL policies. Bailey et al ask whose interests are served by such an educational choice, concluding that it is not the workers’, but the gatekeepers’, those with “coercive influence”. From this perspective, educational practice works in contrast to certain professed targets, particularly the production of critical thinkers. Indirectly, but just as significantly, colonisation erodes the right, and ability, of the mass to construct knowledge and ideas. It values not a broad polity, intersubjectively debating and reaching a consensus, but the objective, generic pronouncements of experts. Carr and Kemmis (1986, 70) write the following: 108 Colonising IL (T)he fact that both pure and applied educational research demands considerable scientific expertise, implies that the only people competent to make decisions about educational policies and practices would be those who had acquired this expertise. Teachers, although they can be expected to adopt and implement educational decisions made on the basis of scientific knowledge, would not themselves participate in the decision-making process... They note that this exclusionary perspective opens and sustains the theory-practice gap in education: a gap between those who make claims and those who test them. The suggestion can be applied to other fields, including librarianship (here see Julien and Williamson 2011). To sum up, Habermas’s theories describe how certain types of knowledge-forming practices (learning) are devalued compared with others. And because single-loop learning is oriented towards preservation and double-loop learning towards transformation, colonisation results in an increasing fixity of informational landscapes

and the devaluing of local, indigenous, practice-based knowledge, in favour of those generic forms, which can be more easily manifested by information systems. It is not based around the scrutiny of validity claims, but rather its opposite – which means it is also a form of rationality conducive to the maintenance of hierarchy. *** Habermas’s work thus describes a shift within organisations to a more objective and hierarchical, and less intersubjective and consensual, set of practices and information exchanges. These can become embedded into sociotechnical systems and thus shape practice, and learning can be directly and indirectly controlled in order to keep these practices from being scrutinised and transformed by those affected by them. Yet within his framework, though the shaping of practice is real, it is not deterministic or totalitarian. Change and transformation – de colonising practice – can still occur, despite the pressures weighed against it (hierarchism, manipulation of the public sphere, and so on). What then is ‘decolonising’ activity, and what are the necessary conditions for the democratic transformation of practice to have a chance of success? What role does IL play? Transformational potential remains present in Habermas’s theories because, unlike in the earlier models of the Frankfurt School – but in common with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and 109 Radical Information Literacy counterhegemony – society is not perceived by him as monolithic. Colonisation produces contradictions and tensions that can be revealed by those affected by it, understandings which are learning outcomes. These can subsequently turn into further learning opportunities – challenges to validity claims and efforts to transform practice, which will sometimes be successful. Scott called these contradictions

hidden transcripts: informational resources, including narratives, values, sources and texts, which reveal inconsistencies or hypocrisies within the discourse of the powerful (Scott 1990). The lifeworld is comprised of a range of different landscapes rather than a single formation, and landscapes based more around hidden than dominant transcripts have been given various names, including “counterpublics” (Fraser 1992: also Fay 1975, 97; Clarke 1996, 109), a term which evokes the counterhegemonic nature of the spaces. These counterpublics – multiple and possibly competing – are arenas in which information is exchanged and authority distributed in ways that differ from dominant discourses. This does not make counterpublics innately democratic. A particular context might be undemocratic and anti-egalitarian, sometimes explicitly (Fraser 1992, 124): a street gang or neo-fascist organisation, for instance. But counterpublics also include communities of practice, networks, activist groups, learning communities and other spaces in which new ways of working, thinking, and communicating are explored. These enquiries create “laboratories of experience” in which “[n]ew problems and questions are posed. New answers are invented and tested, and reality is perceived and named in different ways” (Melucci 1989, 207). Around these new interpretations, communities actively develop collective identities (Melucci 1996, 50)2. Communicative spaces protected from repression are needed to bind these identities together and allow them to flourish, and transformational movements mobilise actors partly for the construction of such spaces (Melucci 1989, 220). Hamelink’s vision of information literacy therefore explicitly requires activism to become reality. Social movements – activist communities mobilised around political goals such as environmentalism, anti-capitalism, and religious fundamentalism – have been frequently studied, and represent a significant subset of society’s counterpublics. These spaces are hands-on and practical, not abstract concepts. Within them, information is more often transmitted orally (or, now, through social

media) and through lived embodied experience, rather than through the controlled, hegemonic narratives of the mainstream media, the analytical eye of the researcher, or formal assessments of profit, loss, effectiveness or other instrumental 110 Colonising IL criteria. Anti-organisational forms are often driving the movement, and the whole process: “thrives on diversity, works best when embedded in its own locality and context and develops most creatively at the edges, the overlap points, the inbetween spaces – those spaces where different cultures meet...” (anonymous author in Do or Die #8, 3). For Habermas, social movements are one example of “counterinstitutions” that develop “within the lifeworld in order to set limits to the inner dynamics of the economic and politicaladministrative action systems”. They aim “to de-differentiate some parts of the formally organised domains of action, remove them from the clutches of the steering media, and return these ‘liberated areas’ to the action-coordinating method of reaching understanding” (Habermas 1987, 396). Politically active communities would therefore seem to be a key agent of decolonisation. Yet at this point Habermas failed to explore – indeed, almost pulled back from – the implications of his theories. He is notably weak on descriptions of how, in real-life political situations, these counterpublics could give rise to genuine change, by transforming practice. Can so abstract a theory be applicable to the real world, shot through with distortions, inequities and power? As Blaug (1999, 54) says: (A) quite extraordinary number of books and articles on Habermasian theory end with a somewhat nebulous benediction to its empirical promise. Often, an increase in popular deliberation in the making of political decisions is called for, and general praise is

inevitably heaped on the public sphere as the appropriate space for such deliberation.... No one feels able to bring him or herself to actually address the empirical problem of how the normative insights might be translated into institutional shape. This problem is reflected in the title of Blaug’s book (1999a): the difficulty in moving from ideal to real, recognising the possible contradiction in the idea of “design for democracy”. The contradiction is manifested if democratic institutions or processes are foisted on a community without the agreement of that community. Yet if democracy emerges from the community, the contradiction is effaced, and Blaug says (1999a, xv) that such learning processes should at least expect guidance from critical democratic theory. For critical theory to be a “living force” it must be developed in association with contemporary issues and problems (Forester 1985). 111 Radical Information Literacy Blaug points out that hierarchism, like other aspects of hegemony, usually works not by direct coercion and the oppression of alternatives. Practitioners advocating the spread of new values, organisational forms, and ways of thinking may be detained as subversives, or subject to disciplinary action or dismissal, but more frequently the operations of hegemony are less direct, with actors denied the methodological or conceptual tools to evaluate and learn about alternative ways of thinking and working. Nevertheless, learning can take place regardless of the controls placed on it, and: “In such a learning process, it may well be that Habermas’s regulative ideal can help us ‘train our eyes’...” (Blaug 1999a, 100). Yet, like any other abstract and generic theory of human behaviour, only in a context, at the moment of application ( ibid, 13), can the

validity of the theory – thus, the validity claim of the theorist – be opened to scrutiny. Theoretical speculation “can never be a substitute for direct experience, for making mistakes, for seeing others do it well” ( ibid, 100). This is, ultimately, the problem with Habermas: his lack of attention to actual, embodied human experience, and the methods by which new insights emerge and are validated. He pays insufficient attention to everyday communication and activity to give guidance and, where he tries, it is to a limited audience. The social movement is certainly an arena in which new, democratic possibilities are actively explored and one that, in early phases at least ( ibid, 135 ff), is characterised by great energy. But democratic moments, “laboratories of experience”, arise whenever existing practices, habits, or routines are called into question, including between friends, parents and children, colleagues at work, doctors and patients, etc. This perspective on democracy – the possibility of a distributed authority that is consented to, not hegemonically, but in an active and consensual way – is a necessary counterpoint to Foucault’s view of power (1980) as embedded in everyday social interactions. The claim that democracy not only can be, but must be, a lived, embodied experience, invested in everyday practice, reclaims the notion from hierarchism. Hierarchism, the idea that authority should be concentrated rather than distributed, has promoted a political system that reduces the powerful notion of democracy to a remnant – the vote, and only for certain groups3. This system of political representation is called ‘democracy’, but it is quite a different beast from the lived and embodied experience. It is testament to the power of the word that it is retained for the impersonal and instrumental voting system, or as a synonym for ‘Parliament’ or ‘Law’. 112

Colonising IL The role of “counterpublics”, whether in their full form as social movements or simply as a space within a landscape in which practice is questioned, has been undermined in Habermas’s work since The Theory of Communicative Action. “[A]s Habermas himself has admitted, by 1981 he had given up on the hope that the economy and the state could be ‘transformed democratically from within’” (Hirschkop 2004, 52, via Habermas 1992, 444). By Between Facts and Norms (Habermas 1996), the public sphere and its component counterpublics became, for Habermas, not the source of political change but more a “sounding board for problems that must be processed by the political system” (Habermas 1996, 359; cited in Hirschkop 2004, 52; also Gardiner 2004, 29). Yet though this may seem an “admission of defeat”, “what the public sphere loses in terms of decision-making power it more than compensates for in terms of its ability to track the problems of capitalism down to their private lair” (Hirschkop 2004, 58). What Hirschkop means here (cf. Habermas 1996, 365) is that in the personal spaces of individuals and communities the impact of “systemic deficiencies” – exploitation, impoverishment, surveillance etc. – in late capitalist society are most clearly revealed. It is the lifeworld that “is uniquely suited to the demystifying of these problems in liberal capitalist societies” (Hirschkop 2004, 58), precisely because the lifeworld is defined by intersubjective exchanges that allow it to remain adaptable and responsive, rather than structured around instrumental solutions to problems that become reified ends-in-themselves. Thus, counterpublics and communities are better suited to double-loop learning. Without allowing for the questioning of the premises which underlie ways of thinking, and the systems based on them, transformation cannot occur (Hirschkop 2004, 60): “Through the crevices in discourse which allow one to ‘open up’ the discussion of life experiences, citizens are able to connect problems experienced in individual life histories to wider social structures.”

Counterpublics, then, are the spaces in which the notion of expertise is reclaimed, and community members can discover they have something valid to say on issues that affect them, directly and indirectly. Counterpublics help assert the worth of forms of knowledge-making and self-expression that have been devalued by colonisation generally, and/or specifically repressed in particular contexts. There is a risk of relativism once again. To say that political activism is legitimate simply because it exists and is structured in communicative ways would accommodate, say, the unstructured networks that are gang culture and Al-Qaeda. Both networks, in their own way, may have been 113 Radical Information Literacy effective, but that does not mean they should be considered legitimate. From another perspective, the astrological “learning community” is one that is effective at producing and sharing information, and is built around particular media and linguistic conventions, despite having no scientific basis for its claims (Thompson 2008). Whatever radical IL is to become, it must be able to assess the values underlying communities like these, reveal and criticise them. Revealing contradictions in a learning community is part of being vigilant over it. Blaug’s discussion (1999a) casts democracy as a constantly-updating, dynamic environment that supports empowering, inclusive activities, not a system, an end-in-itself. A democratic environment would have to be constructed around the understanding that communicatively rational organisational forms, and discourses, constantly tend to decay. A supportive environment would slow this decay, by allowing for the continuous review and possible transformation of practice (Habermas 1993). Blaug describes two reasons for this tendency towards decay. First, there are hegemonic pressures, which work to deny counterhegemonic, decolonising spaces the resources (financial,

intellectual) from which they would benefit, and exploit those resources that do emerge from the space – matters already discussed above. Second, Blaug argues that to understand the pervasiveness of hierarchies, actors in social situations must understand the benefits they bring to decision-making. Hierarchies are attractive for a reason. The limitations on the ideal of the ISS – the continuous exercising of double-loop learning – include time, cognitive biases, and the structures of language which result in differing interpretations (which is why some dissensus always has value: Lyotard 1984). Hierarchical decision making saves time and cognitive work, and as a result may even improve the prospects of truly democratic decision making. Abrahamsson (1993, 92–4) argues that hierarchy is useful for democracy, a rational installation as it allows decisions to not just be taken, but implemented. But the tradeoffs involved show why we must be vigilant about hierarchies (Blaug 1999a), whether at state level, within organisations, or within communities. The different epistemologies underlying each form of rationality use resources in different ways. In a communicatively-rational environment, knowledge is formed by keeping ideas foregrounded, and under scrutiny. Resources are needed to create the necessary supportive environment, including allowing practitioners time to undertake this work, and keeping debate and discussion flowing around the landscape. By its very 114 Colonising IL nature, this results in a more ephemeral and dynamic environment. In an instrumentally-rational environment, knowledge is embedded by devoting resources to the development of systems (hierarchies, procedures, technologies, etc.), which fix the results of decisions in place. This allows decisions to be implemented, but simultaneously leaves them less open to review and scrutiny.

Vigilance, therefore, is the process by which a community reveals these trade-offs, reviews them, and where necessary transforms them. Ideally, it does so in ways that do not retard the community’s future ability to learn and transform its landscape. In other words, the information landscape is maintained in a sustainable way, by the members of the community themselves, but drawing on a supportive infrastructure. Habermas shows that it is a category mistake to expect this support from the state (the instrumental organisation par excellence), but there nevertheless need to be elements of this supportive infrastructure that go beyond simply encouraging discussion and consensus, which drains resources if not accompanied by more instrumental elements of support that allow decisions and transformations to be implemented. Hirschkop (2004, 62) points out that this instrumental activity, and the texts that must support it, are “unlikely to emerge from the interaction of well-intentioned citizens alone: it would require a specialised and organised practice consciously aimed at the emancipation of the existential language in circulation, which is itself in large part a product of the culture industry.” What, then, are these “specialised and organised” practices to which Hirschkop refers? I answer that question simply: radical information literacy. Therefore, if IL is the set of practices oriented towards the maintenance of information landscapes of any kind, radical IL is the subset of these practices oriented towards the maintenance of information landscapes within which communicative rationality is more likely to inhere, and therefore in which authority is more widely distributed. *** IL, including radical IL, needs to be based on a range of learning outcomes that, as the phenomenographic school of IL has shown, encompasses generic skills and competencies, metacognitive skills, an ability to evaluate one’s own context, and a facility with dialogue.

Formal learning providers such as universities, schools, libraries, museums, and other training providers can potentially help in all these areas, thus contributing to radical IL. But there remains the danger of 115 Radical Information Literacy reifying this expertise. Like other delegations of cognitive work – to a hierarchy, a computer, a routine or habit – it can lead to decisions about the relevance of information not being kept under full scrutiny. Thus, the role of any formal learning or training provider, which, by definition, does not situate itself within the context in which such knowledge must be applied, must also be subject to the scrutiny of the community which seeks its guidance. The creation of a radical IL infrastructure (cf. Landry et al 1985) is therefore a matter of developing communicative spaces in which a more democratic, distributed authority is apparent, and to provide the guidance that keeps the spaces sustainable (what Wenger, White and Smith (2009) call stewarding). These spaces may exist within particular communities, or may cross communities; both types are required. Guidance may be manifested in various forms of text, including technology. This guidance shapes practice by saving cognitive work: hence it needs to be periodically reviewed by the community members subject to it. The ultimate goal of a radical IL is the distribution of stewarding capacity throughout a community. This is not an end-in-itself, but a constant process. Hence, the goal of a radical IL practitioner is not to make themselves redundant, but to be constantly monitoring the environment for learning opportunities, keeping pace with the constant trade-offs required to stay vigilant over hierarchy, technology, routine, habit, and other trade-offs involved when cognitive work is saved. Benhabib (1990; see also Nielsen 2002, 33) has critiqued Habermas’s theory of discourse ethics for not being sufficiently context-sensitive. The model of radical IL sketched in the last few pages is an attempt to build on Habermas’s generic philosophies

and, from them, develop a more context-sensitive approach. Supporting a general case for a unitary, critical theory of IL entails showing (Ray 1993, 176–7): (F)irst, that existing forms of domination do not exhaust more varied potentials within modern structures; secondly, that an alternative, suppressed modernity continues to inform new protest potentials; and thirdly, that these have some realistic expectation of decolonising the lifeworld. Habermas lacks the basis in text and context for this work to be fully founded on his theories, though they have provided considerable support. To go further into these matters requires an investigation of Bakhtin. 116 Colonising IL Notes 1. Habermas has been criticised for an overly idealistic view of 18th and 19th century public spheres, which writers such as Fraser (1992) point out were not as egalitarian as he claims (Habermas 1989); thus, the distribution of authority over text has never reached to the great mass of the population. The critique is valid, but should not affect his assessment of present trends. 2. See also Foucault’s idea (1986, 24) of the heterotopia – not a place in which Utopia is made real, but one in which its claims are investigated, critiqued and contested – that is, scrutinised. 3. Suffrage is not universal anywhere; all countries deny it to children, even when matters affect them, and many still exclude prisoners, immigrants and other groups from voting. 117 This page intentionally left blank

6 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL Abstract: This chapter explores the key concepts in Bakhtin’s theories of communication and outlines their relevance for the study of IL.. These concepts, particularly the ideas of genre, chronotope, unfinalisability, and polyphony, or multi-voicedness, help show why information practices and information literacy cannot be a generic pursuit, but instead are context-dependent. The chapter also explores the difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences, and returns to the notion of strong objectivity to clarify why scrutiny of all validity claims is an essential aspect of IL. Key Words: Bakhtin, genre, chronotope, unfinalisability, polyphony, strong objectivity, authority. The role of this chapter is to root radical IL firmly in communication and democracy as experienced in everyday social settings and lived experiences, rather than as abstract ideals. To successfully build on chapter 5, the theories incorporated into radical IL must be attuned to the nature of trade-offs between different forms of thinking, which for Habermas were instantiated in instrumental and communicative rationality. Radical IL must incorporate the reality of colonisation and hegemony, yet simultaneously allow for the possibility of change in these social structures and, thus, how they govern the exchange of information and the making of judgments. All these conditions are met in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin wrote in the Soviet Union from the 1920s until his death in 1970. His work was popularised in the English-speaking world in the 1980s by commentators such as Holquist (2002; 2009) and Morson and Emerson (1990), and through two significant collected translations of his work (Bakhtin 1981; 1986). Linell (2009) cites him as the paramount theorist of dialogism. This chapter will review his

key ideas, particularly the difference between dialogue and monologue, and the importance of 119 Radical Information Literacy polyphony or multi-voicedness in knowledge formation. For Bakhtin, literacy is applicable to every utterance, written or spoken, and not limited only to specialised texts (e.g. expert pronouncements, academic texts). He recognises the reality of authority over text, but also that, because of the nature of language, no ‘final state’ is possible in a communicative situation. Thus, there can be no absolute authority. Everything contains the possibility of change and transformation within itself at multiple levels, from the single utterance up to the structures of language and communication, and how meaning is created within them. Bakhtin has been only infrequently invoked in the IL debate, and this chapter is the first full treatment of his work vis-à-vis IL. Nor are his ideas often connected to Habermas’s. An exception is a paper by Nielsen (2002), who discusses how Habermas and Bakhtin both try to deal with “one of the most perplexing problems to face contemporary theories of creativity and action – diversity and the dilemma of reconstructing a transcultural (universal) ethics” ( ibid, 24). Thus, both are concerned with how we retain diversity and polyphony while not collapsing into relativism, retaining normative criteria (in Habermas’s case, communicative rationality) as a means of judging outcomes. Nielsen goes on to say ( ibid, 27): “Neither thinker gives in to pluralism or a detached intellectual relativism yet each, in different ways, recognizes that modern societies develop ‘polyphonically’ (in multiple voices, perspectives, and simultaneous points of view)...” Hirschkop (2004), Garvey (2000), and Gardiner (2004) also explore the similarities and differences in the work of Bakhtin and Habermas. According to Garvey (2000, 371), there are four issues on which they share common ground:

First, they agree that before equality can be established in the social realm, it must be modeled by establishing egalitarian communicative relationships. Second, both strive to understand communication, not by analyzing language, but by analyzing how selfhood and intersubjective relationships are structured and mediated by communicative action. They both analyze communication as a social institution not unlike a political system or a religious tradition. Third, both assert the special importance of dialogic realms wherein relationships of power are partly neutralized by being brought into the foreground. Fourth and finally, each understands his analysis of communicative relationships as a mode of social criticism that can help to define a more ethical world by demystifying some of the ways in which domination is embedded in acts of speech and communication. 120 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL All are, in turn, true of a radical IL. Also significant are the differences between the two authors. These show how Bakhtin’s ideas can be used to overcome the problems which arise when applying Habermas to IL. This point of Gardiner’s is pertinent because it revisits an idea which appeared in chapter 5: that (colonising) power involves shifting knowledge-formation structures out of the subjective and intersubjective domains, and into the objective (Gardiner 2004, 30): Whereas Habermas seeks to delineate sharply between particular realms of social activity and forms of discourse—between, for instance, public and private, state and public sphere, reason and non-reason, ethics and aesthetics—Bakhtin problematizes such demarcations, sees them as fluid, permeable and always contested, and alerts us to the power relations that are involved in any such exercise of boundary-maintenance.

Thus, for Bakhtin, power and authority are manifested in the very assertion that there can be ‘objective’ knowledge in the realm of human affairs. Instead, Bakhtin sees all such knowledge as essentially intersubjective. Authority is the means by which specific elements of understanding are assigned to one realm rather than another. Whether this authority can be considered legitimate or illegitimate depends on the context, but that does not mean the question is relativist and has no meaning. As with Habermas, Bakhtin develops clear normative criteria by which we can judge the legitimacy of authority: thus, be literate in a given context. These criteria – polyphony, dialogue, and an openness to transformation – can be shown to be true of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge, which has processes for claiming authority that open this claim up for scrutiny, but not of those forms of ‘objectivity‘ which are claimed through the exercise of power, and close up channels of scrutiny. This is an essential move in defining radical IL. Gardiner sees Habmermas’s account of intersubjectivity as “overly abstract and formalistic” (Gardiner 2004, 30), and states that Bakhtin is far more sensitive to the plurality of “embodied, situational and dialogical elements of everyday human life” ( ibid). He believes Bakhtin can fill lacunae in Habermas’s conception of “dialogical democracy” by suggesting methods for judging the legitimacy of authority in practice: Habermas develops these methods in theory only. Bakhtin helps reveal that these gaps arise from problems with Habermas’s notion of consensus. Lyotard (1984) asserts the value of 121 Radical Information Literacy dissensus and conflicting opinions, and sees consensus, in Habermasian terms, as a dangerous imposition. This criticism can partly be countered by remembering that the ISS is specifically an ideal, which Habermas recognises is unattainable in practical situations. Nevertheless a ‘perfect’

consensus (the telos of communicative rationality) would, in principle, efface diversity just as effectively as would a ‘perfect’ system (the telos of instrumental rationality). Bakhtin would call both the perfect consensus and the perfect system monologic ways of thinking and working: that is, they allow only one voice to be heard. His counter-ideal, that of dialogue, is therefore quite different from Habermas’s notion of consensus (Nielsen 2002, 25). Dialogue is the key driving force of change in Bakhtin’s epistemology. Its opposite tendency, the monologue, leads to the death of creativity and psychic stagnation. The “monologic way of perceiving of cognition and truth” (Bakhtin 1984, 81) is manifested in the system. As with Habermas’s “system” – the consequence of instrumentally rational ways of viewing the world and engaging in activity – this notion describes the product of a way of thinking. A system can be driven by one voice and manifest only that one voice’s values. Other voices or utterances must conform to the system, perhaps having to change words or position in order to be processed through it. The only cognitive relations one can have to a perfect system are conformity or error. In principle, a system can be “comprehended and fully contained by a single consciousness – in principle, by any consciousness with sufficient intellectual power” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 236). This invokes Zurkowski’s vision of “information banks”. From an instrumental knowledge management perspective, a ‘perfect’ information bank is one that contains all relevant information and answers, immediately and always accurately, any query put to it (Saracevic 1975, 326). The ideal system is convergent around a single voice and, to use the system effectively, the request must be shaped accordingly. However, Bakhtin’s work is “a highly rational attempt to imagine the world as incommensurate with systems” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 6). A monologic system can process inputs and outputs

efficiently but, by definition, cannot grow and change, as anomalous, creative inputs would be rejected as errors. In practice, alternative perspectives (queries, criteria, meanings) always arise, evidence of multiple consciousnesses, interacting through dialogue. Because of the nature of language, and its essentially contextual nature, these interactions are innately creative, giving rise to new possibilities and practices (this claim will be explored further below in the discussion on ‘unfinalisability’). Dialogue is thus 122 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL essential to change, which by definition cannot arise from a monologue. Indeed, every monologue holds within it a basic contradiction: that it must, by imposing authority, acknowledge the reality of alternative voices, if only as things – potential hidden transcripts – which need to be repressed. What this means is that not only does instrumentality/ monologism not prevent new possibilities emerging, it cannot do so. Here Bakhtin is in agreement with Habermas, but we can now see how their notions of ‘systems’ differ. Bakhtin’s system is rooted not in abstract forms of thinking but in everyday language. Language is not a direct way into people’s brains. Because of the complexities and ambiguities of language, Bakhtin would not see it as possible to directly transfer meaning from a sender to a recipient (Linell 2009, 37). Meanings cannot be transferred, only signs. Language is a construction, but we think through dialogue. Hence, it is how dialogue, and the various elements of the information landscape in which it is embodied, are understood and used in diverse ways that reveals structure and agency (transformation) in Bakhtin’s theories. This is why his work is wholly relevant to the development of IL generally, and radical IL particularly. Habermas’s idea of colonisation is also useful, but too singular. It emanates in the same way from across the system and is experienced in the same way even across a variety of publics and counterpublics. Habermas was insufficiently

interested in everyday lived experience to establish the variety of possible reactions – indeed, the variety of possible systems (monologic sources of authority) – and thus help with a study of how diverse information landscapes can be learned about and transformed. What is needed are theories that better explain the diversity of context, and how both this diversity and also the monologic nature of authority, are rooted in everyday communication and information. Bakhtin offers such insights. Having considered so far how his ideas of dialogue and monologue help distinguish his work from Habermas’s, this chapter will continue first with Bakhtin’s concepts of genre and chronotope, which explain how an information landscape can shape communication; then, the notions of utterances and unfinalisability, which show how there are always unfulfilled potentials in any discourse; and finally, explore in detail the notion of authority in Bakhtin, with particular attention to how objectivity and intersubjectivity are, ideally, connected, but how authority rests in keeping claims to objectivity insulated from dialogic scrutiny. *** 123 Radical Information Literacy For Bakhtin, it is in communication that the human world is created and, from this creation, future possibilities shaped, but not predetermined. This is not an abstract and idealised communicative event, as for Habermas. Rather, it is a “practical rationality, rooted in the actualities of the everyday and not detachable from specific conditions” (Gardiner 2004, 33). Thus, it is prosaic. For Morson and Emerson the concept of prosaics is: (A) form of thinking that presumes the importance of the everyday, the ordinary, the ‘prosaic’... (1990, 15) (T)he everyday is a sphere of constant activity, the source of all social change and individual creativity... prosaic creativity generally proceeds slowly, begins in

narrow spheres, and is hardly noticeable. For that reason we do not see it, and think that innovation must come from somewhere else. ( ibid, 23) Thus, focusing on the prosaic can help researchers and practitioners train their eyes, to see what often goes unnoticed, down to the significance of single moments of information exchange. As already noted, raising awareness of things often taken for granted is a key learning process; part (although not all: Morson and Emerson 1990, 36) of what it means to become literate. Bakhtin shows that the meaning of any utterance is not given by the author, but nor is it wholly created by the recipient. Instead, there is a dialogic relationship between author and recipient in which there is inherent uncertainty, as the context of the author and recipient inevitably differ, though the degree of difference will vary from slight to extreme. All dialogue, then, can potentially destabilise existing practices and ways of thinking. Therefore, while prosaic communication can “display routinized, static and unreflexive characteristics, it is also capable of a surprising dynamism and moments of penetrating insight and boundless creativity” (Gardiner 2004, 41). Learning about these areas of human communication depends also on establishing why there exist structural biases against prosaics. A focus on everyday life contexts and prosaic communication is atypical of formal education. Prosaic communication is usually not perceived as the ‘domain’ of the expert, the ‘right’ (that is, authoritative) location for knowledge1. An interest in prosaic communication, at least potentially, contests notions of authority which exist in those domains, seeking to 124 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL question and possibly redistribute authority through widening access to these spaces and the forms of knowledge and information within them.

This kind of challenge may be diverted in various ways. Access to a text, and the forms of authority invested in that text, may be directly restricted: one may be unable to physically access information without the requisite status (possibly invested in a technological device such as a password). However, access to the meanings invested in a particular dialogue can also be more indirectly concealed. Not all speakers will be literate in each context and their ability to become so may be limited. These insights are explored by Bakhtin via developing the notion of genre. The popular notion of genre tends to be applied to literature and entertainment: the horror genre, the soap opera, etc. In each exist certain conventions. If a book called Home on the Range has a cover picture of an idyllic Midwestern US farm, a reader would be surprised if it was a horror novel. However, Bakhtinian genres “govern our daily speech, both ‘outer’ and ‘inner’” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 275). Breure (2001, no pagination) says: For Bakhtin genres are not simply sets of rules and conventions, but ways of conceptualizing reality, forms of seeing and interpreting particular aspects of the world. They are connected with expectations about length and compositional structure. They are the fundamental molds in which we cast communication. The concept includes (Bakhtin 1986, 60): (S)hort rejoinders of daily dialogue (and these are extremely varied depending on the subject matter, situation, and participants), everyday narration, writing (in all its various forms), the brief standard military command, the elaborate and detailed order, the fairly variegated repertoire of business documents (for the most part standard), and the diverse world of commentary (in the broad sense of the word: social, political). In the 21st century Bakhtin may well have added the Facebook status update, the blog post, the comment on an online newspaper story, TV

quiz shows, and more, as forms of speech genre . As Andersen (2008, 349) says: 125 Radical Information Literacy To recognize a particular text type is to recognize a particular communicative situation and activity in which that type of text (genre) is used to accomplish a given task. In our everyday interaction with texts, whether as producers or recipients, genres are a means of orientation... and thus connected to literacy: The more we know about the communicative activities in which we are involved, the more we know how to understand and use the texts produced by these activities. Genres are not just technical devices, therefore, but contribute to the stratification of society into distinct informational landscapes with specific characteristics. Professional groups develop not just specialised vocabularies, but also associated practices, boundaries, and ways of thinking that function to help form community identities, but also to exclude others (Bakhtin 1981, 289): (T)he language of the lawyer, the doctor, the businessman, the politician, the public education teacher and so forth... these languages differ from each other not only in their vocabularies; they involve specific forms for manifesting intentions, forms for making conceptualization and evaluation concrete... these possibilities are realized in specific directions, filled with specific content, they are made concrete, particular, and are permeated with concrete value judgments; they knit together with specific objects and with the belief systems of certain genres of expression and points of view peculiar to particular professions. The genre is therefore a “human construction” that helps “determine how much selection and search power a searcher is in possession of”

(Andersen 2006, 221–2). To be literate in a particular genre, however that is defined, is to have freer access to the resources of that genre, and wield them as an instrument. This is why information seeking is a sociopolitical activity, as its practices constitute aspects of the power structures in society ( ibid, 222). Genres are “ways of seeing” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 275): tools for analysis of practical communication, applicable to the study of particular landscapes. Genres and information landscapes, however, constructions which shape communication, are similar, but not the same thing. Genres are abstract, sets of “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller 1984, 159 cited in Andersen 2008, 350). 126 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL Like other abstract ways of organising and making judgements about information, genres require situated interpretation across diverse contexts, so becoming manifested within different information landscapes, in which the definitions and boundaries of genres are tested. The idea of, say, ‘the legal genre’ is a way of recognising texts, but does not fully elucidate the diversity of discourses which take place in legalistic contexts. Just as the UK Lake District and Australia’s Great Dividing Range are both ‘mountain regions’, but recognisably different in specific form, so one law firm is a different landscape from another, even if both should be literate in the same genres. Therefore, the existence of genres does not invalidate the study of context. Genres are themes common to many landscapes, and each landscape may contain different genres. The definition of genres is further enriched by Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. This term links the Greek words for ‘time’ and ‘place’ and, again, has layers of meaning. It can refer to the particular sense of time and space that is characteristic of a genre. This is akin to Hall’s studies of physical space, and how different cultures arranged their use of space, studies that informed his notion of “proxemics”

(Hall 1968, 84): “...the way in which both time and space were handled [in a given situation] constituted a form of communication...” Saying that understandings of time and space vary between people is, emphatically, not suggesting that these concepts, as a physicist understands them, are relative. This position is castigated by Thompson in his discussion of counterknowledge (2008, 121–2), but in this case the argument is a straw man. Bakhtin is specifically making points not about the natural world, but about the human reaction to it. Particular spatial and temporal relationships between people do differ across landscapes. To pick two extreme, but nevertheless illustrative examples, time is thought of quite differently by a geologist than by a stock market trader. An ‘urgent’ communication may be perceived differently in a government department compared to an intensive care unit. Chronotopes are not just an output of communication, however. They are a fundamental basis for activity in any landscape (Bakhtin 1981, 250). It is not just understandings of time and place, but the physical and temporal location of a speaker or text, that can define “parameters of value” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 369), and thus shape events. Bakhtin draws here also on Goethe, who saw (Bakhtin 1986, 42): “no events, plots or temporal motifs that are not related in an essential way to the particular spatial place of their occurrence... Everything in this world is a time-space, a true chronotope.” Information or forms of 127 Radical Information Literacy expression that are “taken for granted in one culture [chronotope] may not even exist in another” (Hall 1968, 94). And individuals each have their chronotope, a specific place and time they occupy, uniquely, at every moment. Holquist (2009, 9–10) calls the chronotope “omnipresent”: it is “the clock and the map we employ to orient our identity in the flux of existence”, and thus, the basis of subjectivity. Just as the pronoun I has no intrinsic meaning but is filled with meaning when, and only when, employed by a

specific person, so do the terms now and here, and cognates such as then and elsewhere (Holquist 2009, 16–17). At this individual level, the chronotope is the horizon of the speaker, the landscape in which they are present (cf. Steinerová 2010), the specific coincidence of time and place which forms the grounds for the structure of awareness of that person at that moment. The diversity of genres and the effectively infinite variety of chronotopes give landscapes their heterogeneous and fractal characteristics. We may have single chronotopes but we are members of multiple communities, fluent in genres in varying ways, and we each bring our own level of ‘outsideness’ to any discourse. So, although the collective is a real basis for activity and ethics, these givens can be transcended by individuals. This is central to action. We each individually act at the nexus of many landscapes: “individual stylization” comes about as we try to act in ways that “satisfy conflicting obligations in a polyphonic milieu” (Cresswell and Baerveldt 2011, 274). Because we all live in multiple communities, “there is never a situation where one speaks from a single speech genre in isolation” (Cresswell and Teucher 2011, 115). The world is therefore a polyphony of voices – and it is through dialogue that we experience variation in the voices we encounter, learn from, and can engage with. We therefore encounter many genres as we communicate, but do not use each equally well. Crossing the boundaries can cause difficulties. A text or utterance considered credible in one context may be questioned or dismissed as valueless elsewhere. A speaker may be literate in one genre of communication (e.g. academia, therapy) but less so in another (e.g. legal discourse, music). This is “not a matter of an impoverished vocabulary or style” (Bakhtin 1986, 80): in other words, a speaker’s or text’s ‘illiteracy’

in a classic sense. Rather, it relates to the unfamiliarity of that speaker, or lack of fit of the text, with context-specific features of the landscape: meanings, ways of using words, procedures, technologies, and so on, which constitute that landscape at that particular chronotope. Certain landscapes have come over time to be structured in ways that make them 128 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL sympathetic to some genres over others, and if knowledge is not formulated and presented in ways that fit this structure, it will be rejected. For example, the results of learning may be embodied in texts in diverse ways, not just in academic papers, official reports, or other such formal texts, but in the creation of technology, in oral narratives, in changed practices, on a blog, in conversations around a coffee machine (cf. Harris 2008, 253; Cresswell and Baervelt 2011, 267). The authority typically assigned to each of these media varies, yet this does not necessarily conform to the value that each may have in certain contexts. For example, the knowledge about how to safely fight a fire is clearly significant for humanity, but remains largely unwritten. Even where texts discuss technicalities (e.g. the design of effective fire extinguishers), practitioners in this landscape, as Lloyd showed (2007), still looked first to practicebased, embodied sources of information, such as the physical movements of colleagues, in which were encoded concrete experiences of previous fires (that is, relevant chronotopes). Tacit, rather than explicit, nevertheless that knowledge exists, is stored, is accessible, and is valuable. It shapes practice without wholly determining outcomes, nor closing off new possible insights. Yet because of the form it takes – harder to capture in an information system – it is less valued, and not addressed by competency-based approaches to IL. Landscapes and genres are never the product of design, but products of evolution, which means they are always “imperfectly

suited to their present use – and for that very reason are relatively adaptable to future uses, to which they will also be acceptably but not optimally suited” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 292). To retain relevance, genres – and by extension, particular information landscapes – must continue to evolve: but they can also fade away. They can “stubbornly” persist even when they no longer generate new insights (Bakhtin 1981, 85). Forms of authority within a genre may become more and more concealed, and as a result genres can become mythologised or symbolic, or degenerate into stereotypes or prejudice (‘all people from X are Y...’). Structures of thinking in the individual mind can persist in the same way: this links to the earlier discussion of personal constructs and will be returned to below in the discussion of the ‘authoritative voice’. On the other hand, genres may also be subject to review following encounters with fresh inputs that may bring these collective assumptions into question. Again, this can happen at broad, macrolevels: for example, mobile technologies, and Skype, changed forever certain aspects of the genre that was the (landline) ‘telephone call’. Or, it may take place at a more context-specific and local level. 129 Radical Information Literacy It is possible to move between genres comfortably, bringing many different types of communication into one’s own chronotope and becoming literate in a broader sense, able to “command a repertoire of genres of social conversation” (Bakhtin 1981, 85), which “ enriches one’s capacity to conceptualize and participate in varying aspects of social life” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 275). Orlikowski and Yates (1996, 542; cited in Andersen 2008, 354) note that this broad genre repertoire can be possessed both by individuals and by communities. If we see genres as

“knowledge organizing categories” (Andersen 2008, 355) it can be seen how a wide repertoire of them gives an individual or a community a more flexible range of strategies to choose from – that is, it makes them more information literate (Andersen 2006, 225–6). Facility may be acquired with surface elements of a genre: a sort of lay knowledge. I find astrophysics papers largely impenetrable. Yet, as a Humanities academic, I recognise in them features that are characteristic of the broader genre of the academic paper, such as its general intention, techniques such as the presentation of a methodology, a bibliography, and so on. I understand why these things are there, knowing that they give the text authority. I cannot, however, penetrate, and thus scrutinize, the authority of the paper using its more specific genres (e.g. the validity of its complex mathematics), though I can seek understanding from other media: for example, read about the research in the New Scientist, attend a public lecture, or engage in informal conversations with physicist friends. This may seem little more than the sign of a ‘good education’, but it is also information literacy in the broadest sense. Bakhtin’s work shows why crossing genre boundaries like this is essential. Linell (2009, 82–5) calls this ‘outsideness’ alterity, and recognises it as an essential element of dialogue. Each genre is a “combination of specific blindnesses and insights... adapted to conceptualizing some aspects of reality better than others. That, indeed, is why people and cultures need continually to learn new genres as the compass of their experience expands.” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 276, citing Medvedev 1985, 131). The ongoing health of any landscape depends on its boundaries remaining permeable by fresh inputs, which by definition come from outside, as the validity claims present in one landscape are questioned at the point it comes into contact with another (Bakhtin 1986, 7): ...outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding....

A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage 130 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and onesidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures.... Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched. Yet it is precisely at the boundary points between landscapes that authority is most clearly asserted. Boundaries are where communication crosses into a different landscape, and the systems and cognitive authorities within that landscape may struggle to accommodate the new perspective, particularly if they are monologic. Being literate in the genres that shape practice on both sides of this ‘border’ allows for the transformation of key elements of a text, or its re-presentation, to imbue it with authority in the other landscapes it must encounter. Literacy therefore helps bridge boundaries between cultures and thereby enrich them. This makes it essential for learning, and also gives it its political character. Revealing the characteristics of genre and chronotope, and helping learners become literate in particular genres, is already a common learning method in IL. Competency-based IL does it implicitly, training learners to recognise features of authority, with a bias towards expert genres (academia, official publications, and pronouncements). The personal relevance and learning to learn frames of IL aim to help learners recognise their own chronotopes and the way each can best develop knowledge within them. Social impact views of IL would consider politically powerful genres such as the news media and engage in a critical investigation of the characteristics of that genre, whereas a relational approach would consider variation and difference between genres, and possibly aim to help learners acquire facility with multiple modes of

communication, as called for by writers about transliteracy (Ipri 2010). The critical eye can also be turned on the chronotopes and genres of IL itself, a task undertaken above, in chapter 4. The ACRL standards can be seen as a chronotope: see O’Connor (2009) who “uncovered the American political mythologies and assumptions inherent in the conception of information literacy, as reflected in the ACRL standards” (Julien and Williamson 2011, no pagination). What Bakhtin can help with is to link these conceptions of IL as learning and IL as practice. To continue with this project it is necessary to more closely examine how prosaic communication is at the root of the processes by which genres, chronotopes and landscapes are transformed. *** 131 Radical Information Literacy To say that ‘outsideness’ or alterity is essential for understanding genres, chronotopes, and landscapes may seem to invite the conclusion that these informational phenomena can be studied abstractly, like laboratory specimens, by observers who do not interact with the setting. Abstractions of the communicative process may be useful in generic linguistic and semiotic analysis, but they need to be recognised as abstractions (Bakhtin 1986, 69–70). Actual transformation of the landscape takes place not through treating it as a laboratory specimen, using methodologies oriented towards the external design of solutions to problems (such as an information system), but as a laboratory of experience (Melucci 1989), in which solutions to problems emerge from learning processes undertaken therein. The methods and studies may be explicit and formal, but these processes are also constantly occurring at the informal level. Just as Cervero and Wilson (1994) see organisational learning as a constant series of

“micro-moments” in which practices are tested and validated, so Bakhtin sees every utterance as, at least potentially, a moment of learning. It is this constant process of checking and validating which invests all communication, potentially, with the capacity to transformation information practices and landscapes. Bakhtin sees communication as a series of utterances with no start or end. Utterances can be as short as a word – even a gesture – or as long as a novel. Each is a move in communication. Single utterances hold within them, theoretically, the totality of previous communication: every utterance “must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere...” (Bakhtin 1986, 91). Or as Morson and Emerson put it (1990, 137): Every time we speak, we respond to something spoken before and we take a stand in relation to earlier utterances about the topic. The way we sense those earlier utterances – as hostile or sympathetic, authoritative or feeble, socially and temporally close or distant – shapes the content and style of what we say. We sense these alien utterances in the object itself. It is as if the object were coated with a sort of glue preserving earlier characterizations of it. And every utterance can be potentially replied to, even if that reply does not follow immediately (Bakhtin 1986, 68–9): An actively responsive understanding of what is heard (a command, for example) can be directly realized in action 132 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL (the execution of an order or command that has been understood and accepted for execution), or it can remain, for the time being, a salient responsive understanding... but this is, so to speak, responsive understanding with a delayed reaction. Sooner or later what is heard and actively understood will find its response in the subsequent speech or behaviour of the listener.

Utterances are shaped by genres, and so the genre will influence utterances’ ‘finalisability’ as well as other features. The military command can almost be exhausted by a single utterance and response. Once one has heard a command and responded to it, there is nowhere else to take the dialogue, except to await another command. In creative spheres, there is almost no finalisation possible, except a “certain minimum of finalization making it possible to occupy a responsive position”, that is, to make the next move in the creative conversation (Bakthin 1986, 77). Great texts, such as Shakespeare or Greek myths, retain ‘genre potentials’ more or less permanently: that is, they can continually be reworked as new communities use them for guidance on contemporary issues (and also, in many cases, see commercial potential, particularly with Shakespeare). For example, Purdue refers (2003, 658) to Walter Benjamin and the transformative power of great stories: like seeds preserved for centuries, stories “retain a germinative power” and “are begging to be retold”. These examples suggest that certain speech genres are more conducive to debate and creativity than others. Not all are equally able to develop new potentials. Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language (1950), and his invention of “Newspeak” in Nineteen-Eighty Four (1948) – a stripped-down language designed to eradicate subversive or non-dogmatic thought – specifically invoke this point. In all, any attempt to understand meaning generically, independent of a listener’s context, can at best derive some sense of the potential of an utterance, “but only when that potential is exploited for a particular purpose on a particular occasion is there real meaning” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 127). Indeed, it is genre and landscape that carry these potentials from the resources of the past into the present and future (Bakhtin 1986, 4). These structures support cognitive work, preventing speakers from having to engage in the long process of definition before making an utterance, e.g. indicating

values, exploring the context, suggesting a sense of time and space ( ibid, 60). Thus, they can also be conduits for the concealing of meaning, hiding assumptions from 133 Radical Information Literacy scrutiny, beneath awareness – thus, conduits for institutionalisation. It is in genres that collective memory can best be seen to reside (Wertsch 2009, cf. points made in chapter 1 above). The genre framework can explain continuity from past to future, but genres do not define the future deterministically, as if the present and future can be understood merely from examining the past (Morson and Emerson 1990, 89): (I)n understanding genre we have not understood everything that is important about... acts or literary works. Genre provides the ‘given’, but the work or act provides the ‘created’, something new... each act of speech and each literary work uses the resources of the genre in a specific way in response to a specific individual situation. The genre – similar to the uttered word – is thus changed slightly by each usage... Hence, landscapes are not made of the same ingredients, constantly recycled. Any landscape retains within it the possibility that entirely new perspectives and activities may emerge. Up to the scale of an entire culture, or down to the individual’s chronotopic, personal landscape, all have within them potentials that cannot be completely specified (Bakhtin 1981, 37). That is, they are unfinalisable. The author remains a “captive of his [ sic] epoch, of his own present”, but can be “liberated” from captivity, and it is the scholar or critic – that is, the reader, the interpreter of the text – who “is called upon to assist in this liberation” (Bakhtin 1986, 5).

It is unfinalisability that both permits creativity, and means there is no possibility of designing a ‘perfect’ information system that can subsequently substitute for all necessary cognitive work in a particular situation. It could only do so if all possibilities were predefined, and could thus be coded into a series of algorithms. Such a system would become the aforementioned “single consciousness”, yet could never create new possibilities or accommodate any anomalous inputs at all. No change would be possible in this perfect system. Thus, for Bakhtin, ethics and creativity remain essentially intersubjective, only definable through constant attention to them via active cognitive work, undertaken through dialogue, and the constant scrutiny of utterances which that dialogue represents. A Bakhtinian ethics cannot rest on generic rules and principles. If there is a rule to apply to a situation, it always works, and the rule is known, then any work involved in that (ethical or other) decision disappears. At the other 134 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL extreme, the ethical position that is total relativism – anything goes – also removes that work. The reality lies somewhere between these two positions, hence actors in social situations are always having to make judgements about ethics (Morson and Emerson 1990, 26) – ultimately, about information – and: “That work of judging necessarily involves a risk, a special attention to the particulars of the situation and a special involvement with unique other people at a given moment of their lives.” This dialogic encounter opens any claim up to scrutiny when it encounters genres and other validity claims on which alternative perspectives rest. Thus, the act of co-constructing an ethical framework should be a mutual learning process for all concerned. Ultimately the same is true of other creative acts. If all life were reducible to laws, and explicable by them – even if the laws are not

yet known – “creation becomes mere discovery” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 38). Yet nor can creativity exist in a realm of completely random phenomena ( ibid, 39). Creativity involves finding genuinely new and unexpected possibilities within existing structures and forms. These structures are the “congealed” products of former discourses (Bakhtin 1986, p. 165), but are unfinalised, so remain open to further transformation. Their heritage is stable, but only relatively so: nevertheless, it is this “relatively stable heritage” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 229) which permits true creativity. *** Unfinalisability means that information and communication must be seen as experienced and lived phenomena, and cannot be fully understood abstractly. This epistemology, and the prosaic, polyphonic methodologies which grow from it, places Bakhtin’s work in contrast to any theory of communication which is (Morson and Emerson 1990, 129) “concerned with how readers interpret texts after they are made”. Bakhtin’s epistemology instead “represents readers as shaping the utterance as it is being made” ( ibid). This calls into doubt any form of IL that is concerned only with the retrieval and consumption of texts that have been produced by others. IL must also incorporate attention to the usage and production of texts. Both usage, and subsequent production (or re-production) of text – which could include texts that are written, spoken, performed, photographed, etc. – open any text up to intersubjective checking of the values and assumptions which are encoded within it, and which underlie the landscapes with which it interacts. Usage and production are responses to the utterances of 135 Radical Information Literacy others, and how the potentials of a landscape are explored. The producer (or ‘produser’: Bruns 2009)

can test their own assumptions about a genre or utterance, by opening it up to further responses, through publication. At a high level, this process of publication, review, and response could be considered a wisdom-based approach to information literacy (Bruce 1997), creating new possibilities that may ultimately transform ethical and social structures (see Morson and Emerson 1990, 288). Yet institutionalisation empirically indicates that landscapes can not only be constructed around monologues but be experienced as monologues, denying the possibility that other voices or discourses could be more effective at addressing particular problems. ‘‘Extreme versions of official discourse are similar to autism in so far as they are totalitarian and do not recognize otherness; they abhor difference and aim for a single collective self ’’ (Holquist, 2002, 52). That is, they are monologic. As noted in the previous chapter, with regard to instrumental (monologic) and communicative (dialogic) rationality, it is not that monologism is undesirable in all situations. Both types are important. The assertion of a particular position is, at times, essential, in order to embed the results of dialogue into a landscape, the results of this process being authority and information systems of some kind. But the question is, how can these assertions – these authorities, instruments, systems – be scrutinised? How can we enter into a dialogue with them (cf. Johansson 2012)? Authority is manifested in both the production and the consumption of utterances. An utterance will – and must – draw on forms of expression, characteristics of particular genres, that will either invite scrutiny of the claims inherent within it, or retard this scrutiny. Thus, there are two kinds of authority: the first dialogic, the second monologic. A monologic ‘authoritative’ utterance would come from approved sources or be created to meet pre-ordained criteria, defined by an authority that could range from a Pope to a tenure committee.

Because the subjective and intersubjective realms are intertwined, even a consumer’s internal deliberations regarding a text will be subject to authority (Linell 2009, 133): “The ‘authoritarian’ voice is often akin to ‘commonsense’ or cultural assumptions that the individual does not question, and when the individual internalises the discourse, i.e. the ideas of this voice, it is often a kind of selfdiscipline in Foucaultian terms. These are the canonical, normally unquestioned views that become incorporated into the individual’s self identity.” Individuals also make secondary considerations (Wilson 1983), calculations of cost and benefit (like whether reading the book will secure a higher grade), or they may simply never question the authority that (they are told) is invested in the text. 136 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL Wilson (1983, 135–6) cites Becker (1967, 241) to show the strong links between monologic authority, information systems and hierarchy: “In any system of ranked groups, participants take it as given that members of the highest group have the right to define the way things really are... those at the top have a more complete picture of what is going on than anyone else. Members of lower groups will have incomplete information, and their views of reality will be partial, and distorted in consequence.” But this is a perception. Wilson shows later ( ibid, 154) that the manager, the overseer, still has a perspective that is therefore distorting the reality of what goes on at smaller scales (cf. Blaug 2007). The key organising factor here – how authority is imposed – is, therefore, not through any one individual’s cognition, but the system; this is how the cognition of those at the top of the hierarchy comes to substitute for those of others in the organisation (Blaug 2007; 2010). While the relationship between the speaker and addressee of an utterance is an innately reciprocal one (Bakhtin 1986, 121–2), in situations where authority is asserted this reciprocity, this dialogue, may be skewed, denied, concealed, or simply ignored. Non-reciprocity is inherent to

hierarchical systems of exchange (Graeber 2012), and in a nonreciprocal information exchange, one side can scrutinise the claims of the other, but not vice versa. Yet the perceptions which support this imbalance always retain a potential to be challenged, by prosaic, everyday practice, whenever one enters into some kind of dialogue with a cognitive authority. In dialogue, the act of asserting something immediately invites critical, intersubjective attention to that assertion. A monologic assertion, conversely, “will probably be cited in a type of reported speech allowing for little opportunity to express agreement, disagreement, or other personal opinions. There may also be a tendency to ‘depersonalize’ and ‘disembody’ the authoritative figure’s speech, so that it is not perceived as merely one person’s opinion...” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 164; via Voloshinov 1973). Thus, when one encounters an information system, one tends to become a ‘client’ or an ‘employee’ (cf. Habermas 1987), an ID number, rather than a person, a unique identity. Nor will the system’s processes be identified with the individuals who have coded it, and/or whose assumptions and values have influenced the design. As with the military command, there is little that can be done directly to respond to these kinds of system-generated utterances, except to withdraw from use of the system – which may not always be straightforward, or possible to do without incurring sanction. 137 Radical Information Literacy Once again, however, it must be remembered that dialogue, the ideal communicatively rational form of speech, and monologue, the ideal instrumentally rational form, are complementary. Just as Klein and Truex (1996: see chapter 4 above) saw that instrumental action was needed after communicative actions in order to implement rational decisions, so monologic and abstracting statements about the human world may be both the product of enquiries and essential starting points for further enquiry (Gardiner 2004, 34). Problems of validity come not with monologic

utterances per se, then, but arise when the claims inherent in these statements fall away from dialogic scrutiny, lose their provisionality, and become reified (Morson and Emerson 1990, 59). For Bakhtin, dialogue is “centrifugal”; through dialogue, possibilities inherent in utterances are “pushed out” to individual speakers interacting within networks and communities, exploring ideas and forming knowledge polyphonically (cf. Hall 1968, 91 who used the term “sociofugal”). Yet each utterance can also be “centripetal” (Bakhtin, 1981, 272), meaning a force that pulls towards the centre. Specific genres and forms of speech can attract “words and forms into their orbit by means of their own characteristic intentions and accents, and in so doing to a certain extent alienating these words and forms from other tendencies, parties, artistic works and persons” ( ibid, 290). As Linell (2009, 213) puts it, this contrast, between centripetal and centrifugal forces, is also a way of conceiving “the tension between, on the one hand, responding to and perhaps conforming with what the other has just said and, on the other, injecting new and perhaps divergent ideas, associations and initiatives to new communicative projects”. All discourse can therefore be considered “a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language” (Bakhtin 1981 , 272). Centripetal forces pull towards a unified language, devaluing idiosyncratic usages, dialects, and experimentations with form. This applies both in linguistic terms (e.g. academic papers are expected to be written in the ‘high’ form of any language and – increasingly – the English language), but also in terms of genre. It is hard to get any academic paper published that does not conform to, at least, the expectations of a given journal or editor, and there is no guarantee that one’s institution will accept an unconventional publication when making judgements about promotion or tenure. Other professions will have their equivalents. Thus, a concept of ‘literariness’ is embedded into the landscape. It is how ‘authoritative’

people speak, it gives one credibility in a particular genre. Such discourses serve to “preserve local interests at the national level... or to defend the interests of cultural-political centralization...” ( ibid, 382). 138 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL There is also variation within genres around how the speaker conceives of the addressee. Who are they? How should they be addressed, and what response do we expect from them (Bakhtin 1986, 96–8)? These also help define authority. One can make generalisations about particular genres here, but though this, like other abstractions, may provide useful general insights, these issues still need working out at the level of communicative practice, at the point in space and time (the chronotope) that specific utterances are made. Authority is therefore worked out at a continuum of levels, from the most abstract considerations (is the utterance phrased in ways that assert some kind of authority?) to very concrete and personal ones (does it accord with the reader’s prior experience, will they face sanctions of any kind if they refuse to accept the authority of the utterance?). Factors such as emotion and personal trust also come into play. Bakhtin still has to face the problem of relativism. Is all authority simply a matter of agreeing that something is true? Thompson (2008) would rightly call this counterknowledge. Is it morally right to refuse to accept authority of some kind, simply because one has chosen to do so, inside a specific chronotope? While justifiable in certain cases, this is by no means always true, and taken to its extreme would constitute a nihilistic rejection of any authority external to the self: the person would be a sociopath. How can these extremes be avoided within dialogism? Bakhtin’s solution is to posit that there is an ultimate, non-relativistic authority, but it is unreachable, so only ever approached or invoked in principle. Nevertheless, like the speed of light, which cannot be

reached in reality but still governs physical reality, this authority is inherently present in all communication. The ‘superaddressee’ is an essential psychological element of effective communication, akin to an idealised listener, dispassionate, unbiased, and open to being swayed by the force of the better argument (cf. Habermas 1984). It is the ideal respondent against whom the real addressee’s responses can be judged: “a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it. This follows from the nature of the word, which always wants to be heard, always seeks responsive understanding, and does not stop at immediate understanding but presses on further and further (indefinitely).” (Bakhtin 1986, 126–7). Thus, the superaddressee plays a role in Bakhtin’s theory analogous to Habermas’s ISS. Remove it, and the possibility of progression towards ever-greater understanding disappears (Morson and Emerson 1990, 125–6; Bakhtin 1986, 126–8). This would cast all speakers into a relativist dungeon, where one’s chance of being heard depends only on random contextual events. Thus, the superaddressee is necessary to retain 139 Radical Information Literacy the possibility of validity claims. It is this notion – admittedly underdeveloped in Bakhtin’s theories2 – that makes his politics more than just reactive, a “constant struggle to maintain freedom in a world characterized by discursive cunning and infinite subtle forms of rhetorical coercion” (Garvey 2000, 385). Instead, the superaddressee gives his theory normative force, a belief that the worth of different communications can be judged according to criteria that are not just pragmatic, imposed through force, or habit. But though these criteria are innately dialogic, monologue emerges when the superaddressee stops being treated as an abstract, unreachable ideal, and starts being reified as a concrete point in discourse which could be reached if only there were ways to get enough people to agree on something. At best, a speaker would be

using rhetoric at this point, perhaps appealing to notions such as ‘common sense’, ‘natural justice’, or ‘truth’. Further still, this is one way that dominant groups and their discourses try to position themselves as a final arbiter of validity, removing their claims to objectivity from all scrutiny, and possibly enforcing a position on others. This starts with depersonalisation of both speaker and addressee. This may be a valid move to make in discourse: many utterances can be quite validly described as generic. But the removal of the addressee from personal consideration also challenges the right of any given addressee to respond to the utterance, except in a similarly depersonalised way. When a speaker places their role or position at the forefront of consideration and speaks, not as themselves, but as a representative of something else, they become an interface to a system, expressing the cognitive authority of that system (cf. Blaug 2010). Depersonalisation has occurred. The ability to respond to the claims of the speaker is being instrumentally taken out of the exchange: thus, a monologue is emerging. The extreme is invoked in the superaddressee’s “mirror image”, the Fascist or Orwellian state police, the torturer, the panoptic surveillance society forcing conformity and having totally removed the individual from consideration or empathy (Bakhtin 1986, 126: Garvey 2000, 386). In that these counterposed tendencies – monologic and dialogic forms of authority – are inherent in all speech, the counterplay between them (Morson and Emerson 1990, 219): (P)lays a role in all social groups, down to ‘each small world of the family, friends, acquaintances and comrades in which a human being grows and lives’ (Bakhtin 1986, 88). Authoritative discourses set the tone for action in a given sphere of life; and they are assimilated into the psyche to set the tone for a particular sphere of thought.

140 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL This is a Foucauldian view of the link between discourse and power (Foucault 1980, 93): (R)elations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse... Persuasive, authoritative voices, texts, or discourses nevertheless vie within us internally, and also within our landscapes. As we all struggle with this debate individually, we may see previously persuasive voices lose their authority. This, in the end, is the basis of transformation. Once an authoritative voice has been challenged, the potential always remains for it to be challenged again (Bakhtin 1981, 332). To defend itself, the claims of authority may be expressed in ever more monologic ways, closing off avenues of response. Yet (Morson and Emerson 1990, 355): Despite its pose of immobility, ennobled discourse undergoes constant change, in both literature and extraliterary life. Given the fact that the pose of immobility is just that – a pose, polemically ignoring vulgar life – such change is implicit in the very nature of the discourse. It carries the traces of whatever it is at the moment straining not to see. As new kinds of vulgarity and heteroglossia accumulate, new kinds of literariness arise to ‘ignore’ them. *** One not only can enter into a dialogue with information systems (authoritative voices); one must do so (Morson and Emerson 1990, 222): (A)greement... is a truly dialogic relation, and to agree with a discourse is already to have tested it, deprived it of unconditional allegiance, and integrated it into one’s own framework. One has told it in one’s own words, and whether those words seem acceptable or

unacceptable, they are still partially one’s own. Conversely, mere hostility to authoritative discourse may leave its status as absolutely authoritative unchallenged... To take on responsibility with respect to a discourse, or to any kind of authority, it is necessary not to dislike it, but to enter into dialogue with it – that is, to test, assimilate and reaccentuate it. 141 Radical Information Literacy This is the ideal of strong objectivity (Harding 1993, cf. chapter 1 above). Dialogue assesses the validity of a discourse while simultaneously allowing for the possibility of its falsification. Asserting the value of knowledge produced in context can therefore have a positive effect on the content of science (Harding 1993, 51) where the validity claims of the investigation were previously concealed. This ultimately produces “stronger standards for ‘good method’, ones that can guide competent efforts to maximise objectivity” ( ibid, 52). In other words, it turns the authority from monologic to dialogic, strengthening it as a result. Invoking these issues, of the validation of science, it is important here to revisit and restate the difference between human and natural science. The latter deals with non-human ‘voiceless things’, and monologic forms of knowledge are appropriate in this realm: knowledge developed through positivistic methods and systematic, rigorous, scientific enquiry. To assert otherwise would invoke the ire of writers such as Thompson (2008), who would attack those who, either through ignorance or in the name of such intellectual arguments as postmodernism, claimed that certain fundamental constants are in fact relativistic, or even depend on context. Such a view would recall

the hoax wherein a physics Professor, Alain Sokal, fabricated a nonsense paper called “The Positive Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” and had it accepted by a journal, Social Text (Thompson 2008, 121–2). Yet the natural sciences are still dialogic at the level of analysis – and can and should have their claims to objectivity opened up to critical, and dialogic, scrutiny. Calling for a greater involvement in critical attention to the claims of science is no different from calling for greater public engagement with science, awareness of methods, and a willingness to engage in valid and reliable research as a practice, and this would be a political, liberatory process (cf Levine 2007). It must also be stressed once more that the study of the non-human realm is fundamentally different from that of the human realm. Wilson (1983, 88 ff) recognises this, going so far as to say that social science has nowhere near the same level of cognitive authority as natural science – partly because of the fundamentally ill-structured and unpredictable nature of the former, and partly because (1983, 89) “the business of the social sciences is everybody’s business and not left by default to academic social scientists to investigate”. In other words, it deals in large part with everyday, prosaic situations with which we are all at least intuitively familiar – not with natural processes that require specialised instrumentation to detect and analyse. Bakhtin was quite clear that the 142 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL non-human realm requires a different epistemology from the human realm. The latter is transmitted by language, which introduces uncertainty and unfinalisability into the ontology, and requires an epistemology that is not positivist and empiricist (an approach which is quite appropriate in the natural sciences). All in all, then, one can call into question the presentation and validity claims of particular utterances in the scientific realm without any need to claim that scientific constants are somehow relative: a

nonsense perspective and one that would shatter any argument based on it. Gravity is a constant – it exists – it is not some rule written into a governing algorithm that we can eventually, with enough cognitive work, reveal, scrutinize, and transform, allowing us to fly through the air by will alone3. But the utterance ‘Gravity is a constant’ is one that is set into a context and which, by being stated, opens its validity claims up to scrutiny. If this were not the case then Sokal could not have written his hoax paper and Social Text, whatever its peer review practices, could never have accepted it. Indeed, by calling into question the specific uses of language in this case, and making a political point about peer reviewing practices in this journal, and postmodernity more generally, Sokal’s paper was not nonsense at all. It was a very effective utterance, one made specifically in the human realm of knowledge-formation. Thus, the non-human realm exists but has a different epistemology from the human, and scientific discourse remains in the latter (Bakhtin 1981, 351): In scientific activity one must, of course, deal with another’s discourse – the words of predecessors, the judgments of critics, majority opinion and so forth... but all this remains a mere operational necessity and does not affect the subject matter itself of the science, into whose composition the speaker and his discourse do not, of course, enter. The entire methodological apparatus of the mathematical and natural sciences is directed toward mastery over mute objects, brute things, that do not reveal themselves in words, that do not comment on themselves.... In the humanities... there arises the specific task of establishing, transmitting and interpreting the words of others... The promotion of positivist methods in the humanities is not just inappropriate, therefore, it is actively exclusionary (cf. Harding 2003), as it seeks to create abstract forms of knowledge. At its extreme, this 143

Radical Information Literacy kind of abstract understanding “is completely separated from the living, ideological power of the word to mean – from its truth or falsity, its significance or insignificance, beauty or ugliness. Such a reified word-thing cannot be understood by attempts to penetrate its meaning dialogically: there can be no conversing with such a word.” (ibid, 352). However, as Bakhtin noted in Towards a Methodology in the Human Sciences, a study in the humanities must always deal with two or more subjects, each with their own voice and thus capable of dialogue. To treat these subjects as ‘voiceless things’ is a choice, which on occasion can be beneficial for certain tasks, but this choice should be made in the full knowledge that this does not (and can never) lead to full creative understanding and will always provide a limited view of the world (Morson and Emerson 1990, 98). More specific versions of this critique have been made in various fields, including Burrell (1997), who critiques the use of positivist and abstracting methods in organisational studies and Carr and Kemmis (1986) in education: chapter 4 above has already done much the same for IL. Yet the fact that such work in the humanities continues nonetheless is a sign of two things: first, that there needs to be some level of monologism and temporary finalisation if any dialogue is to contribute to knowledge-formation – and second, a long-standing institutionalisation of the ensuing practices. Institutionalisation is centripetal, pulling things into a monologic interpretation of a field and constructing utterances in ways that limit possibilities for response, and Wilson (1983, 51) notes how various professions (not just academia) assert cognitive authority: “Professions generally aim to get and keep a monopoly on the right to criticize their own work by claiming that outsiders are incompetent to judge the merits and defects of their work”. Institutionalisation of this sort does not occur because a particular view – originating from a specific moment in space and time, or a specific chronotope – is somehow

‘more valid’ than others. Bakthin’s epistemology shows that such a view is impossible in a humanistic field of study: validity comes about through scrutiny. Thus, there is a need to study the fact of institutionalisation and how this in itself is representative of a particular landscape. As Douglas (1986) noted, the authority of monologic views needs to be asserted through some kind of structure through which the force can be channeled; some kind of control over the formation of knowledge, that exists in lived situations, not the abstract forms of langauge itself. Technology and procedure – designed according to the dictates of instrumental rationality rather than communicative – play a significant 144 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL role here. Technology becomes a conduit for centripetal force – the centralisation of knowledge-forming capacity – when the assumptions that have gone into its programming are concealed. A good example of this comes from Van Dijck (2010), who suggests that search engines like Google Scholar should be seen as being coproducers of knowledge. In Bakhtin’s terms, the tool is shaping the utterance. However, its validity claims, indeed its very role in this process, are concealed, largely for reasons of commercial confidentiality. For example, at the time van Dijck wrote, Google Scholar had no connection to Elsevier’s database, itself a significant shaper of academic text (van Dijck 2010, 577). Yet this challenge to its authority is not a clear part of the Google Scholar interfaces (input or output), hence it goes unscrutinised by those who use this tool to judge credibility and therefore validity of any texts that it helps find (in essence, Google Scholar is acting as a locator, level 2 of Kuhlthau’s (1993) categories of mediation, introduced in chapter 3 above). All in all ( ibid, 580): “In a network society, search engines like Google Scholar constitute a nodal point of power, while the mechanism of knowledge production is effectively hidden in the coded mechanisms of the engine, as well as in the unarticulated

conventions of scholarly use, such as quality assessment and source presentation.” Intellectual property regimes are another example of how access to information can be defined in ways that are opposed to the polyphonic, evolving nature of text (Luyt and Azura 2010). Instead, in an instrumental way, they assert the rights, not even of the author necessarily, but the (corporate) publisher. “Commons-based” landscapes thus become enclosed and privatised (cf. Hess and Ostrom 2007). Luyt and Azura implicate institutionalised IL in this process: “In today’s digital version of the enclosure movement, information literacy is implicated. Many of the information literacy standards explicitly acknowledge without criticism the tightening copyright regime” (Luyt and Azura 2010, no pagination). This kind of authority can be asserted in more intersubjective ways, which nevertheless remain exclusionary. Mark (2011a, 5) investigates peer review, and generally notes the exclusivity of academic discourses: “In the culture of the academy, faculty are the experts and the process of naming is the purview of faculty. Faculty have a stake culturally, politically, and economically in expertise and hence a stake in naming and controlling dialogue.” The authoritative voice here is systemic, not invested in an individual – but it remains exclusionary and unifying. The whole process of formal academic study can be considered as a way of 145 Radical Information Literacy acquiring the genre repertoire and, hence, legitimacy in this landscape (Mark 2011a, 6): “The purpose of papers and research assignments often is to train students out of the colloquial voice, to have students adopt the language and conventions of academia.” She also asks (2011b, 25): “What if educators constructed a theory of information literacy where students’ opinions about information were as valid as professors’?”

Chapters 7 and 8 address this task in part, but note straight away that this question poses an explicit challenge to the notion of the authoritative voice, and an admission that within HE students and faculty – and the library – occupy different contexts. Mark also says that (2011b, 25): “Freire wrote that the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she or he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students”. The point is about how the student should ascertain for themselves the authority of the knowledge, and not simply accept it because the professor (or librarian) has said it is authoritative. Historically, this has always been the professed aim of higher education, particularly in its later stages: indeed, PhDs oblige such challenge to occur, with a requirement that the thesis is a report on original research. This kind of work is based around practices that fuel the creation of new knowledge within the discipline: all good science, though (cf. Goldacre 2008), is presented using genre conventions that hold its claims up to intersubjective scrutiny through certain conduits, principally the conference and journal, but with increasing contributions from new media. Nevertheless, the university and academia as institutions also serve to exclude large proportions of the population from contributing to dialogues which originate within them, even when matters affect them directly or indirectly – as do all institutions. This has important consequences for how libraries and universities can contribute to radical IL, but that is a subject which should be left for another chapter. Bakhtin has offered much to the study of IL, and to radical forms of it. His work shows how authority can be embedded in landscapes in different ways, and how this is a communicative act. Yet it is precisely because it is communicative, and hence informational and dialogic, that it can be challenged, for no ultimate and final cognitive authority can possibly exist, even if it can be invoked via the ‘superaddressee’. Extant structures of information processing, being the congealed products of former discourses, shape utterances in

various ways, but they cannot, for all time, determine the content of these utterances, nor dictate how people will respond to them. Thus, while there is clearly structure, there 146 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL is also agency in a Bakhtinian world. Dialogue is that form of knowledge-formation which opens validity claims up to scrutiny. It is an innate challenge to the authority of more monologic forms and it is only through such challenge that the validity of monologic statements can be truly determined. Thus, while Bakhtin does not share Habermas’s views on the desirability of consensus, and would problematise the distinctions Habermas draws between spheres of human action, he nevertheless supports the position that communicative competence of some kind is essential if transformation of cognitive authority is to have a chance of occurring through dialogue. It is this competence which constitutes information literacy in a broad sense (Whitworth 2007), and this is a competence which can only be exhibited in prosaic, everyday communicative practice, a lived experience. Bakhtin’s work shows definitively that information and communication, and the sociolinguistic structures which have evolved over time to shape them, are fundamental to human activity: hence, so is IL. IL is educational – or at least, learning-based – in large part, and libraries and universities are among the professional groups in society well placed to help nurture IL in certain populations. But to declare that IL is solely educational, solely oriented to texts that can be found in a library, higher education institution, or search engine, solely rooted in one or other frame; these are all examples of monologic thinking. They neglect the empirical diversity and polyphony of human responses to information, the role of uncertainty and unreason, and the role authority plays in each particular context. The remaining chapters of this book will explore the consequences of this statement. Notes

1. Ethnomethodological and other studies may focus on prosaic communication (Linell 2009 has several examples) but even here, the study is typically driven from within specialised context of the academy, and not by the prosaic concerns of the research participants. 2. The superaddressee concept does not emerge into Bakhtin’s writing until just before his death. 3. Compare this with the ontology expressed in the fictional, computer-generated world of The Matrix (1999, dir. the Wachowski brothers), where all this is the case, and gravity can be ignored by those who have achieved a high enough level of awareness of the rules by which that world functions. 147 This page intentionally left blank 7 Practising IL Abstract: This chapter examines practice-based views of IL in more detail and links them with the phenomenographical view, via the idea of mapping the information landscape. Producing such maps is the outcome of a learning process, often engaged in unconsciously. Practice and transformation — thus, the experience of information literacy — can be controlled when these learning processes are not sufficiently relational to allow all experiences of variation to appear in a map (outcome space). Key Words: Information practice, socialisation, reflective practice, mapping. By this point it is assumed that the need for a practice-based approach has been justified. Limberg et al (2012) stated that

sociocultural practice theory was one of the three key theories of IL, along with phenomenography and discourse analysis. But though Limberg et al discuss each theoretical field’s implications for IL, their paper is not a synthesis of phenomenography, practice, and prosaics, in the way that this book is. That synthesis can now be completed, by returning to some ideas which have emerged from the IL-as-practice school and using them to explore that school’s methodological connections with IL-as-learning. By doing so it can be shown how both views of IL can support radical IL, or IL as transformation. These connections arise through the notion that the information landscape is a space that can be mapped, that producing such maps is the outcome of a learning process, but also that practice and transformation can be controlled when these learning processes are not sufficiently relational to allow all experiences of variation to appear in a map (outcome space). The previous three chapters, 4–6, have explored institutionalisation, colonisation, and authority, and justified the conclusion reached at the end of chapter 3, that the phenomenographical enquiry must be a critical one if it is to reveal (map) not just the variation within a landscape, but 149 Radical Information Literacy the unequal distribution of both cognitive authority itself and the resources needed to scrutinise that authority. Hence, a critical view of the learning-practice link will demonstrate why not all experiences of variation will be equally supported by the structures of authority and information exchange within a landscape. Unequal distributions of cognitive authority are a result of the need to periodically embed the results of discourse in information systems and texts. However, unequal distributions of the resources needed to scrutinise and, if necessary, challenge and transform authority are manifestations of hegemony. Pace Hamelink, Gramsci and Freire, then, radical IL seeks to address this latter problem of distribution, and it does so not through setting standards, focusing on technology or proposing alterations to any existing

information system, but rather by influencing practice. In short, radical IL seeks directly to close the theory-practice gap. *** Hultgren (2009, 45) defines information practice as a concept which: “can be used to identify and define sets of information related activities and procedures that are created collectively. They can be described as socially sanctioned and structured tools which social groups use to monitor their worlds”. Practices include those for “scanning, actively seeking, and avoiding information, and for being identified as an information seeker. Such activities are socially and culturally embedded, they are learned through interactions with others and they are used not only to generate information relevant to the actor’s situation but also as a means of orienting in the world, gaining control over one’s life and to demonstrate one’s position in the world” ( ibid, 54). Lloyd notes that (2010b, 249, via Schatzki 2006): Practices are constituted as open-ended, spatio-temporal manifolds of actions that are organised in three ways. First, an understanding of how to do things (practical understanding), e.g. explaining, questioning, and describing. Second, rules i.e. the formulations that prescribe, require or instruct. Third, teleoaffective features which structure emotions that are acceptable or prescribed for participants in practice. Like cognition, practice is distributed across mind, body and world, having an “affective and embodied” dimension as well as a cognitive one ( ibid). Analysis of practice cannot therefore just reduce the practice to 150 Practising IL the action of an individual, but must focus on “how the practice is constructed corporeally and socially and how these features are

interwoven and mesh together within a social site” ( ibid). Texts of various kinds do play a significant role in constructing practice, but practice-based investigations of IL highlight the blinkers which IL tends to wear, particularly as taught through the content and competency frames: namely, seeing IL as applicable only to certain types of texts, those which can be found through a library or a search engine. Even forms of IL which look beyond just written texts, and include video and imagery, retain an implied emphasis on what has been (or could be) subject to publication. What IL-as-practice impels is an acknowledgement that IL is relevant to any text, including sociotechnical information systems as a whole and also social relations. Practice is therefore an innately intersubjective concept ( ibid, 250): All practices are social therefore they are not constituted as individual self-sufficient activity, but are located within and through group activities – formed, interwoven and sanctioned through a dialogic intra-group process. This suggests that there is an intersubjective dimension to the concept, its dimensions and arrangement, which facilitates the development of shared understanding and shared skills (Schatzki, 2001). In writing about practice as the property of groups, Kemmis (2006) suggests that they are ‘shaped through histories and traditions that locate practices in such a way that they are “inherited” already formed, by contemporary practitioners, who in their turn, become the custodians and developers of practices’ (p. 2.) Therefore practices are understood, organised and conducted through the discourses that characterise and shape a setting... Drawing on all these observations, Lloyd comes to see information literacy as certainly more than an outcome of a learning process, and also more than just a tool to achieve certain ends. Instead, information literacy is fundamental: it is the source of practice. In general (Lloyd 2012, 773): “[i]nformation landscapes reflect the modalities of information (agreed upon sources) that people draw upon in the performance of their practices in working or everyday life, and therefore constitute the intersubjective agreement that informs our situated realities...” Therefore, focusing on how IL

emerges in a setting is a way of investigating the information exchanges, genres, and artifacts that 151 Radical Information Literacy ( ibid, 772): “reveal the nature of a setting, particularly in relation to what information and knowledge are sanctioned and legitimized”. IL therefore does not exist independently of the landscape ( ibid, 774): (P)articipating collectively in a social setting bring[s] practices such as information literacy into being, and shape[s] it in ways that are collectively agreed upon through negotiation, and in ways that reflect the practice traditions of the setting. In effect, people engage with a discourse that governs agreements about what is accepted as information and knowledge, and also what activities are acceptable in the performance of becoming information literate (Lloyd, 2006; Sundin, 2008). These are significant conclusions, as they explain why IL cannot be a generic practice, even when it draws on standards. IL is an understanding of what “modalities of information... are considered credible and authoritative”, but this enquiry varies, in both methods and results, from landscape to landscape ( ibid, 777). The outcomes of such enquiries govern practice, because they establish conventions of information exchange, or “practice architectures” ( ibid, 775, via Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008): (P)ractice architectures provide the enabling or constraining preconditions for practice by orchestrating the activities of individuals who are co-located and co-participating in a particular setting thus enabling individuals to become drawn into its collective practices... Thus, there is a strongly social and intersubjective aspect in how we become drawn into collective practices, and thus enter a practice community ( ibid): When we are stirred into a practice (by mediators such as teachers, other workers, or people in our communities, or by the material

objects that inhabit our contexts), we are drawn into the information landscapes that compose a setting. We are also introduced to the ways of knowing that connect us to the arrangements that enable us to become aligned to socio-cultural, material-economic and historical traditions of the setting. We learn how to take on professional or occupational identity and learn to identify and affiliate with 152 Practising IL others in the same field, through the practices and performance of our occupation; we learn to become members of a community in the same way. This process of socialisation is, again, not solely cognitive, but distributed across mind, body, and world (technologies, information systems, social relations, and ways of using words). In the first place, from the very earliest stages of becoming a practitioner, “ it is through language that the object and its background are differentiated for the novice” (Gherardi, Nicolini and Odella 1998, 282). However, non-linguistic communicative elements: that is, embodied acts such as pointing, doing things in a certain order, movement through a physical space, or operation of a technological interface, also play a part. The structures which socialise novice practitioners are also constrained by information systems designed around assumptions and values that may or may not be explicit. “Accordingly, one of the most important skills that a novice must learn is ‘how to see’” ( ibid, 282); that is, reveal and learn the practices that comprise the landscape. At first, novices tend to apply context-independent rules, or practices from other landscapes and communities they are familiar with. As competence increases, and they become more embedded in the landscape, they may seek guidance from formalised educational resources, e.g. textbooks, web pages: here the content and competency frames of IL can certainly play a part in their becoming proficient. But one also learns to recognise non-textual elements of practice, and “situational elements which depend on the context” ( ibid, 276). Through processes like these, novices learn to become more practiced within a given

landscape – they become more literate in its genres and acquire an authority that may also be recognised in similar settings (such as a different organisation in the same sector). This cannot be done simply by reading about practice, but engaging in it, becoming part of a community of practice (Wenger 1998, Wenger et al 2009), and acquiring ways and habits of engaging with that community’s information landscape that remain unique to the individual, but which are also intersubjectively conditioned by the community. So far, this section has provided a general definition of practice and described ideal ways in which actors in a social setting learn to become practitioners – that is, comfortable with the genres and systems that exist within their landscape, and invested with a certain amount of cognitive authority therein and, consequently, able to change their practice and that of others. However, this ideal is not always reachable in practice. Practice may be developed in ways that retain for an individual the awareness and 153 Radical Information Literacy opportunity to keep his/her practice under review, leaving the assumptions beneath practice open to scrutiny, but communities of practice can be closed and parochial, even dysfunctional. They may also be disempowered, deliberately or not, by practice architectures that reflect more dominant interests in the community, such as those further up an organisational hierarchy. Different landscapes and practice architectures will be differently configured, depending on the intersubjective understanding of questions like: what information is appropriate to share or not share within a context? What information is shared in a communistic way and what hierarchical? What genres marshal and guide these exchanges? What forms of knowledge and practice are considered valid? Whose inquiries construct practice, and embed it into information systems? What support can be drawn from the landscape generally: is it set up in ways that privilege certain viewpoints, or is it a landscape that

allows a multitude of voices (Bakhtin’s “polyphony”) to establish their own authority over information? If the latter, is this a cacophonous and formless diversity, what Keen (2007) would see as “the cult of the amateur”? Or are there structures which offer conduits for these intersubjective agreements to become instrumental action: that is, ways to channel dialogue into the transformation of practice? And once such transformation has occurred, can it be kept under review, and made the subject of further enquiries, or have more monologic forms of cognitive authority come into play, producing an information system that is closed to subsequent scrutiny? Do actors have access to all available cognitive tools and the full experience of variation within the landscape, or are aspects of it closed off behind nonreciprocal forms of information exchange, possibly the abstract construct of “confidentiality”1? These various questions can potentially be answered by philosophical speculation, or by scientific, abstracting research, conducted from a position external to the community. But the results of such inquiries cannot change a landscape until they are put into practice. Carr and Kemmis (1986, passim) see this as the fundamental characteristic of professional activity in education. They mean not that practice should be performed automatically, being merely a response to stimuli developed externally, such as standard operating procedures, guides to ‘best practice’, standards, and so on. These resources can assist a practitioner, for certain, but it is incumbent on the good practitioner to always reflect on their applicability in a particular chronotope: that is, make a judgement as to their relevance in a particular setting. In that this is the core driver of IL, it can be seen how being information literate is essential to becoming a practitioner. 154 Practising IL Reflective practice is called for by many other authors in the Education field (e.g. Schön 1983; Brookfield 1995; Reason and Bradbury 2001; Loughran 2002; for IL educators see Whitworth

2012). All see it as a way of raising awareness of how knowledge formation can become constrained by the constructs and categories of description that have shaped an individual’s upbringing and training. The existence of such ‘constraints’ is not a negative: we must limit our informational intake somehow, in order to save cognitive work. And, to some extent, information seeking itself is an activity “focused on discovering, or becoming aware of, the context in which the individual is embedded and how the system of categories that describes it works” (Hultgren 2009, 76). But reflective practice is more active and critical: it involves the scrutiny of the act, and the assumptions which underlie the act – double-loop learning, in other words (Argyris and Schön 1999). Reflective practice is how practitioners can enhance their awareness of their professional status and validity claims regarding their activity, and promote these at the expense of generic claims and the consequent engineering of their landscapes by ‘experts’ (in academic research establishments, in governments, wherever). Reflective practice does not ‘just happen’, however: as with other aspects of radical IL, there needs to be a supportive infrastructure, and also some level of individual motivation (Hultgren 2009, 85): Reflection on the motives for, and meaning of our activities occurs only if the actor sees pragmatic reasons for doing so; otherwise our activities tend to be a ‘matter of course’ and a part of the ‘natural attitude’ – things we do without paying much attention to the actual ‘doing’ and of which information seeking is a case in point. Reflection is a choice one makes, a kind of stepping aside for a moment in order to articulate knowledge of the social context of our activities, even if it is only to oneself. Nevertheless, this kind of constant evaluation of practice – reviewing the assumptions underlying acts, as well as one’s progress towards the act –

is what constitutes double-loop learning: thus, the scrutiny of validity claims and cognitive authorities within a landscape that must periodically take place. The theory of radical IL therefore suggests that reflective practice is not just something which should be adopted by professional educators, but which is fundamental to learning throughout society, including informal learning. Through such cognitive work, all validity 155 Radical Information Literacy claims are scrutinised and their applicability in particular contexts is tested in practice. That is, the community would be continually validating its practices through double-loop learning. It is this kind of governance – now expressed not in a monarchic, or oligarchical, but a collective authority – that is the essence of a democracy considered as a practical, lived experience. It is also, if linked to valid methodologies for researching the world, how one avoids counterknowledge and secures “strong objectivity” (Harding 1993). A few paragraphs ago, a range of questions were posed, the various answers to which would reveal some of the diversity within real information landscapes. Not all practice architectures will be constructed in ways that are as conducive to transformation as others. In these characteristics of landscapes reside the power relations which can put a brake on transformation and the redistribution of cognitive authority within a landscape. The IL-aspractice approach fully acknowledges that communication, and hence information, has an embodied aspect: “... embodied persons are not simply constructs, but are productive bodies capable of activities that change the nature of their lives... their natural habitats and... their social scenarios” (Burkitt 1999, 2). Systems of information processing acknowledge this, as within them, relations of power “constitute attempts to restrain and curtail bodily powers through regulations around the formation and exercise of capacities and agency”

(Burkitt 1999, 3). In other words, restrictions are often placed on the ability of social actors not just to state that practice should be transformed, but to then transform it. These restrictions can be direct, with undesirable practices subject to sanction; they may also be indirect, with practitioners denied the financial, intellectual, or linguistic resources they need to either develop practice, or to properly scrutinise and evaluate it. At times there are valid reasons to restrict practice and the ability to transform it. This is recognised most clearly in the conventions of democratic practice, such as checks placed on the ability of a monarch or oligarch to wield the political system as an instrument in their own interest. The ability to transform a practice may be limited because of valid and – importantly – open and scrutinised agreements from members of the landscape. This may be for entirely pragmatic reasons, such as to avoid open conflict or danger (seeking to transform the practice that one should not operate heavy machinery while drunk will likely be rejected or sanctioned, for obvious reasons), but it may also be because of shared values that can be regularly reviewed. However, cognitive authority also comes into play. Socialisation is not a passive thing, a mere acquisition: the newcomer is not a ‘social dope’, but straight away an actor, a product 156 Practising IL and producer of the landscape (Gherardi et al 1998, 283). Yet novices also tend to have limited authority within the landscape, and again this can be linguistic and communicative, rather than formally bounded by organisational constraints such as rules and sanctions. Gherardi et al observed authoritarian styles of language in use by more established practitioners, “where no effort was made to help the novices learn from what they did” ( ibid 289): thus, not orienting their practice toward any kind of distribution of their authority. In part this was also because expert practitioners did not necessarily include the genre of teaching in their repertoire ( ibid, 292–3): some experts are brilliant teachers, others less so, as every former student

knows. But senior members of groups also exhibited “jealous custodianship of their expertise” and the influence that comes with it ( ibid, 290). Wilson (1983, 63) noted that: “An innovation made by one with no particular authority will not become fashionable unless taken up by those who do have authority, who legitimize the innovation, making acceptable for others to try and exerting an influence that may lead others to try.” Thus, one’s position in a social network, as well as within an organisational hierarchy, and the cognitive authority or capital which one has acquired within a landscape, will be factors in how easily one can shape one’s own practice, and that of others. *** Studies that use a practice perspective have highlighted issues with information processing in organisations that other views of IL may have missed. This perspective shows how macro-level organisational factors and micro-level practices combine to form information landscapes. For example, Urquhart & Rowley (2007) examined student information behaviour and concluded that it was affected by macro factors such as the ICT infrastructure, policies, funding, and organisational leadership, which comprised the practice architecture in this case. Huvila (2010) described how in corporate finance firms in Finland, decisions about information were made not primarily on the basis of relevance, but on how individuals thought the information would affect their chances of success at work. This in turn was defined differently by different people, some in terms of the organisation’s profits (short-term, longer-term), others with reference to salary, promotion, prestige, or work-life balance. Huvila points out that understanding these effects makes it possible, within a particular context, to predict what sort of sources will be preferred, and thus design appropriate assistive strategies. In this regard his objectives are similar to the “Aggregate-then-Curate” project of Whitworth, Garnett and Pearson (2012): see chapter 8. 157

Radical Information Literacy Workplace studies show how IL can be relevant to organisational operations and practices that are not always present in formal education. Chou, Chen and Pu (2005; 2008) conducted a study of Taiwanese civil servants’ propensity to engage in collective action, measured with reference to their level of IL. The context for this study was the introduction of e-government in Taiwan, and the authors postulated that low levels of IL were retarding the move in this direction. They concluded individuals with higher levels of IL were more likely to seek to transform practices in response to the move. Zhang, Majid and Foo (2010) examined IL vis-à-vis “environmental scanning”: that is, an organisation seeking information about its wider environment as a way of perceiving and responding to risk (see also Nara 2007). This is an interesting idea as, while it is conceptually indistinguishable from developing a general awareness of the environment, which we all do at a subconscious level – Bates (2002, 128, cited in Tavares et al 2011, 127) claims that 80% of information is absorbed this way, and Blaug (2007) notes that this always forms the first stage in cognition – it describes the need to foreground this process of scanning, periodically bringing it into conscious awareness. But Zhang et al (2010, 722) specifically say that their review ends at the point at which the scanning process results in information, with everything after that – viz, decision-taking – being a “strategic management issue”. This limits the criticality of their idea, as it is describing only single-loop learning. Against what criteria is the scanning taking place? Are these open to scrutiny and review? They say ( ibid, 726) that wider informational distribution improves decision-making and helps produce consensus – but that also, in practice, many organisations restrict access to information for reasons of confidentiality, which as noted above is an essentially abstract, depersonalising feature of a practice architecture. No attention is paid to the impact of this on actual practices, nor to how such an assertion could be challenged, as part of the same

environmental scanning process – that is, the process of learning about and mapping the information landscape (see below). More generally, Tuominen et al see studies of practice as an essential foundation for the effective teaching of IL (2005, 341). The approach ( ibid, 342): “calls for empirical research efforts to analyze how specific communities use various conceptual, cultural, and technical tools to access printed and digital documents and to evaluate and create knowledge.” This is absolutely correct. But radical IL demands attention to the question of what kind of research can not only illuminate practice, but subsequently offer practical guidance to participants wanting to 158 Practising IL transform practice. Clearly, one can learn to do things better; the “cult of the amateur” (Keen 2007), in this case interpreted as poor quality information processing, is by no means an inevitability. One can be taught better practice, and one can be open to learning it. This does not just apply in a workplace: indeed, to assume that it does is another way of imposing and institutionalising a limited perspective. One can, for example, learn how to do things like political campaigning better: research into social movements reveals that once certain individuals have engaged in activism the first time, they become more practiced at it, and more inclined to engage in this kind of practice at a later date (Wall 1999, 96). Limberg et al (2012, 107) write that: Within a sociocultural perspective people’s activities should be studied in relation to the tools through which the activities take place and based in the social practices where the activities are carried out. Hence, a sociocultural perspective often favours ethnographically oriented research, in which rich qualitative descriptions of people’s activities in their ‘natural’ settings form the basis of analysis.

Such study would also need to be critical. Fay (1975) criticises interpretive paradigms of social research for neglecting issues of power, focusing only on subjective issues and ignoring the role of linguistic, cognitive, and technological artifacts in shaping the views of participants in interpretive research. For transformation to take place, it is important not just to know what people think, but to know why they think it. This is what offers studies a critical dimension (Fay 1975): it also requires some kind of dialogue, as Bakhtin identified. This does not prevent some kind of formal study, external to the landscape, taking place – as noted earlier, such alterity is essential for dialogue to occur. ‘Scientific’ studies of a particular landscape can take place, as can training or professional development schemes. Yet, whenever an analysis is undertaken from outside any landscape, to be relevant within the landscape the results of the analysis must be interpreted with relevance to situated understandings of practice. Through both this investigation and application, and their own learning, conducted within the community, people learn about information needs and how best to respond to them. This response may involve retrieving information to help meet goals that have already been set (single-loop learning), but it may also involve reflecting on practice and reviewing goals in light of the information found (double-loop learning). *** 159 Radical Information Literacy Chapter 8, below, explores practical strategies which exist for developing reflective practice and doubleloop learning within individuals and communities, ideally enabling them to undertake these kinds of evaluations from within their own landscape. Before moving on to that discussion, however, it is necessary to complete the theoretical synthesis of IL-as-practice with IL-as-learning. The first step in this is to recognise the implications of extending IL beyond just the evaluation of texts, and into an understanding of all potential information sources within a landscape, particularly including other people.

If knowledge is seen as developing through an interaction of practice and information, then any other person becomes a potential information source. The idea that only those in particular roles have cognitive authority in a context is characteristic of bureaucratic information systems (Weber 1947), and Wilson (1983) shows how, empirically, we assign cognitive authority in many more varied ways than just by role. Badke (2010; 2012) criticises the institutionalised approaches to IL within HE that have been focused principally on published texts and the idea that IL teaching is role-based, taking place formally, usually in a library. Yet they have not been successful at improving student research skills, a valuable characteristic of “graduateness” and useful outside the academy in organisations and communities (cf. Levine 2007, Whitworth 2009 ch. 13). He notes that these institutionalised views of IL do not encourage students to appreciate how their own status as practitioners in this area can help novitiate colleagues. This potential, but underused, arena for the sharing of practice could compensate for cognitive differences and tensions between how students perceive their information needs, and how faculty do (Badke 2010, 134): Leckie (1996) discussed an ‘expert researcher’ model inhabited by faculty members. Professional academics work within narrow fields where they have a strong understanding of their literature. For many of them, keeping up with a few journals and staying in contact with colleagues is more useful than doing the kinds of research performed by their students, who know little about the field they are studying and, thus, must cast a wider net to find relevant material for research projects. Leckie concluded, ‘The expert researcher simply cannot imagine (or refuses to think about) the continuum of problems that undergraduates have in using even a moderately-sized academic library’ (p. 206). 160 Practising IL

Such circumstances are ripe for the formation of communities of practice between the learners, which operate ‘under the radar’ of their teachers and institutions (Wenger 1998). In these communities, information is exchanged regarding shared learning needs and how these can be fulfilled. The key concept to note here is not the question of whether or not students should teach other students the practices they need to adopt in order to be seen as information literate within this particular landscape. Badke suggests that they are doing it regardless: indeed, that this is a natural part of what it means to become socialised into academic practice. Learners generate their own context, drawing on a range of informational resources to do so, including but not limited to technology (Luckin 2010; Luckin et al 2010). It is precisely because communities like these share practices that are not those sanctioned by the ‘host’ institution (in this case, the university, its teachers, and librarians), that they tend to be ‘under the radar’: the evaluation strategies and rubrics which help the institution fulfil its informational needs, being systematised and usually not open to scrutiny by the students, are harder to apply to these practices. Hence, they tend to go unseen. Generally, what is happening in this example – and similar processes can be viewed in other types of organisation (see the example of the insurance claim processors with which Wenger opens his book (1998)) – is that, first, initiates into this practice are making judgements about the various resources available in this landscape, and concluding that other students are more relevant and contextually-useful information sources in this case than the IL training being offered by the library. But because the categories of description developed in the university-as-institution do not encompass this particular practice, or experience of variation – in this case, how students can and do learn IL skills from each other – the activity is hard to see. The outcome spaces around which the university has built its information systems do not accommodate it, just as the outcome spaces of the insurance company in Wenger’s example did not accommodate the practices which claims processors actually engaged in on the shop floor, including the

exploiting of social networks in order to learn how to do the job more easily, networks through which they would learn shortcuts to ‘official’ procedure. What is being described here, then, are examples of where the outcome space, the map of an information landscape, has omitted key elements of the practices which actually occur in this landscape. Thus, they are not seen by those who drew the original maps, even when these practices are clearly relevant and significant to the members of the community of practice. 161 Radical Information Literacy Some may consider this argument as stretching the definition of phenomenographic enquiry and outcome spaces too far, even if it is remembered that what is being discussed here is a typical, but hypothetical, situation. It may be that the university has reviewed its IL provision via a process of phenomenographic enquiry, but more likely is that other, more positivistic, methods and quantitative data were used (e.g. library use, student grades, occurrence of plagiarism in submitted work, etc.). The product of these enquiries will be texts such as reports, academic papers, and elements of information systems such as rubrics, self-assessment questionnaires, tutorials, and the like. Yet even if these texts would not normally be considered an outcome space, they remain outcomes of enquiry. Epistemologically, they are a map of the information landscape, but one which reflects only the limited experience of variation that has emerged from the institution. To see outcome spaces in this way requires the idea to be extended from meaning only some kind of written or drawn text. Maps are not simply pieces of paper: they are cognitive depictions of reality (Wandersee 1990). One can have a personal, inner ‘mental map’ of something – both Kelly’s and Bakhtin’s theories make this clear – and a map can also be encoded in collective memory, which is why

we can usually direct a stranger to some location in the vicinity without consulting a paper map. Landmarks within a landscape may also exist, or signposts can be built, which either make a map less necessary or complement one. The erecting of a signpost is a way of making knowledge of a map more explicit. Due either to innate or to built-in characteristics, some landscapes are easier to map (and/or navigate) than others. Either way, understanding any map depends on familiarity with certain conventions of a genre. What goes on to a map, and what is left off it, are choices that are made partly depending on the audience for the map, but also on the message that the mapmaker – or whomever is driving the creation of the map – wants to promote. Certain features of the landscape will be centralised within the structure of awareness depicted on the map, others marginalised or omitted altogether. This can take place for many reasons, often quite subtle ones. For example, the present author has been to all the continents except South America, and on each has seen world maps that depict his current location in the centre. One could interpret this as an innate patriotism or even jingoism, and indeed, many maps are guilty of this, more-or-less overtly. But this positioning could also be seen as sensible design, a gentle piece of cognitive assistance. Presenting the most context-specific information in the centre of a ‘map’ gives the reader a 162 Practising IL known starting point and allows them, for example, to make the greatest number of observations of distance relative to the current position. Therefore, making a map context-specific is also a way to make a map more engaging and useful for particular audiences. Either way, a map – an outcome space – will become a useful guide to a landscape if it offers relevant information to its users. Phenomenography is oriented to producing “lean, thin” descriptions of landscapes rather than the sort of “rich, thick” understandings of it

that are acquired through immersion in a landscape over a period of time (Christine Bruce, personal communication), but that is exactly why the analogy of a ‘map’ is a useful one. All maps are, obviously, simplifications and representations of reality. In phenomenography, the outcome space is viewed as a tool for exploring and revealing variation (Andretta 2007b, 156), not a definition of a phenomenon, which is inevitably much richer and thicker than can be accommodated by the technique of mapping. Nevertheless, the formally conducted phenomenographic enquiry, which produces a written-up, tabular, or diagrammatic outcome space (map of the landscape) that is intended to be purposefully used, cannot be conceptually separated from other types of communicable outcome, based on other forms of enquiry that may be positivistic or interpretive, formal or informal, analytical or intuitive, but which all produce informational resources within the landscape. The images produced by Steinerová (2010) and Whitworth et al (2014), or the textual maps of Tavares et al (2011), are equivalent to other resources in an information landscape: like any map or text, they have informative potential, but will acquire actual meaning and relevance only when applied by practitioners in a given landscape. The key critical question therefore becomes not just what is on the map, but who has drawn it, how, and why. Whose perspectives influence the experience of variation, and thus the map of the information landscape? What methods have been used? Practice is the lived-in embodied experience of variation within a landscape. That “experience of variation” can be elicited in various ways, but, crucially, many methods for doing so are not relational (Bruce et al 2006): that is, they aim to elicit only a limited view of the landscape. The outcomes of such enquiries will tend more toward monologic forms of knowledge than dialogic or polyphonic. Content and competency-based approaches to information literacy focus on assessing learner conformity to extant mental models of a

landscape, manifested in the information systems and texts which have been allocated authoritative 163 Radical Information Literacy status by dominant actors within that landscape. These approaches will see certain types of practice, those which accord to standards and rubrics, and which take place in certain physical and informational locations (the classroom, the library), but neglect others. The mapping of the landscape in these cases has been engaged in by external interests, evaluating the landscape according to their own criteria, rather than being embedded in those practices, within the landscape, around which practitioners gather (in this case, students). Results of such enquiries will be less relevant to the research subjects but may be foisted on them anyway, even if their full variation of experience will not have been explored, and the research results will therefore be more likely to be depersonalised, objective, and generic. Systems designed around this outcome space will be less likely to meet the needs of participants. A system may be created that delivers information according to generic assessments of ‘need’, but not context-specific ones. Or, if IL teaching focuses only on the learning to learn and/or personal relevance frames, the emphasis will be on subjective mental models of a landscape. Important as these enquiries are, they again will not allow for the full experience of variation because within these frames the learner/ practitioner is not exposed to the maps, and hence the understandings of others, whether within the same community or from outside it. On the other hand, where the learning about the landscape is actively engaged in by the participants, where learning is socially situated, where it takes place in (relational) ways that encourage a wide exploration of the variation in practice, then the full2 experience of variation of these participants will be more likely to become embedded in the outcome space: the texts, systems, and genre repertoires of the landscape. The resources produced through this active learning will be more relevant to members of that community

and, if sufficient variation exists within the map, possibly relevant to other communities as well. This permits the distribution of stewarding capacity (cf Wenger et al 2009), providing useful resources to those seeking to nurture the information landscape through developing a broader genre repertoire, as well as more technical skills (which include the various frames of IL). Through this practice, potentials are worked out and the ‘genre memory’ drawn on, but also slowly transformed. This process can become reified, when a practice becomes embedded into technologies or routines and is no longer being scrutinised. The epistemological mistake that Carr and Kemmis (1986) discuss becomes manifested when the outcome space does get treated as a “definition of 164 Practising IL the phenomenon”, rather than merely a tool which, through practice, can have its relevance judged by those who are actually engaged with the phenomenon. The phenomenon would become defined in monologic ways. Problems may then arise within a landscape around the lack of relevance of the information systems to learner needs, because their experience, the mental models they use to orient themselves in this landscape, will not be reflected in the system. Yet when problems like these arise, they do not have to cause alienation, information obesity, and other such pathologies – though they may well do so. Despite the pressures weighed against it, people and communities can and do raise such tensions back up into awareness and, through dialogue, learn about and attempt to address them. Raising awareness in this way is an essential teaching role in any given landscape, and the outcome of teaching is an outcome space: resources for subsequent learning, thinking, and practice. The better the maps – meaning, the more the teaching captures the full experience of variation – the more effective a guide they become to the

subsequent nurturing of the information landscape. These maps can draw on technical, scientific enquiries, but can never be fully technical, as Bakhtin showed (and as Carr and Kemmis show). Thus, the creation of these outcome spaces must also be a dialogic and participatory process. And an approach that was not just relational, but also critical, would, as noted earlier in chapter 3, raise awareness within practitioners and community members of the structural causes of inequality within the landscape, and permit the scrutiny of the validity claims that support cognitive authority therein. The facilitation of this process – the teaching of IL – does not inhere only in formal education, but in all practice. Wilson (1983, 123) describes how in a society that was “unanimous... in matters of cognitive authority”, “everyone would know who the leaders are... who the teachers are...”. Yet ( ibid), such unanimity is “unlikely without strong and deliberate control over the formation and expression of opinion.” One reason IL has lost its political heart, epitomised by Hamelink’s vision of it as an emancipatory, community-led learning process, is that because it is an essentially educational activity, perceptions of it have suffered from the same institutionalised blindness as affects many studies of ‘education’: that it is largely the activities of professional teachers which are considered significant in the outcome spaces of relevant enquiries. Yet the work and methods of both the practice and phenomenographical schools of IL demand the conclusion that it is precisely by such role-based definitions of cognitive 165 Radical Information Literacy authority that the full experience of variation in any given landscape can easily be limited, by limiting who is entitled to research and draw maps of an information landscape. As such, research and mapping should be seen as a fundamental, relational teaching and learning activity, thus, these conclusions suggest the fully universalist character of IL. IL is for all, and all can teach it.

Notes 1. ‘Confidentiality’ cannot be defined except with reference to an abstract boundary drawn between communities, one of which is defined as having a legitimate right to access to the information and the other of which is not. To assert that something is innately confidential (e.g. ‘National Security’) is a prime example of how language is used by the powerful to prevent scrutiny of validity claims. When the term is invoked, it is hard to translate ‘confidentiality’ as substituting for anything other than ‘We know this information, but without even telling you what it is, we have decided that you cannot be trusted with it.’ Confidentiality is the antithesis of dialogue. 2. Or at least, fuller; one should see the idea of capturing the ‘full’ experience of variation as akin to the ISS: an ideal, worth striving for even if one acknowledges that it can never actually be reached due to inherent constraints such as time and uncertainty. 166 8 Reclaiming IL Abstract: This chapter explores empirical examples of a radical approach to the teaching of IL, investigating the usefulness of narrative-based approaches to teaching: action research; Bakhtinian pedagogies, and more. It investigates what might be done inside the library, but also beyond it, in classrooms and workplaces, communities and families. Radical IL happens whenever the assumptions around which we base our learning and practice are called into question and scrutinised in democratic, participatory ways.

Methods presented here help practitioners ‘train their eyes’ and see when others are doing it well, so these experiences can be evaluated and applied in a different context, as appropriate. Key Words: Teaching, decolonisation, creative understanding, action research, collaboration, transformation. The synthesis of IL-as-learning and IL-as-practice is now complete. IL, or more precisely, information literate behaviour, can be defined as practices that sustain learning and the potential for transformation within communities and their landscapes. Radical IL is the subset of these practices which lift those potentials up into practice, transforming information landscapes through scrutiny and review of the cognitive authorities that penetrate them. As Hamelink noted, these practices are diametrically opposed to the ‘pushing’ of information onto communities: something that can now be defined, more precisely, as the design of information systems which do not accommodate the experiences and categories of user groups. Hamelink’s critique was directed mainly toward the broadcast media, but the synthesis of learning and practice within radical IL shows how these hegemonic and colonising practices also work through many other arenas for information exchange, the structuring of information systems, and the use of centripetal forces in language. 167 Radical Information Literacy Radical IL seeks to counter these tendencies, wherever they may be found, and thus reclaim the political heart of IL. It attends to how authority over texts can be redistributed in a landscape. Methods for exploring this, in and via practice, lie with critical phenomenographical approaches that attend to the experience of variation within the landscape but also recognise that not all of these experiences are granted equal potential to transform practice, and are able to reveal the reasons why they are not. Empirical examples of this approach will be explored in this chapter. Like Linell (2009, 387–8), however, I do not want to use the theoretical distinctions I have presented to assign all existing literature and/or practical work to one ‘side’ of the debate or

the other: in his case monologism versus dialogism; in mine, institutionalised versus radical IL. Nor do I claim that all IL practitioners must now adopt radical practices, at least, if they want to attain certain political ends. What the framework should be used for is learning to see: as a way of noticing, assessing, and evaluating trends and examples of work, and casting judgment over whether such work is oriented to the scrutiny of cognitive authority (double-loop learning) or to its acceptance (single-loop). What this final chapter must now do is to explore what this theory means for practice, offering guidance where it can (cf Blaug 1999a; 1999b). Radical IL is not presented as a new ‘standard’ or rubric, nor as a form of assessment or, generally, some new approach which all IL teaching must hurry to adopt. Radical IL is already happening, and has been for millennia. It happens whenever the assumptions around which we base our learning and practice are called into question and scrutinised in democratic, participatory ways. The theoretical discussion presented here, and the critical phenomenographical methods that emerge from it, help practitioners ‘train their eyes’ and see when others are doing it well, so these experiences can be evaluated and applied in a different context, as appropriate. Radical IL is also a theory that suggests why change is difficult. Institutionalisation, authority in texts, and the presence of unscrutinised assumptions and values in many landscapes helps to explain why collaboration, whether between librarians and faculty or between communities and formalised educational institutions, has proven so elusive. It shows that any institution, by its very nature, restricts choice and thus becomes an information filter. At the same time, radical IL fully embraces the possibility of transformation in any social setting, and the information landscapes, genres, and personal constructs that drive these settings. It is not about designing

practice, but learning to see the practices that exist, and understanding their consequences, experiencing 168 Reclaiming IL their variations, and facilitating transformation. It is not relativist: certain practices can be viewed as information illiterate, if they contribute to a reduction in learning capacity by closing off the exploration of alternatives (double-loop learning), or if they exclude certain communities from participation in information-processing activities and decisions which affect them. Critical theory must be premised on these kinds of practices, ones that diminish the negative effects and cognitive costs of authority (such as coercion, alienation, surveillance) in workplaces and communities. Ultimately, radical IL is a guide to remaining vigilant over direct democracy and small-scale decision-making, and assists the creation of decolonising forms of organisation and community-building, with a particular focus on the importance of the information landscape to these endeavours. It counters colonisation’s tendency to separate capital (of all kinds, including financial, human and social capital, as well as capital in the Bourdeuian sense (Bourdieu 1990)) from the communities which have generated it. Radical IL is political: but so is IL, and all social science in fact (Carr & Kemmis p. 144): Inevitably... social science is political: what is done depends on the way social processes of knowing and doing in particular situations are controlled. Critical social science thus requires a political theory about social life and, equally importantly, about its own processes and their effects on social life. The political theory of critical social science is democratic and rests on Habermas’s theory of communicative competence and, in particular, on the idea of rational communication in which decision-making is guided, not by considerations of power, but by the rationality of arguments for different courses of action.

Communicative competence, in this sense1 (see also Whitworth 2007) is fed by the effective distribution of IL throughout a community – that is, distributing the ability to make reasonable and methodologically-valid judgments that sustain that community’s information landscape into the future. As the foundation of practice, radical IL thus drives the “organisation of enlightenment [which] is the organisation of the learning processes of the group” (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 146). The development of context-specific, defensible, and rational forms of knowledge is absolutely essential to this. Social change demands that (Harding 1993, p. 50): 169 Radical Information Literacy (I)t is not only desirable but also possible to have that apparent contradiction in terms – socially situated knowledge. In conventional accounts, socially situated beliefs only get to count as opinions. In order to achieve the status of knowledge, beliefs are supposed to break free of – to transcend – their original ties to local, historical interests, values and agendas. This ‘breaking free’ can take place when knowledge becomes expressed generically and monologically. And there are times when this must take place, or society would be mired in endless discussion. However, this process also contributes to colonisation, whereby the values, assumptions, and forms of thinking that shape generic knowledge become concealed within information systems. As a result, double-loop learning – scrutiny of not just the effectiveness of a decision, but the premises underlying that decision – becomes more difficult. Thus, information systems become less flexible: enquiries must be shaped according to the needs of the system, rather than the other way around. The system thereby denies resources to alternative perspectives, and a fuller experience of variation is more difficult. Monologism, single-loop learning, systems, and standards are all thus interconnected.

The colonisation of knowledge formation in this way can be – and often is – decolonised, based on epistemologies and methodologies that are dialogic, and methods that are practice- and practitionerbased. These enquiries redistribute authority over knowledge products. They also test and validate texts and systems (written, technological, cognitive) that are based on this knowledge. “Strong objectivity” (Harding 1993) therefore becomes not just a philosophical position, but a practical one, and critical phenomenography offers methods that permit such scrutiny. Such a view is questioning and critical, and emphatically not antiscientific: instead, it strengthens and spreads valid scientific practice, while still permitting (indeed, impelling) critiques of the colonisation of science by the steering media of money and power. These kinds of critiques are essential for democracy (Angus 2001, 10): “When understood radically, democracy is about the processes of public decision-making to which economic, social and cultural institutions must be subjected in order to be legitimate and binding upon citizens. Such a radical concept of democracy is concerned to judge social, economic and political institutions, not presuppose their legitimacy.” And ( ibid, 48): “To confuse democracy with institutional arrangements is not only to put the cart before the horse, it is to miss the essence of the process altogether – which is movement and creativity, the desire for change, for inclusion.” 170 Reclaiming IL Strong objectivity is not monologic, an attempt to impose a consensus; it is dialogic, polyphonic, dynamic, and challenging ( ibid, 55). Access to good quality information is one capacity needed to sustain the democratic quality of a group’s interactions and, thus, the distribution of authority throughout the landscape, but also needed

are (Blaug 1999a, 145): opportunities for deliberation, that is, problems to address; fora of some kind in which the community can undertake the process of learning about itself, which may now include digital fora (see also Wenger et al 2009) but which are not limited to them; motivation, and good morale. These all help provide the necessary energy. Being information literate requires having access to good information, but it also requires these other resources. Money and formalised teaching and training can also be valuable resources, but as these are also conduits of colonisation, to accept them a group has to remain vigilant over the trade-offs which arise when they are used. This kind of active, self-aware, democratic involvement in a broad range of communities and landscapes has been called “deep” citizenship: “the activity of the citizen self acting in a variety of places and spaces” (Clarke 1996, 3). Deep citizenship has no fixed beginning and end, no single conception of the ‘good life’, but a number of possible ones, dynamic potentials that can be manifested in a range of different locations and contexts ( ibid, 18–20). The remainder of this chapter investigates pedagogical approaches and locations which are already undertaking relevant work in this area. It discusses the importance of action research as a way of bridging the theory-practice gap, and examines the political pressures that will inevitably be brought to bear on a radical IL, discussing how these must become learning opportunities whenever possible. Because the book has been, in part, a critique of the institutionalisation of IL within the library, but has also acknowledged the depth of IL expertise that exists there, there are passages below which discuss the library in particular, but the general concerns of the chapter are broader. There is a need not only to discuss the potential contributions made by both formal and informal learning, but also the links between the two types, and how each can

strengthen the other by helping with the scrutiny of each other’s validity claims. *** Landscapes can be understood at a variety of ways. They can be examined according to generalisable principles. For example, in many valleys of northern England, it is not hard, once one knows what to look 171 Radical Information Literacy for, to see evidence that proves glaciers covered the landscape relatively recently, but have now disappeared. Such evidence is not visible in, say, Queensland. One needs to know very few details about either context to draw this conclusion. Rather, one needs to be able to apply more generic rules, such as looking for U- rather than V-shaped valleys and items such as erratics (boulders left behind by retreating ice). This kind of knowledge, an active, but generalisable, awareness of one’s surroundings, would in this case be based on a basic understanding of the ‘objective’ scientific discipline that is geology, but would still be developed in personal and subjective ways (see Bakhtin’s (1986, 32) anecdote about Goethe). However, to gain a more holistic, dynamic, and intimate appreciation of the landscape – to understand what it is like to actually live in the landscape – one cannot rely on summary data and generic enquiries. One must develop a deeper understanding of the specific context, a “chronotopic visualizing of locality and landscape” (Bakhtin 1986, 36). Both types of inquiry involve learning, but the second, situated type forces the inquirer to enter into dialogues with the sources and forms of knowledge existing within the landscape. It also requires more time and active involvement. Both types of inquiry would be facilitated by a teacher, but in the first case that role would probably

be satisfied by a single person or textbook, whereas in the second case, the role of ‘teacher’ would spread throughout the community within the landscape, and into the landscape itself, in both its informational and natural forms. We undertake both types of learning at different points in our lives. The latter type is slower, more diffuse and, for that reason, far less visible than the first, but it is also more fundamental. Knowing what constitutes cognitive authority in the first type of learning environment is important, but that knowledge must, in turn, be based on the sort of deeper understandings of the many information landscapes we encounter. It is at this deep level of understanding that radical IL works. As a result, it specifically effaces the difference between formal and informal education, between the office of ‘the teacher’ and the practice of ‘teaching’. Hence the statement which ended chapter 7, also captured in the epigraph that appeared at the beginning of part 2, from the movie Ratatouille – “Anyone can cook”. That statement does need qualifying, however, in order to avoid relativism. While the statement that ‘all can teach IL’ is an inexorable consequence of the argument thus far, there remains a difference between teaching that is IL-oriented (and information literate in its own right), and teaching that is not. That is, there remain normative standards 172 Reclaiming IL against which practice can be judged. The statement “Anyone can cook” is explored in Ratatouille by the character of food critic Anton Ego. He originally disparages it, as he believes it trivialises the art of

cooking: popularising the notion, in this context, of the “cult of the amateur” (Keen 2007). But by the end of the movie, stunned by the great meal he was served by the (rodent) protagonist, Ego is moved to say: “Not everyone can be a great cook, but a great cook can come from anywhere”. So it is with IL teaching. Anyone can do it, but it takes care, attention, and practice to do it well. It involves guiding and facilitating the exploration of an information landscape, so can involve both of the forms of knowledge formation discussed just above. The formal educational provider clearly has a role to play, but so must informal learning, and good or bad teaching can be found in both sectors. And the normative standards which govern good teaching are not to be found in the simple assignation of the role of ‘teacher’ in a particular context. Carr and Kemmis (1986, 89) write that: “... to describe somebody as ‘teaching’ is to implicitly appeal to a background of rules operative in a particular society which specify what is to count as teaching. Indeed they constitute the very possibility of teaching at all.” These rules may be drawn in exclusionary ways, around the possession of certain qualifications, the membership of a certain subset of an organisation’s employees (those whose job description specifies a teaching role), or generic, objective statements in the academic literature about what makes for effective teaching. Carr and Kemmis counter these generic rules by examining in detail how rules can also be practice-based. Good teaching practice means, in any setting, that teachers must also become researchers, reflecting on their practice rather than separating theory and practice from each other, depersonalising both (1986, 127) so research is done ‘on’ practice. Instead, research becomes integrated into practice. As with teaching, the notion that ‘research’ is something esoteric, for initiates only, is ultimately part of the boundaries drawn in society around knowledge-formation; it is an expression of authority and

may even be subconsciously perpetuated by the academic community (as discussed at the end of chapter 6, e.g. via Mark (2011)). In any case, it is this kind of continuous self-reflection and application of generic principles within one’s own context that Carr and Kemmis hold up as the normative standards for good teaching practice. This is not to dismiss the usefulness of more quantitative and generic measurements of learning outcomes – such as grades – but emphasising practice rather than outcomes makes the point that desirable outcomes cannot arise without good practice underlying them. 173 Radical Information Literacy Effective IL teaching takes place when the process of reflection and experience of variation is facilitated within the learning environment. The roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ within such an environment may at times be fixed and clear but they can also be dynamic and fluid: either way, the basis of the teaching is dialogue. The environment may exist within formal educational institutions, but it has the potential to arise in any social setting. There exist many documented examples of teaching and educational practice that encourage students to explore variation in information, and/ or draw on investigations of these methods to argue for transformation in practice, whether in higher education specifically (e.g. Whitworth, Fishwick & McIndoe 2011; Bruce et al 2007, 51–55; Hepworth and Walton 2009; Andretta 2012), or outside the academy (Sayyad Abdi et al 2013, Yates et al 2009). Studies of the impact of these practices are harder to find. Herein lies an issue with the genre that is the academic paper. These texts’ conclusions cannot evolve: they should be judged as utterances to which practitioners can respond, but it is harder to judge the responses unless follow-up studies may take place.

Indeed, where such follow-ups have been done, the response to such teaching may even be negative, as it has been with Andretta’s project (2012). This invokes the more difficult questions, of how institutionalised biases against democratic and critical forms of knowledge-formation work to deny resources to alternative approaches like these, but that will be returned to below. Technology skills are a factor, as many papers have discussed (Brandt 2001, Reffell and Whitworth 2002, Scoble 2011), but the retheorisation of IL conducted here has shown that digital literacy is included in IL: it is one aspect of it, just as are scientific literacy, media literacy, and so on. Technologies are texts, so can be read, critiqued, scrutinised. As a subset of IL, digital literacy needs to be developed in dynamic and holistic ways, not just skills-based, moving “from following steps to applying concepts” (Brandt 2001, 81), but that is beyond the scope of this book (see Whitworth 2009, however). Views of digital literacy development which are more in tune with radical IL have been propounded by Luckin and colleagues (2010), and Garnett and Ecclesfield’s Emergent Learning Model (2012) applies similar ideas to the organisation of learning resources more generally: this model was adopted in the MOSI-ALONG project (see below). A pedagogical approach to consider is one inspired by Bakhtin’s notion of “creative understanding”. A truly creative understanding of a text goes beyond understanding a text as the author intended. Indeed, it is the act of understanding by other readers that really gives a text its potential, 174 Reclaiming IL by imbuing it with multiple meanings: “creative understanding continues creativity, and multiplies the artistic wealth of humanity”

(Bakhtin 1986, 142). While one can still recognise the authority invested in the author’s creation of a text (hence the etymological similarity between the words ‘author’ and ‘authority’, just as there is a common root to ‘community’ and ‘communication’), it is only by critiquing an author’s intentions, and transcending them to some extent, that the full creative potential of communication is realised (Morson and Emerson 1990, 55): Outsideness creates the possibility of dialogue... for any culture contains meanings that it itself does not know, that it itself has not realized; they are there, but as a potential... Only dialogue reveals potentials. It does so by addressing them, by provoking a specific answer that actualizes the potential, albeit in a particular and incomplete way. At the same time, the questioner necessarily undergoes the same process, which helps him comprehend unsuspected potentials in his own culture. The process, then, is multiply enriching: it educates each side about itself and about the other, and it not only discovers but activates potentials. Indeed, the process of dialogue may itself create new potentials, realizable only through future activity and dialogue. In this dialogic epistemology, neither side simply turns themselves into the image of the other – accepting authority unquestioningly – but both engage in dialogue. This is why the roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ become fluid and less clear. “As Bakhtin would say, intelligence is a matter not of the given but of the created” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 214); this creation is a joint project (Matusov 2011, 1152): The goal of education is not to make students have the same understanding as the teacher, but rather to engage them in historically valuable discourses, to become familiar with historically, culturally, and socially important voices, to learn how to address these voices, and to develop responsible replies to them without an expectation of an agreement or an emerging consensus.

Generally, appropriate pedagogical techniques will facilitate the experience of variation, guide the creation of an outcome space that will subsequently be relevant and useful to the community, and sustain their 175 Radical Information Literacy ability to learn into the future. Good teaching practice would then be manifested in the ongoing scrutiny and review of these techniques, to make sure they remain appropriate and relevant. It is not the place of this book to discuss radical IL pedagogy in detail. Many guides already exist to IL teaching (e.g. Mackey and Jacobson 2011, Hepworth and Walton 2009, Andretta 2005, Bruce 2008), and to reflective, constructivist, and critical pedagogy more generally (Loughran 2002; Shor 1996; Mezirow 1990). ‘Bakhtinian’ pedagogies have also been presented: see below, and also White (2009). Geijer & Olstedt (2009) invoke Bakhtin, and also Mezirow (1990), a writer with a critical perspective on staff development, in their discussion about the importance of dialogue in vocational education, aimed at helping learners develop professional identities and resist erosion of their status and autonomy. Generally, all will share a pedagogy that encourages dialogue and the experience of variation (polyphony). One, more specific, suggestion will be made here, however. Various authors have examined narratives as a valuable means of raising consciousness and becoming aware of other experiences of variation. Linell (2009, 243) observes that the narrative is an intuitively useful way of organising information, giving experiences shape, form and order by embedding them within a “plot” and using the narrative to forge links between “the exceptional and the ordinary”. In his definitive study of conspiracy theories, Knight (2000) observes that one reason these forms of counterknowledge are attractive is that

they exploit the narrative form, as well as features of certain fictional genres, to construct a theory of how the world works into which evidence can be easily slotted, even when it may seem to challenge the conspiracy theory. Narratives (Linell 2009, 243–4): (D)eal with the unexpected, create a viable account or a good story by showing the deviance in relief to the normal order of things. A good story presupposes some ‘normal’ background setting, introduces certain complications, and then accounts for the resolution of the problems and the restoration of normality (it accounts for why the deviation from the norm occurred)... narratives are not just retrospective accounts of past events... they involve active attempts to shape the present and the future. Within narratives, one can see signs of the information landscapes that have shaped them. For example, Wertsch (2002, cited in Linell 2009, 244) shows that both Russians and Americans presented narratives about their 176 Reclaiming IL countries’ history in characteristic ways, emphasising emotion and the fight for freedom in the American case, the preservation of indigenous culture and the expulsion of foreign invaders in the Russian. At the very other end of the scale, personal construct psychology also encourages (amongst other things) the learner to explore and scrutinise personal narratives of change, and blockages to change: in their book on the subject, Fransella and Dalton also present case studies as narratives (e.g. 2000, 27–30). Purdue (2003) considers narrative a useful tool to use at the beginning of group professional development sessions, with participants offering stories and experiences, seeing parables as a kind of extant collective map of a landscape. Broidy (2007) did much the same to teach gender issues in information. Watkins and Russo (2005) took the technique outside the academy, undertaking work of this kind with communities in Queensland, Australia. Whitworth, Garnett and Pearson (2012; see also below) researched the links that could be built between informal learning communities and formal learning

organisations in Manchester, UK. One technique used was when a city museum helped local communities present their narratives through helping them create ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’, video-based presentations of technological artifacts in which were encoded information that was relevant to communities or individuals, creating resources that were relevant to subsequent community learning. Popular culture offers narratives for analysis, and material to use in reflection: Ward (2006) suggests the use of images and music; Detmering (2010) uses films, specifically Burn After Reading, Thank You For Smoking and W. The present author adopts this approach in his teaching, using Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me, and the accompanying book (Spurlock 2005), as an illustration of various forms of information gathering and information concealment, with the film itself being an example of self-generated, justified research and conclusions3 used to address a question of political and social interest (the effect of fast food on health) (Spurlock 2005). Herman (1998, cited in Luyt and Azura 2010) encourages students and teachers to use local and alternative media as resources for learning, as opposed to an increasingly concentrated corporate media, recognising that the stories, enquiries, and critiques present in these media will be more relevant within specific contexts. Reflection can also be promoted by encouraging learners to develop their own narratives, either in an ad hoc way or systematically, perhaps through writing a journal or, more publicly, creating a blog. These are valuable tools in reflective practice (Loughran 2002) and also can become texts, through which narratives can be shared with colleagues and discussion ensue. They can also become data for analysis. Narayan (2012) 177 Radical Information Literacy asked twenty people to record their interactions with information each day, using the data to study information behaviour in prosaic settings. Her method sought to overcome limitations which affected Kuhlthau’s and other information retrieval studies (Saracevic 2007b): namely that the act of assigning research subjects an information task immediately constrains their activity and risks making the behaviour artificial or, at least,

applicable only within the context from which the task emerged. Her subjects were not engaged in specific tasks, however: she sought to have them record every engagement they had with information over the study period. Narayan expressed concern in her thesis that even then, the journal could not be a wholly objective source of data about her subjects’ information behaviour, because the act of keeping the journal may have changed their behaviour (the so-called “Hawthorne Effect”). However, this is precisely the effect being encouraged here. Narratives like these can be useful for information counselling, helping reveal personal constructs (cf. Kuhlthau 1993; Fransella and Dalton 2002). Describing and reflecting on events allows values and assumptions to be foregrounded, one can trace trains of thought and sources after the fact, and so on: this is the original intention of the term journalism, so one might call it ‘personal journalism’. With the blog, this self-presentation can be made more public. Narratives like these draw attention to how the image of the author is constructed, and thus, the image of authority present in the narrative. This, in turn, allows the claims of the author to be reviewed, and judged as more or less relevant within the reader’s chronotope and landscapes. The criticism that encouraging this kind of self-presentation contributes to ‘information overload’ and the ‘cult of the amateur’ can be effaced if the material is published in an information literate way, e.g. by attending to metadata, accessibility, use of language: in short, making the information of good quality. The sort of assistance that is needed here, for the effective (micro-)production, retrieval, and use of this kind of information, may be drawn from libraries, teachers, and other professionals; it may also be drawn at times from fellow members of one’s community and social network. Ultimately what radical IL pedagogy seeks is to develop “informed participation” (Wilson 1983, 144) in the decision-making structures of society. This is an ideal, and, as Wilson admits ( ibid, 145), not often

attained in our less-than-ideal democratic society. Yet this is precisely the point: it is this low level of informed participation that radical IL seeks to address. *** 178 Reclaiming IL Though LIS gave birth to IL, and libraries nurtured its early growth and development, radical IL must transcend the library. Yet the library, despite the challenges it has faced in the decades since Zurkowski first called for the spreading of IL, remains the most significant source of technical IL expertise. What radical IL work, then, can be done inside and across the boundaries of the library, under the restrictions posed on librarians’ practices, whether due to colonisation or institutionalisation? What role should a library take in maintaining the spaces of a radical infrastructure – that is, information landscapes that are supportive of attempts to scrutinise and redistribute cognitive authority? Simmons’ paper (2005) is worth discussing first, and in some depth. The paper adopts some of the elements of radical IL, and is probably the best other example of academic work that links Bakhtin with IL. But it does not turn the critical investigation back on the library itself. Simmons suggests that librarians should teach genre theory as part of their information literacy instruction. She proposes that this work could help embed students in different HE disciplinary cultures, supporting the argument that it is necessary to teach IL with reference to a particular context, and not generically. Simmons also invokes ideas of Bakhtin’s, to support claims that librarians can and should aspire to become a bridge to academic landscapes rather than fully enter them, by claiming that librarians are in a particularly convenient place within the university to undertake this work (2005,

298): “Librarians are simultaneously insiders and outsiders of the classroom and of the academic disciplines in which they specialize, placing them in a unique position that allows mediation between the non-academic discourse of entering undergraduates and the specialized discourse of disciplinary faculty.” She claims librarians have a particular ability to notice what is not visible to others embedded within these different academic cultures or genres ( ibid, 299; here see also Becher and Trowler 1989). Simmons (2005, 298) describes how: “domain-specific rhetorical processes are seen by the faculty members who work within the domain as the ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ or ‘correct’ way of writing, reading or researching; and they expect their undergraduate students to be able to learn and adopt these ways of communicating without explicit instruction.” However ( ibid): “Because faculty members in a discipline are immersed in the discourse of one discipline, it can be difficult to see (and explain to students) how this discourse is different from other fields’ discourses and how students can negotiate the language of their chosen discipline... [faculty members’] prodigious, focused knowledge can hinder the ability to make visible and explain to 179 Radical Information Literacy undergraduate students the rhetorical practices that have become inseparable from the faculty members’ own ways of communicating.” Simmons wants librarians to adopt a genre-based approach to teaching as a way of moving beyond the ACRL standards, developing students as “participants in scholarly conversations” (299) – thus, informed participants (cf. Wilson 1983, 144). She invokes Freire on page 300, and critical information literacy (via Pawley (2003) amongst others) on pp. 300–301. Her methods are sound: she does not view any genre as fixed and authoritative, that is, another set of standards, but sees the notion as dialogic. There is a need to illustrate to students that there is a diversity of landscapes (or disciplinary discourses), each of which is constructed by various kinds of cognitive work

undertaken in different locations. This will have academic benefits: (305): In order for undergraduate students to be able to locate, understand, evaluate and use information [ACRL standard], they need to recognize the disciplinary epistemological conventions that shape the knowledge... by learning that there are differences between discourse communities, students will be able to move from one discipline’s research practices to another. But Simmons also wants students to (302): (B)egin to see themselves as participants in a disciplinary conversation with the potential to effect change in the conventions instead of simply learning to conform to the established patterns within a particular ‘community of practice’ or academic discipline. She makes the claim that if undergraduates learn that knowledge is dialogic, they will be better equipped to enter a particular community of practice. Thus, there is a claim that through this kind of instruction, students become better prepared to become, at least, novice practitioners in a discipline, through having gained a general view of “the landscape of scholarly work” (305). These are all laudable ends. However, some problems emerge when these Bakhtinian lenses are turned back onto her claims. It is difficult to justify the notion that, even in relative terms and within the HE landscape, librarians can somehow be ‘genre-neutral’ or, at best, more familiar with the discourses of entering undergraduates than are academics. There is little support for this claim. On page 306 she brings 180 Reclaiming IL in some assumptions about the qualifications of librarians; on pages 307–8 there is reference to work done in LIS bibliometrics: “the information science literature in bibliometrics attends to disciplinary characteristics in research practices of varying disciplines”. This may be true but information science literature is not necessarily going to

be part of the everyday context of librarians teaching IL, and nor is it only the landscape of different academic disciplines that Simmons is claiming librarians are best placed to deal with, but also the landscape of entering undergraduates. There is no evidence for that latter view. Simmons’ suggestions also remain firmly rooted in HE. They are no more likely to overcome institutional boundaries and biases than other pleas for collaboration. Leckie and Fullerton (1999, 7) agree that there is no evidence that “faculty will be eager to embrace a librarian-centred pedagogical discourse that is essentially foreign to their experiences and ways of thinking”. Seeing the university as a realm in which students can be thought of as novice participants in constructing academic landscapes is a worthy aim, but it does not challenge the notion that the “landscape of scholarly work” is in fact a very limited view of the landscapes they will go on to enter, whether in the workplace or in private and community life. Despite these issues, Simmons’ approach is an interesting one and does recognise that becoming a practitioner in a given field involves more than simply absorbing content, but requires an understanding of conventions and other practices which have constructed a landscape over time. Elmborg has written two papers which make brief reference to Bakhtin. In one (2006, 58), he refers to Bakhtin to support pedagogies in libraries and IL that embrace dialogue and polyphony, arguing against a “monologic” classroom “where one dominant voice and style of speaking is authorized while others are controlled”. At its extreme this would “create an educational system that eradicates individuality and institutionalizes the status quo”. In Elmborg’s other reference (2002) he discusses the reference interview as a speech genre employed in libraries. He reveals the genre’s assumptions and practices, with particular attention to the idea that the user can precisely outline their needs

and the librarian precisely answer them: Elmborg uses Bakhtin to suggest this is not only an unjustified assumption, but it creates “library anxiety” (cf. Kuhlthau 1993). He makes explicit reference to Bakhtin’s point that otherwise literate people can have difficulties making use of the conventions of a genre with which they are unfamiliar, and says (2002): 181 Radical Information Literacy The problem delineated here runs deep in the culture of academic reference. The reference interview puts students in an untenable position. They are asked to participate in a strictly defined genre without being told the rules. When they sense that they are expected to play a role in the transaction, they become anxious and inarticulate... the reference interview and subject classifications can be seen as powerful agents for channelling students into categories of thinking that reflect authorized disciplinary constructs in the academy. ‘Good questions’ track automatically into such categories. ‘Bad questions’ do not. Hence, the need for librarians to adopt more of a mediator role, as advised by Kuhlthau (1993); something which obliges dialogue and a creative understanding of the perspective of the user. Work has been done at Høgskolen i Bergen, Norway, to create an online information literacy tutorial, Søk og Skriv (Search and Write), and written up by Skagen et al (2008) and Torras i Calvo (2012). These papers invoke Kuhlthau, and ideas of information anxiety and communities of practice, to discuss how the aim of the tutorial is to inculcate new students into the practice of academic study. Both mention Bakhtin briefly, but do not develop the theoretical links. However, the example is worth invoking because it does at least show how this perspective on education, building on Bakhtin and other authors (like Kuhlthau) already invoked in this book, can lead towards a practice-based approach to IL education. The papers mentioned so far concentrate largely on the internal practices of the library, but others have examined practices at the

boundaries, and how the library therefore relates to informal learning spaces and communities. In a radical IL, provision of boundary spaces is not intended to prescribe practice, but to cross the gap that is the “false narrative isolation of lifeworld problems from larger structures” (Hirschkop 2004, 64). In radical IL there certainly remains a role for the expert. Some professional groups do have a grounding in forms of knowledge that are suited to the promotion of IL, but one can be members of multiple communities, and in radical IL it is the role of ‘experts’ to promote dialogue and the experience of variation, not to instruct. Formal learning providers can be used as resources to challenge the break between the felt, lived experience of real people and the macro-level structures that, albeit not exclusively, cause and intensify problems. These spaces could be resources in a negative sense as well, operating in 182 Reclaiming IL ways that give rise to critiques and hidden transcripts in their own right. Through such critiques, the relevance of the provider could be challenged, possibly leading to a positive response (the provider’s practices change to accommodate the needs of the community), possibly negative (the relationship between provider and community breaks down). Scoble calls for “Pro-am” [professional-amateur, as in golf] links, as a direct response to the criticism of Keen (2007): he recognises that collaborations like these (Scoble 2011, 241): (A)re obviously nothing new, but the ways in which the relationship is conducted and supported is radically new, and both parties can now take advantage of the following:

share the same data sources; use similar tools that were once too expensive or difficult to use; and communicate much more easily with each other through new media tools. He is right about the added capabilities offered by Web 2.0 technologies, also noted by Spiranec and Zorica (2010), but the differences between the landscapes and cognitive authorities of the ‘Pro’ and the ‘Am’ still need to be accounted for. Some librarians have managed to embed a more politically-oriented approach into IL curricula. See Broidy (2007) for instance, who created a course entitled “Gender and the Politics of Information”, albeit building on past successes and emerging from a Women’s Studies department, so not starting from scratch. The course was approved only because it was ( ibid, 499): (P)erceived as a course that ‘belonged’ to an academic department and not to the library.... The incorporation of the skills portion became a covert activity. We needed to devise strategies for presenting information-seeking techniques within the context of the intellectual core of the course. In other words, we had to teach basic skills while maintaining the integrity of an upper division seminar. But this quote also highlights the essential cognitive tension here. The library was perceived, even by the librarian, as concerned only with ‘basic skills’. This amounts to a near-admission that the library is 183 Radical Information Literacy unqualified to go beyond this. One could argue that this is a collective construct that the library profession needs to overcome, but though this was much the same as argued for by Kempcke (2002), in the paper which was critiqued at the end of chapter 4, taking a belligerent approach to it is not a constructive

approach. What is needed are spaces for dialogue with the other groups, not hectoring of them. It is admitted that, here, the argument shares much common ground with the mainstream IL literature (e.g. Secker and Coonan 2013; Badke 2012; Kakkonen and Virrankoski 2010). McCrank said back in 1991: “If the aim is truly comprehensive information literacy, then libraries must cooperate with other information agencies more than ever. They will need alliances with nonlibrary admistrators, civic and religious leaders, educators, and academicians.” Alliances like these are essential not just for strategic reasons, that is, to attract resources and support (though they are that), but because they help extend a community, jointly developing ways of thinking and thus building stewarding capacity from within. Instead of just consulting ‘outside’ experts, the expertise is brought into a shared community. But if these alliances are to emerge they are not going to do so around some shared interest in understandings of ‘IL’ which librarians can perceive but academics (or other groups) for some reason cannot. If alliances are needed, then active work needs to be put into building them, including negotiation and bargaining (Cervero and Wilson 1998) but also cognitive work. Cognitive work here means double-loop learning, with librarians reviewing and, if necessary, adapting their perspectives, learning about the contexts of the other stakeholder groups they wish to work with. ‘IL’ is too fundamental and abstract a notion to motivate activity, just as political alliances are unlikely to be motivated by a shared interest in ‘politics’ per se, but something more specific. What, then, are the hidden transcripts within an organisation (whether a university, or something else) around questions such as learning (the quality of the student experience), professional development and the erosion of professional autonomy, certain features of information systems, and the need for transformation in particular practices? Where information specialists and non-specialists find common ground in these terms, joint understandings of IL, relevant to this shared context, can then be negotiated.

‘Operational proximity’ can help form alliances: that is, the informal conjunctions that arise within information landscapes due to the literal sharing of a working (or other4) space, thus, a context (Tagliaventi and Matarrelli 2006). For example, Bridgland and Whitehead (2004, 56) mention the benefits of information specialists having offices inside 184 Reclaiming IL academic departments for some time each week. Weiner (2012) offers useful advice to librarians about understanding the organisational dynamics of different contexts and tailoring IL advocacy accordingly. It is clearly going to be easier to work with sympathetic allies first, or ‘academic champions’, even though McGuinness (2007) questions whether this approach is useful. But alliance-building tactics can be proactive and creative, acknowledging the blocks to change which are endemic to HE institutions as currently structured. The institutionally limited perspective on IL that is typical (but understandable) within a library may mean that very good work in IL, even in radical IL, may just not have previously been noticed within academic settings. However, a fresh look at research and teaching interests of faculty could take place, now using lenses that go beyond just ‘IL’ as explicitly named to also encompass interests in constructivist and critical pedagogy, professional development and reflective practice, community development, cognition, communication, human geography, and political theory – to name but a few. Professional development units within universities (and other organisations) could become another conduit (McGuinness 2007, 33) but, as noted here, these can also be conduits of colonisation and institutionalisation. However, there are other organisations which play valuable roles here, particularly trades unions. Alliances for radical IL could encompass student union activists as well, and reach off campus, via public engagement and “service

learning” (see Warschauer 1999). Libraries can also come to see themselves as a space, rather than a service (Elmborg 2011), re-working their information systems and practices to support dialogic knowledge-formation rather than more instrumental kinds, but this is a longer-term project. Nevertheless, it is an idea worth developing. In the first place, the information systems literature does offer guidance on how to design systems in more flexible and open ways, such as Checkland’s “soft systems methodology” (see Checkland and Holwell 1998, for example): these are useful insights, but not covered in further detail here, firstly for reasons of space, but also because such a methodology would still rest on knowledge-formation practices of the type being discussed throughout this book. More usefully discussed here are insights into how the library can come to define its general role in dialogic knowledge formation. Wilson discusses the distinction between the didactic library and the liberal library (1983, 188–91). Essentially, the difference is that in the liberal library, the librarian is not supposed to allow any of his/her own 185 Radical Information Literacy judgements regarding the cognitive authority of any text to affect the inclusion of that text in the library, whereas in the didactic library, texts are selected because they accord with learning outcomes that the library has been set up to promote. Thus, the didactic librarian is acting as cognitive authority for the users by, in turn, implicitly stating – via inclusion of the book in the library – that these texts also possess cognitive authority. As Wilson says (1983, 189): “Not only might there be such libraries, there are plenty of them.” They arise wherever selections are made based on some principle of cognitive authority – whether works are suitable for children, whether they are of sufficient relevance for the user community that the library seeks, and so on. That being the case, how could a librarian possibly be liberal, bearing in mind that the physical space in all libraries is limited

somehow? Even the use of digital technologies to compensate is itself limited by funding and other constraints. Wilson argues that the driving force in the liberal library would in fact be demand. This may seem a plea for a pure ‘free market’ in books, and one that would lead to any liberal library becoming filled with bestsellers and celebrity biographies, but Wilson acknowledges that this kind of full libertarianism is an extreme that is rarely reached. The greater significance of the idea of the liberal library is that its basic founding principle is that the choice of text is made, not according to the librarian’s notion of cognitive authority, but to ( ibid, 191): “prefer one text over another to the extent that the first is more likely than the second to be found satisfactory by a user of the library”. To put this principle into practice would require the liberal librarian to be engaged in a constant dialogue with users, and, through this, trying to develop a dynamic and creative understanding of their context – thus, co-creating an environment in which the user community is more likely to find relevant texts. What the librarian particularly brings to this co-creation is not, therefore, an uncaring laissez-faire attitude, but a professional skepticism ( ibid 194): “The liberal librarian can be viewed as a professional skeptic about claims to knowledge or claims of the superiority of one opinion over another... Pyrrhonian skepticism [is] the attitude of one who neither asserted nor denied the possibility of knowledge but continued to enquire, though always unsatisfied that knowledge had yet been found.” In other words, the effective librarian recognises that the library is unfinalisable. Librarians may well ask what practical steps can be taken here and now – in one’s chronotope, that is – to help bring about this longterm goal of an evolving space in which dialogue with users and this kind of 186 Reclaiming IL professional skepticism can evolve? But specific actions depend on the context, so cannot be dictated here. Instead, what is required is to promote professional development activities, freer access to texts

and/or guidance with organising and navigating open educational resources, evaluation of where operational proximity and other nonhierarchical forms of information exchange can be exploited, and other tactics suggested above, all of which help develop a supportive environment within the library for the transformation of practice, and also contribute to the radical information infrastructure of society: a Zurkowskian “information services environment” devoted to the centrifugal redistribution of cognitive authority, not its centripetal centralisation. In the public library sector, radical IL work is taking place. Ferguson (2012) describes how public libraries develop social capital in communities, with the promotion of IL a key strategy. He notes that public libraries are most valuable resources within the information landscapes of voluntary associations and ethnic minority communities, and that because libraries remain physical spaces and not merely virtual ones, they are rooted in local contexts, particularly those of marginalised groups. In essence they have become more low-income oriented as Internet access has spread. Public libraries have played a critical role in helping individuals and communities through the post-2008 economic downturn (Rooney-Browne 2009, 348, cited in Ferguson 2012, 25). Radical IL certainly supports these views, but it also suggests why the funding cuts being faced by public libraries at the present time, most incisively in the UK, are a consequence of their contextspecific, potentially decolonising role, not just a constraint on it. However, O’Beirne observes that there are contrasting perspectives on the reasons for the public library movement (see also Black 1996) , including radicalism, but also including social control, the education of the population in technical skills required by industry. Nor has every country experienced a ‘public library movement’. The role of the library in IL has been explored with reference to Habermas by Elmborg (2011). He, via Buschman and Leckie (2007), invokes the idea of the public sphere as an image of what a library should aspire to as a physical space: an environment or architecture

designed around democratic principles and supporting learning and transformation (Elmborg 2011, 341). Then, invoking Harvey (1989), he describes how the instrumental rationality of late capitalism depends on the increasing collapse of space and time, seeing them as inefficiencies, as obstacles to the production, movement, and consumption of goods, particularly informational goods (Elmborg 2011, 342): 187 Radical Information Literacy The Enlightenment project of human emancipation has been increasingly ineffective as a means to resist the capitalist restructuring of culture (hence the transformation of the public sphere chronicled by Habermas). While we might see ourselves as autonomous and rational, the culture we live in undermines our autonomy and subverts our rationality. Yet, within this reality, communities can still work to define spaces in particular ways ( ibid). Within formal organisations, like the library, boundary spaces can exist in which two cultures – now interpretable as two contrasting rationalities, ways of thinking and communicating – can come together. Indeed, all learning providers can become boundary spaces (or landscapes) in this way, depending on the context: that is, the specific set of practices being constantly developed within the landscape. Elmborg (2011, 349) observes: We [libraries] can become bookstores in an effort to beat bookstores, or we can work to build libraries and librarianship around the concept of shared social space where real people engage in real struggle for meaning and purpose in a landscape of increasingly rapid human movement and social change. Yet the landscape of institutionalised IL is still a dominant one, and we cannot simply ignore it, claiming that a radical IL is needed and should be self-evident to educators or, more pertinently still, those who provide the resources to them and develop the criteria by which their ‘effectiveness’

will be measured. Elmborg (2011, 345) observes that: Like cathedrals, temples, and other culturally symbolic spaces, libraries evolved to fill one sociocultural function, and they are so filled with the essence of their identities that they tend to resist appropriation or reinvention. Through the rhetoric of those who resist library change, we hear the fear that the library might become something other than the absolute institution it has always been. *** Ultimately, the location for a radical IL lies outside the HE institution, even if work inside HE can, as it always has done, contribute to the radical infrastructure through becoming a space in which resources can 188 Reclaiming IL be found to assist the relevant research and theorising5 . It is how bridges are built, between informal and formal educational processes, that matters: the bridges must become conduits for twoway traffic, not just the imposition of cognitive authority from the formal realm of education onto the informal learning processes of society, thus ensuring dialogue between the two. Radical IL work can focus directly on creating community-generated, alternative information banks in the sense described by Hamelink. The “cult of the amateur” (Keen 2007), a deterioration of the quality of the online information landscape in toto, is not an inevitability. Communities who wish to create online spaces or “digital habitats” (Wenger et al 2009), and use these to store and present elements of their information landscape, can be helped to learn the necessary technical skills, communicative competence, and reflective, dialogic practices needed to keep these spaces of good quality, dynamic and open to new inputs.

This objective drove the MOSI-ALONG project which took place in Manchester, UK in 2011 (Whitworth et al 2012)6. Essentially, MOSIALONG sought to enact the co-creation of museum collections that Simon (2010) terms “the participatory museum”. It did so by brokering alliances between community groups – informal learning spaces which in this case included local historical societies, urban gardeners, and webmasters of community web sites – and formal and non-formal7 educational providers in Manchester including museums, the university, social media experts, video production specialists and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). Evaluation of the project, mainly using observational and qualitative methods, led to the framework termed “Aggregate-then-Curate” (Whitworth et al 2012). This outlined the process of creating good quality and sustainable online content collections, identifying seven stages, from the initial, subjective impetus to produce a text and the validation of this by close collaborators (friends, colleagues), through the process of creation and, possibly, eventual accreditation which could take various forms such as funding, further commissions, course credits etc (for more detail, see Whitworth et al 2012). The quality and relevance of online content was, through this process, validated by both the formal learning providers and the informal learning processes within the community. The communities driving the creation of these particular information landscapes focused their validation of the process more on the content of the collection, whereas more formal learning processes focused on technical issues and how the content was presented and structured. Both were essential: relevant content will not be found if 189 Radical Information Literacy there is no use of tagging or other metadata, and other technical qualities (whether a video is in focus, for example) will also affect its reception. Aggregate-then-Curate thereby constitutes a framework through which collaborators could jointly identify those areas in which the

community most needed guidance, in order to nurture their information landscape (or as Wenger et al (2009) would put it, steward their digital habitat). Use of the framework to analyse various case studies arising from the project also permitted the conclusion that where one or more of the seven stages were omitted from the content creation process, the content would lose quality and relevance. An example of this was seen with a set of online resources intended to be used for ICT skills training in the community, but which had not been open to community participation in their creation. As a result, they were underused due to a perceived lack of relevance to the user community ( ibid). The process of online content creation can only be one element of IL, but MOSI-ALONG has wider relevance, as it highlighted some problems with sustaining formal/informal learning collaborations. Whitworth et al found that it was at the point of curation where the greatest tension existed between the community’s interest in content, and the information professionals’ interest in structure. Where community content was offered to the museum partner, curation – the restructuring of that content to offer learning pathways – was always done on the museum’s terms, not the community’s. In this respect, MOSI-ALONG’s bridges remained one-way. However, more of a two-way dialogue was seen in another case study, the redevelopment of a community web site for a suburb of Manchester8, as brokering contacts between the site’s webmaster and social media specialists provoked the addition of a Twitter feed to the site that then substantially diffused the cognitive work required to keep the site up to date. Through this, the webmaster removed significant constraints on her time and the site became more relevant and useful to users: accreditation then came with direct use of the site by the city council (Whitworth et al 2012). These are limited case studies, and not generalisable, but nevertheless show that in this context, a productive dialogue could be facilitated between ‘pros’ and ‘amateurs’, and that social media greatly facilitated the nurturing of a useful and relevant information bank in this case. This bank was constructed more along Hamelink’s lines than Zurkowski’s, being

essentially under the control of the community, and thus an actively stewarded part of their information landscape. 190 Reclaiming IL There have been other projects which have tried to broker such alliances, by developing the IL skills of marginalised communities. Bruce’s work with the Puerto Rican community of Paseo Boricua in Chicago (Bruce and Bishop 2008) is a more involved, longer-term version of MOSI-ALONG. Kanyengo (2009) recounts work done by libraries on HIV/AIDS issues in Zambia (in an environment, incidentally, in which the library has not been able to afford any journal subscriptions since the 1980s, and relies entirely on donations). Dorner and Gorman (2011) have done work in Laos: they recognise the constraints imposed by a poor overall level of education, but claim that IL can be a starting point, and help development, because of its basic rooting in literacy. External advisors can help develop IL, even in these extremely marginalised areas of the world, but must understand the local context and cannot just apply the ACRL standards (Dorner and Gorman 2011). The authors also reported a lack of relevant information in local languages, and that even where donor agencies and foreign governments declare a lack of influence over what is taught, they establish de facto control over curricula due to supplying resources. Ultimately, when considering IL in the community, what this means is not that ‘community’ should be seen as the location for pedagogical work, but it is also the content (Harris 2008, 252) and outcome of the work. This combination can be seen in the work of Tavares, Hepworth and Costa (2011), who conducted participatory action research (see below) with a community in Brazil. The participation (Tavares et al, 2011, 128) improved the success rate of this

development project, and its longer-term sustainability, because it enhanced the ownership of the discourse among the community. The problems they faced (such as lack of access to services) could be presented as information problems and, thus, potentially addressable ( ibid, 134). Evaluation was integrated into the process: not just evaluation of its impact on information searching, but on members’ collaboration and participation in community life. Thus, community itself became an outcome of the research ( ibid, 136): “through the course of intervention there was a growing awareness of rights and a sense of responsibility and a desire to participate in the democratic process”. The same impetus also drives the notion of ‘service learning’, whereby work done within a formal educational setting is made directly relevant to the communities around that setting through an activist outlook and the nurturing of informed community participation (Warschauer 1999; Riddle 2003). Rockquemore and Schaffer (2000) reported that students 191 Radical Information Literacy engaging in service learning did initially manifest alienation and despair at the magnitude of problems faced by communities, and the seeming inevitability of them but, as the course progressed, they overcame this anxiety (cf. Kuhlthau 1993) and were increasingly engaged: that is, embedded in the context. Eubanks (2011; 2013) examines the question of social justice in the information age: her book contains a dozen examples of projects but her theories are drawn mainly from her work with the YWCA in Troy, NY, US. This work was collaborative, action research driven by the community; Eubanks was therefore helping her subjects develop their own laboratories of experience, rather than using them as laboratory specimens. Like Feenberg (2002), Eubanks is committed to “popular technology”9. Access to technology is perceived as a human right in the digital era, but Eubanks notes that many lowerincome and marginalised populations are already firmly “plugged in”

to information systems, as the consumers of digital content produced by the mass media, low-status workers in menial information industry jobs, the subjects of surveillance, and so on. Therefore, ‘access’ alone is not empowering: it may even be colonising and hegemonic. However, the popular control and ownership of technology must also be based on participation (in policy decisions, construction of networks), common ownership (of networks), and healthy communities, virtual and otherwise (see also Seale 2010, who presents a similar definition of “digital inclusion”, and Whitworth et al 2012). In offering guidance to academics, librarians, and those within communities who wish to assert control over their information systems, Eubanks stresses the importance of one’s personal experience of what it means to be a critical technological citizen: that we are all experts about what technology means in our own lives. But this subjective view must also be made intersubjective by having a social justice framework at the centre of one’s IL work. Coalitionbuilding needs prioritising, through meeting people in their own context. A crucial role in Eubanks’ Troy work was played by an “activist lab”, a technological space for use by members of this community. When the computers were just provided alone, use was limited, but once the space included “lab hostesses” – people who lived in the YWCA, and who spent time in the lab as a human face – then use increased hugely: not because the lab then contained “experts” but almost the opposite; users responded positively to hostesses “who looked like them”. In other words, there was a clear common context. There was no imposition of practice; no declaration of how the lab should be used (e.g. a fixed 192 Reclaiming IL schedule of training sessions). Users were instead encouraged to reflect on their own activities first, and then once a focus for the use of the lab was so found (cf. Kuhlthau 1993), the hostess would help the user find out how the technology could help. An example of this (Eubanks 2013) is that a potential user might come in and simply

want to play the guitar in the lab. After letting them do this (subject to them not disturbing other users), the hostess might have suggested the use of digital recording and editing software such as Audacity, as a way of opening a dialogue with the user about their potential requirements. Eubanks’ work shows that one can work on IL at a very local and contextual level, yet still reveal macro-level structures of constraint, both in theory and practice, and that stimulating a community to engage in its own research and reflection lies at the roots of transformation. Access to technology and expertise alone is not only inadequate to overcome colonisation, it is a conduit for it. Dialogue, self-reflection, and learning are the micro-level processes which drive any change. *** The term “action research” (AR) has begun to appear within discussions of how to facilitate dialogue, and the experience of variation. Hughes, Bruce and Edwards (2007) draw on it specifically, relating reflection and AR directly with the seven frames of IL. Narrative and reflection were mentioned above as ways to scrutinise one’s own practice, but AR makes this more systematic, and turns it into praxis (Reason and Bradbury 2011, 1–2): (A)ction research is a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview... a practice for the systematic development of knowing and knowledge, but based in a rather different form from traditional academic research... action research is about working towards practical outcomes, and also about creating new forms of understanding, since action without reflection and understanding is blind, just as theory without action is meaningless. AR has an essential role in combating limited views of professionalism, whether these views come from within the profession or from outside it.

In Carr and Kemmis’s view it is what allows educators to justify their validity claims. AR is built around a cycle, or rather a spiral10, of 193 Radical Information Literacy practices: planning, acting, observing (or recording), and reflecting (Hughes et al 2007, 73–6). Three areas of improvement are intended: improvement of a practice; improvement of the understanding of a practice by its practitioners, and improvement of the situation in which the practice takes place (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 165). AR can be used to raise awareness of a context, at a macro level (e.g. within a whole profession: ibid, 8), the meso-level of the community, and the micro-level, personal context. It is oriented not to the development of theory, but nor only to practice: instead, theory and practice come together in praxis, a dialogue between theory and practice which is intended to “remake the conditions of informed action and the knowledge which informs it” (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 33). Thus, it remakes the information landscape. AR is an epistemology that closes the separation between researchers/ policymakers on the one hand, and practitioners on the other ( ibid, 216). The “epistemological mistake” that is the theory-practice gap has developed into a “cultural or political mistake” (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 218), creating professions with ( ibid, 2) “limited views of [their] professionalism” (Carr and Kemmis write about education specifically, but it applies more widely than this). This passivity is conducive to conformity, with educational standards specifically mentioned by Carr and Kemmis as part of this process. AR, as a means of countering this view and promoting professional practice, is driven by democratic and participatory impulses, simultaneously seeking contributions to both social science and social change ( ibid, 165; Reason and Bradbury 2001; Gustavsen 2001). Notions of standards and control are incompatible with unfinalisability ( ibid, 26):

(E)ducation is essentially a process or an activity. It takes place in social situations of great complexity.... While the technical view of education sees teaching and learning behaviours as elements in a system which can, in principle at least, be controlled as means to given end, the practical view asserts that the social world is simply too fluid and reflexive to allow such systematization. It regards social life as in principle fluid and open. Such control as is possible in the social process of education will only enter through the wise decisionmaking of practitioners – through their deliberation on practice.... But the events of school and classroom life will always have an open, undetermined character. The action of those in the situation will never completely control or determine the unfolding of classroom or school life. 194 Reclaiming IL Professional practice is thus fully context-specific, dependent on the educational ‘micro-climate’ in which the practice occurs, something which can change from day to day ( ibid, 37). It is through AR that relativism is avoided, and the practices of educators (which, remember, can now be located in any setting) are scrutinised and given validity. This is all part of achieving “strong objectivity” (Harding 2003), the revealing of assumptions, opening them up to scrutiny. The purpose of this kind of research “is to ensure that the observations, interpretations and judgments of educational practitioners can become more coherent and rational and thereby acquire a greater degree of scientific objectivity” (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 124). AR can be formal, engaged in through the same methods as in other research, such as surveys, questionnaires, observation. Methods vary from reflection via narrative and anecdote (Horton 2011), to more systematic techniques. Hughes et al (2007, 77) note its applicability to information literacy learning needs analysis,

curriculum development, pedagogical strategies, and monitoring and evaluation of IL programmes. At the individual level, personal constructs can block change. Personal construct psychology (PCP) is effectively a form of selfreflective AR, thus applicable to IL. The personal construct psychologist seeks to help the client raise awareness of constructs that can block learning, and works to transform them, both of which challenge the client’s inner ‘authoritative voice’. PCP as a practice has been best worked out by Fay Fransella (e.g. Fransella and Dalton 2000), and Kuhlthau’s work remains the best treatment of the PCP-IL connection, with the caveat that her work remains library-oriented. However, personal constructs cannot explain all reticence to change practice. Broader, meso- and macro-level structures also must be investigated by AR (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 189): “much teacher action is the product of custom, habit, coercion and ideology which constrain action in ways that the teachers themselves do not recognise...” AR here can become a way of developing informational products from processes that communities and community members engage in all the time, though not always effectively. Kemmis relates this directly to Habermas’s notion of communicative action, noting that the first step in AR is not the research itself, but (Kemmis 2001, 100, emphasis in original): “the formation of a communicative space which is embodied in networks of actual persons... A communicative space is constituted as issues or problems are opened up for discussion, and when participants experience their interaction as fostering the democratic expression of divergent views”. 195 Radical Information Literacy AR can be a way of mapping the experience of variation that is evident in these “divergent views”. This mapping process can be explicit, using techniques like group concept mapping, which promote reflection and develop outcome spaces (Johansson 2012, 6–7). Kuhlthau also suggests that concept

mapping and other visualisations such as timelines and flowcharts can be useful for “charting information and... visualizing emerging ideas” (Kuhlthau 1993, 181). She sees the visual and nonlinear elements of the technique as significant here, allied to the importance of composition and production as a way of promoting thinking and (for her) helping with formulating a focus. Steinerová (2010) asked her subjects to create visualisations of their information horizon, an idea conceptually related to the outcome space. Johansson (2012, 2) sees visualisations as information media that, even more than text-based media, have the potential to be “evocative and non-blackboxed information resources that inspire new questions and enable repeated analyses from alternative perspectives rather than as enunciative tools providing true answers”. Tippett’s work on using concept mapping to promote reflection on small-group decision making has taken place in various communities from workplaces to marginal communities in Southern Africa (Tippett, Handley and Ravetz 2007). She does not invoke IL directly, but is clearly oriented to scrutiny of cognitive authority within information landscapes. Whitworth et al (2014) have applied the same techniques as Tippett et al to studies of two academic libraries in Norway, using concept mapping, other visualisation techniques, and social network analysis to map changes in the communities’ information landscape over a period of organisational change. This work is in its early stages at the time of writing, but the desired outcome is to use these visualisations to reveal how these groups collectively make judgements about relevance, a question that has long been neglected by information science (Saracevic 2007b). *** The techniques listed so far – narratives, concept mapping and other forms of visualisation, action research, dialogue, constructivist and critical pedagogies, small-group decision-making – are nothing new, but their importance to IL can now be justified theoretically. What they all have in common is their attention to the micro-scale, the psychology of the individual actor, their relationships to diverse communities, and the information horizons of each. In that radical IL

is specifically community-oriented, communicatively-rational, and prosaic, it is correct that no 196 Reclaiming IL mention has yet been made of how standards, national policies, specific curricula, and assessments could promote it. These are the tools of instrumental and institutionalised education. While radical IL can and must respond to these, and perhaps incorporate them in particular contexts if they are seen as appropriate there (selecting them from a range of alternatives, and keeping this decision under review), they should be seen as potential resources, and not essential elements of a radical IL. What is more significant, and must be at least raised, as the end of the book approaches, are the institutional biases against these practices, the macro-scale, system-wide means by which transformational and democratic activity is denied financial and social capital, and thus cognitive support. This issue has been raised throughout, particularly when criticising mainstream IL literature in chapter 4, so it cannot be avoided here. There are micro-level, personal reasons why AR does not take place more often in professional and community contexts. Lack of time is an obvious one. Nor does everyone wish to undertake this kind of work: “involvement in decisions is not attractive for everyone in all relevant choice situations, all the time. The capacity for beliefs, attitudes and concerns is larger than the capacity for action” (March & Olsen 1979, 14). Even if these are personal constructs, they cannot be simply wished away. There is no point simply demanding that teachers, or any other professional, engage in some new activity that they do not have the capacity to engage in. At the same time, these kinds of constructs can be exploited by hierarchism to justify the delegation of cognitive work away from communities (“this system will save you time”). Nor should the galvanising effect of hidden transcripts be underestimated: even the most apathetic community can at least

potentially be roused by injustice, incompetence, or a simple incompatibility of perspective, a contradiction arising between what they are told and what they see or do for themselves. More significant are not that these sparks of rebellion never arise: rather, that when they do, their potential energy can be drained away by meso- and macro-level structures that then re-entrench themselves around whatever discourse provoked the critique. Even if nonconformity and dissent “provides the gene pool for social innovation” (Korten 1990, 214), it is also at least potentially disruptive to an organisation: “there is no such a thing as learning without conflict, for any modification of the knowledge distribution is perceived as a way of subverting the established knowledge/power relations within a social 197 Radical Information Literacy context...” (Gherardi et al 1998, 276). Therefore, organisations tend to approach decisions as analytical problems, to be answered with the appearance of due process and objectivity, even when it is clear that to actually implement the content of a (rational, instrumental) decision, communicative actions – bargaining, negotiation, the reaching of a consensus – must then take place (March and Olsen 1979, 89–90; Cervero and Wilson 1998). Carr and Kemmis (1986, 197) note that: The organisation of enlightenment in action research thus gives rise to conditions under which the organisation of action can take place as an attempt to replace one distorted set of practices within another, undistorted set of practices. Such action is always political action; new practices always challenge established institutional interests. They express a realignment of tendencies towards empowerment and emancipation, on the one hand, as against tendencies towards the entrenchment of sectional self-interests, on the other. At every moment... any action research project will contain some balance of both of these tendencies. Effective, transformational AR is as much about managing conflict and achieving a sense of community as it is about the results of the

research itself ( ibid): Since it is undertaken by a particular group with particular selfinterests of its own, and under particular historical conditions of relative power or powerlessness, it is always subject to distortions by these self-interests. By aiming to involve others in its progress, however, it can expand the community of self-interests it represents... Thus the importance of alliance-building in AR, just as in radical IL more widely. These drives are implictly refuting the idea that the authoritative voice in a landscape can come from outside the community of participants in the practices that constitute that landscape (cf. Carr and Kemmis 1986, 211), yet expanding the community in this way also involves a risk: moving beyond what is known, into what is unknown, a step that might go wrong (Carr and Kemmis 1986, 185). Managing emotion is also important and cannot be avoided, as people tend to shy away from interpersonal conflict (Blaug 1999, 153–5). 198 Reclaiming IL One should not expect support for direct democratic processes, such as radical IL, to emerge from most state apparatuses. At a transnational level, there has been support from organisations like UNESCO, and Sturges and Gastinger (2010) invoke the UN Declaration of Human Rights, particularly the right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas, through any media and regardless of frontiers” as the basis for IL. But, ( ibid): “while Article Nineteen provides excellent inspiration, like any simple statement of a human right, it does not offer supporting arguments that might indicate the specific dimensions and potential structures of an information right.” In any case, we live in an era where certain governments and media interests, particularly in the UK, regularly propose withdrawing from certain binding human rights agreements (e.g. that of the EU). The

“responsibility on governments, professionals and civil society activists for the (active) creation of suitable conditions for the effective exercise of intellectual freedom” that Sturges and Gastinger mention is one adopted with varying enthusiasm by each group, but the basis of radical IL in theories such as Gramsci’s and Habermas’s suggests it is a category mistake to demand that a government do more to support the development of radical information infrastructures, although it is true that some states, such as Norway, do offer more protection than others ( ibid). Clarke (1996, 62) observes that the state is not a necessary requirement for politics, and “there is a perfectly defensible view that the state inhibits politics and distorts citizenship.” Graeber (2012, 382–3) goes further still: (I)t could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world – in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s – with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the 199 Radical Information Literacy world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important to exponents of the ‘free market’, than maintaining any sort of viable market economy.... To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in

the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away. Because validity claims and cognitive authority can only be truly tested in contexts that are not those from which they originated, these other contexts are grounds from which hidden transcripts (Scott 1990) and, eventually, challenges to authority emerge. However, the rhetorical moves made by colonising forces are often based around the denigration of contextually-relevant, situated knowledge and also deterministic views of humanity that deny the possibility of internal and individual transformation and change (as an example, consider the arguments made in favour of mass surveillance and subsequent use of the data gathered for ‘profiling’ purposes). Asserting the value of this kind of knowledge in turn drives depersonalisation (Morson and Emerson 1990, 405) which, in turn, detaches the individual from their context, sometimes forcibly so (Graeber 2012, 437). Yet even here, there must remain some grounds for hope ( ibid): ‘To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away.” This accords with Hamelink’s words (1976, 123): “The process of becoming the object of one’s history has to start with the awareness of the immediate context and the consciousness that this context is changeable...” Is this a forlorn hope? Certainly, the path is a difficult one, and change will not be rapid. But empirically, the work is being done in places, now as it has been in the past, as writer/activists such as Eubanks (2013) prove, as well as many others already cited in this section. What these projects must concentrate on, more so than data gathering, is the active evaluation and communication of their results to other interested communities – whether these are presented in academic form (but outside the academic publishing establishment, and/or in open access journals) or using other genres such as narrative, awareness-raising workshops, and so on. In this way can

both the theory and practice of radical IL continue to evolve. This book is not the end of the process – nor indeed, its starting point – it is merely a move in the ongoing 200 Reclaiming IL dialogue around direct democratic practice, and how we can learn to be better citizens. The present author will continue his work in this area and others will also do so. The hope is that the theory and practice of radical IL will continue to evolve as we all learn about how we must challenge the cognitive authority currently invested in powerful and influential information systems, open the claims of the powerful up to active scrutiny, and realise we have the power to transform our local contexts through active dialogue and work. *** In summary, radical IL picks up Hamelink’s early, tantalising but underdeveloped views on IL, and returns to them with new theoretical lenses, developed by those authors which have previously analysed IL in dialogic terms – particularly those working in the phenomenographic and practice schools of IL. The ideas originating from these schools have been synthesised through the idea that through everyday, prosaic explorations of the various information landscapes we inhabit, we are, collectively, constantly drawing maps of these landscapes that help organise and visualise the resources available to us for learning and transformation. But only rarely do we become fully conscious of this process – usually doing so at times of rupture, when the validity claims we habitually accept are called into question by new information or anomalous experiences. These can cause anxiety and denial, but they can also provoke learning experiences, sometimes of great energy. Participation in such a project is a learning process in its own right, and if reflected on and assimilated into a worldview, one realises that one can, indeed, learn to become more political – a conclusion recognised by the social movement literature (e.g. Diani 1995; Wall

1999, 96). The question is whether organisations who may seek to facilitate this kind of process can withdraw from control of it at the appropriate point. In 1990 Korten looked forward to the need in the 21st century for a ‘fourth generation’ of transformative political actors that stood outside the governmental sector – in other words, NGOs (non-governmental organisations, for instance the Red Cross, Greenpeace, or more local charities and voluntary groups). He saw the first generation of NGOs as those that organised immediate relief efforts in times of suffering (e.g., the Red Cross); a second generation that focused also on building communities without the necessary provocation of a disaster (e.g. Voluntary Service Overseas or VSO); and the third generation, which many NGOs have reached, as campaigning for change in government policy and against 201 Radical Information Literacy transnational organisations like the IMF (e.g. Greenpeace). Korten then defined the fourth generation as organisations that would aim at “energising decentralised action” (Korten 1990, 120), for example, Dr Y C J Yen’s literacy movement in China in the 1920s–30s: Copies of the texts... appeared in provinces and towns throughout the country, and not even James Yen knew how many classes were in fact being taught or how many schools were operating. In a more conventional project... these conditions would have been a sign of poor management. In a true movement it is a sign of the vitality of an idea with a power to spread by its own momentum, wholly beyond any central control or monitoring. A form of radical IL can be seen in Yen’s example. It raised the ability of the mass of the population to engage with what had previously been elite dialogues, improved their ability to engage with information generally, and was decentred and community-focused. In modern parlance, Yen’s texts ‘went viral’. The example also suggests that to distribute stewarding and authority, to create the

intersubjectively-validated elements of the radical infrastructure, more than just introspective reflection is required. It requires the production of texts. This is itself a ‘risky’ business, requiring reflection: we cannot be sure of our recipient, or even that we will be externalising our own ‘inner speech’ accurately (Morson and Emerson, 1990, 215). Nevertheless, only by producing such texts, narratives and maps of various kinds can ideas enter into dialogue with one another. It is in this production that radical IL can be ‘measured’, not by the creation of rubrics and standards. By the production of texts, and their validation as utterances, the responses made to them by others, can the impact of radical IL be seen, and it can come to be defined as more than just an abstract concept. But these are not the same criteria of success as will be expected by organisational hierarchies. Subordinate members of a social and organisational structure – the ‘lower classes’ if one likes – are worked harder. This work is both physical and cognitive. These classes lack not technology as such. As Eubanks shows (2011), most are already plugged in to information systems. But rather than facilitating learning, these systems are essentially extractive. The huge information banks which Zurkowski anticipated are now manifested in sites like Google and Facebook, with the brute processing power required to make use of these data well beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen and, indeed, many corporate entities. But to call for such 202 Reclaiming IL power to be redistributed to communities misses the point. What the disempowered need, and what transformation depends on, is not this kind of instrumental force, but a flexible genre repertoire, an ability to communicate effectively in a variety of landscapes, to learn from the resultant dialogue and, ultimately, to understand how to

transform one’s own world, and the cognitive authorities which constrain it. Work and authority are diametrically opposed. Authority, as instantiated in a monologic information system, forces other people to do cognitive work to adjust to it. Just as radical IL redistributes authority, so it redistributes work. The sort of holistic, situated understanding it implies takes time and effort to achieve – there is no ‘magic bullet’ in this case – but the investment is worth making. Radical IL redistributes the benefits of work: that is, it more equably distributes capital of various kinds, and it redistributes the negative, colonising, unsustainable effects of work, effacing them with positive impacts on communities’ ability to sustain their own information landscapes and continue to retain learning potentials into the future. Radical IL highlights not just the financial, but the cognitive debt that our increased reliance on instrumental rationality owes to the products of communicative rationality. For that reason it is opposed by the hegemonic institutions that are funded by these debts. Notes 1. This is quite a different usage from the idea of competency as manifested in Bruce et al’s (2007) competency frame of IL education. 2. Note the difference between Bakhtin and Habermas’s views on ‘consensus’, epitomised by the last line of this quote. 3. The question of the ‘validity’ of Spurlock’s research is a matter for critique, of course: but it cannot be denied that he at least attempted to root his conclusions in scientific analysis through the employment of three medical specialists to evaluate the results of his experiment (that is, the effects on his body). He also presents his methodology and justification for the study at the beginning of the film. In short he shows himself to be aware of the genre of academic study and though, like any academic study, his findings can be critiqued, they should be critiqued on the right terms. His book (2005) also plays a role here. In the teaching being referred to here, students follow the film by engaging in discussion of these matters.

4. I came to know one of the University of Manchester’s librarians, Ian Fishwick, not because of some formal connection made on campus but because we live in the same town and often share a commute. This link became strong enough to produce a jointlyauthored book chapter on IL pedagogy (Whitworth, Fishwick and McIndoe 2011). 203 Radical Information Literacy 5. This book is an example: for all that the ideas are mine, building on the work of other individual authors, the book could still not have come into existence without more institutional forms of support from at least three universities: The University of Manchester, Queensland University of Technology and, in a lesser but still significant way, Charles Sturt University. The same will have been true of almost all the other books cited here. 6. MOSI comes from the name of one of the project partners, the Museum Of Science and Industry. ‘ALONG’ is then a backronym. The project was funded by JISC ( www.jisc.ac.uk). 7. Formal educational providers are those which offer accredited courses of some kind. A non-formal provider is an organisation with an educational mandate but which does not offer courses, such as museums, libraries and public service broadcasters. See Garnett and Ecclesfield (2012). 8. www.whalleyrange.org (last accessed 6th August 2013). 9. see www.populartechnology.org and also the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (djc.org) 10.

A cycle implies that one simply moves round and round the same points, whereas with a spiral there is a sense of progression. 204 Bibliography Abrahamsson, B. (1993). Why Organizations? How and Why People Organize. London: Sage. ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) (2000) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. Adamson, W. L. (1980). Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Aharony, N. (2010). Information literacy in the professional literature: an exploratory analysis. Aslib proceedings, 62(3), p. 261. Alexandria Proclamation (2006), ed. S. Garner: Report of the HighLevel Colloquium on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning. Alexandria: Egypt. American Library Association (1989). American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report. Chicago: ALA. Andersen, J. (2006). The public sphere and discursive activities: information literacy as sociopolitical skills. Journal of documentation 62/2, p. 213. Andersen, J. (2008). The concept of genre in information studies. Annual review of information science and technology 42/1, 339–367. Andretta, S. (2005). Information literacy: A practitioner’s guide. Oxford: Chandos.

Andretta, S. (2007a) Information literacy: the functional literacy for the 21st century. In S. Andretta, ed. Change and Challenge: Information literacy for the 21st century. Adelaide: Auslib (pp. 1–13). Andretta, S. (2007b). Phenomenography: a conceptual framework for information literacy education. Aslib proceedings 59/2, 152–168. Andretta, S. (2011). Information literacy: a term whose time has passed? Journal of Information Literacy, 5(1), 1–4. 205 Radical Information Literacy Andretta, S. (2012). Facilitating information literacy education (FILE). Handbook of library training practice and development 3, 49–75. Angus, I. (2001). Emergent Politics: An essay on social movements and democracy. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Argyris, C. and Schön, D. (1999). On Organizational Learning. Oxford: Blackwell. Babalhavaeji, F., Isfandyari-Moghaddam, A., Aqili, S. and Shakooii, A. (2009) Quality assessment of academic library performance: the case of an Iranian academic library. Malaysian Journal of Library and Information Science 14/2, 51–81. Badke, W. B. (2008) A rationale for information literacy as a creditbearing discipline. Journal of Information Literacy 2/1. Badke, W. B. (2011). Why information literacy is invisible. Communications in Information Literacy, 4/2, 129–141.

Badke, W. B. (2012) Teaching Research Processes: The faculty role in the development of skilled student researchers. Oxford: Chandos. Bailey, P., Hunsberger, M. and Hayden, K. A. (1998). The diverse faces of critical literacy: only knowledge or also social action? Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 44/2, 120. Bakhtin, M. (1981) . The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. tr. C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. C. Emerson & M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bartlett, F. (1932) Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Basili, C. (2011). A framework for analyzing and comparing information literacy policies in European countries. Library Trends 60/2, 395–418. Bates, M. (1986): Subject Access to Online Catalogs: A Design Model, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 37, 357–376. Bawden, David (2001) Information and digital literacies: a review of concepts. Journal of documentation, 57/2, 218–259. Becher, T., & Trowler, P. (1989). Academic tribes and territories. Buckingham, UK: SRHE/Open University Press.

Becker, H. (1967) Whose Side Are We On? Social Problems 14, 241. Beetham, H., McGill, L. and Littlejohn, A. 2009. Thriving in the 21st Century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age. Glasgow, UK: The Caledonian Academy. Behrens, S. (1994). A conceptual analysis and historical overview of information literacy. College and Research Libraries 55/4, 309–322. 206 Bibliography Black, A. (1996). A new history of the English public library: social and intellectual contexts, 1850–1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Blaug, R. (1999a). Democracy Real and Ideal: Discourse Ethics and Radical Politics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Blaug, R. (1999b). The Tyranny of the Visible: Problems in the Evaluation of Anti-Institutional Radicalism. Organization 6/1, 33–56. Blaug, R. (2007) Cognition in a Hierarchy. Contemporary Political Theory 6/1, 24–44. Blaug, R. (2010). How Power Corrupts. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blaug, R. and Schwarzmantel, J. (2001) Democracy: A Reader. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Bohman, J. (1989). System and Lifeworld: Habermas and the Problem of Holism. Philosophy and Social Criticism 15, 381–401. Booth, S. (1997). On phenomenography, learning and teaching. Higher Education Research and Development 16/2, 135–158.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). Homo academicus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brandt, D. S. (2001). Information Technology Literacy: Task Knowledge and Mental Models. Library Trends 50/1, 73–86. Breivik, P. S. (1985). A vision in the making: putting libraries back in the information society. American Libraries 16/10, 723–723. Breivik, P. S. (1986). Library based learning in an information society. New Directions for Higher Education 56, 47–55. Breivik, P. S. (1991). Information literacy. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 79/2, 226. Breivik, P. S. and Gee, E. G. (1989) Information Literacy: Revolution in the Library, American Council on Education, Washington DC. Breivik, P. S. and Gee, E. G. (2006) Higher Education in the Internet Age: Libraries Creating a Strategic Edge. Westport, CT: Praeger. Breure, L. (2001) Development of the Genre Concept. Utrecht, NL: Department of Information Science, University of Utrecht. Bridgland, A. and Whitehead, M. (2005). Perspectives On ... Information Literacy in the “E” Environment: An Approach for Sustainability. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 31/1, 54. Broidy, E. (2007): Gender and the Politics of Information: Reflections on Bringing the Library into the Classroom. Library Trends 56/2, 494–508. Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Practitioner.

London: Sage. 207 Radical Information Literacy Bruce, B. C., & Bishop, A. P. (2008). New literacies and community inquiry. The handbook of research in new literacies, 699–742. Bruce, C. S. (1997): The Seven Faces of Information Literacy. Adelaide: Auslib. Bruce, C. S. (2008): Informed Learning. Chicago: ACRL. Bruce, C. S. (2013) Information literacy research and practice: an experiential perspective. In Kurbanoglu, S., Grassian, E., Mizrachi, D., Catts, R., Akça, S., & Spiranec, Sonja (Eds.) Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL 2013), Hacettepe University Department of Information Management, Istanbul, Turkey, p. 6. Bruce, C. S., Edwards, S. L. and Lupton, M. (2006) Six frames for information literacy education. Italics 5/1. Bruner, J. S. (1973) Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing. New York: Norton. Bruner, J. S. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruns, A. (2009) From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding UserLed Content Creation. In Transforming Audiences 2009, 3–4 Sep, 2009, London. Burchinal, L. G. (1976) The Communications Revolution: America’s Third Century Challenge, in The Future of Organizing Knowledge: Papers Presented at the Texas A & M University Library’s Centennial Academic Assembly, Sept. 24, 1976, Texas A & M University Library.

(See also http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/drew.whitworth/ burchinal.html). Burrell, G. (1997). Pandemonium: Toward a Retro-Organisation Theory. London: Sage. Burkitt, I. (1999) Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity. London: Sage. Bush, V. (1945) ‘As We May Think’, Atlantic Monthly, July: available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush [last accessed 6th Dec 2013]. Calhoun, C., ed. (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carr, W. & Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming Critical: Knowing Through Action Research. Geelong: Deakin University Press. Cervero, R. and Wilson, A. (1998): Working the Planning Table: The Political Practice of Adult Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 208 Bibliography Chang, C. and Liu, E. (2011). Exploring the Media Literacy of Taiwanese Elementary School Students. The Asia Pacific Education Researcher 20/3, 616–623. Checkland, P. and Holwell, S. (1998) Information systems and information systems: Making sense of the field, Wiley. Chen, K., Lin, P. and Chang, S. (2011) Integrating library instruction into a problem-based learning curriculum. Aslib Proceedings 63/5.

Chou, T., Chen, J. and Pu, C. (2005): Collective Actions: The Case of e-Government Development. 9th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2005). Chou, T., Chen, J. and Pu, C. Exploring the collective actions of public servants in e-government development. Decision Support Systems 45/2, 251–265. Clarke, P. B. (1996). Deep Citizenship. London: Pluto Press. Conant, J. B. (1951) Science and Common Sense. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cover, T. and Thomas, J. (2012) Elements of Information Theory. London: Wiley. Crawford, J. and Irving, C. (2011) Information literacy in the workplace and employability agenda. In A, Pope and G. Walton, (eds). Information literacy: infiltrating the agenda, challenging minds. Oxford: Chandos (pp. 45–70). Cresswell, J., and Baerveldt, C. (2011). Bakhtin’s realism and embodiment: Towards a revision of the dialogical self. Culture & Psychology 17/2, 263–277. Cresswell, J., and Teucher, U. (2011). The body and language: MM Bakhtin on ontogenetic development. New Ideas in Psychology 29/2, 106–118. Curl, S. R. (2001). Subramanyam revisited: Creating a new model for information literacy instruction. College & Research Libraries 62/5, 455–464. De Boer, A. L., Bothma, T., and du Toit, P. (2011). Enhancing information literacy through the application of whole brain strategies. Libri 61(1), 67–75.

Demo, William (1986) The Idea of “Information Literacy” in the Age of High-Tech, Tompkins Cortland Community College, New York. Dentler, R. A. (2002). Practicing sociology: selected fields. Greenwood Publishing Group. Detmering, R. (2010). Exploring the Political Dimensions of Information Literacy through Popular Film. Portal 10/3, 265–282. 209 Radical Information Literacy Dewey, J. (1909). Moral principles in education. Houghton Mifflin Company. Diani, M. (1995). Green Networks: A Structural Analysis of the Italian Environmental Movement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DiMaggio, P. and Powell, W. (1983). The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review 48/2, 147–160. Do or Die, eds. (2000): Do or Die volume 8: voices from the ecological resistance. Brighton: Do or Die. Domine, V. (2011) Think Global, Act Local: Expanding the Agenda for Media Literacy Education in the United States. Library Trends 60/2, p. 440–453. Dorner, D. G. and Gorman, G. E. (2011). Contextual factors affecting learning in Laos and the implications for information literacy education. Information Research 16/2. Douglas, Mary (1986): How Institutions Think, Syracuse UP: Syracuse. Downing, J. D. (1988). Trouble in the backyard: Soviet media reporting on the Afghanistan conflict. Journal of Communication 38/2, 5–32.

Dudziak, E. A. (2010). Competência Informacional: análise evolucionária das tendências da pesquisa e produtividade científica em âmbito mundial. Informação & Informação 15/2. Easterby-Smith, M., Snell, R. and Gherardi, S. (1998) Organizational Learning: Diverging Communities of Practice? Management Learning 29/3, 259–272. Edwards, S. L. (2006). Panning for gold: Information literacy and the net lenses model. Adelaide: Auslib Press. Eisenberg, M. B., & Berkowitz, R. E. (1990). Information Problem Solving: The Big Six Skills Approach to Library & Information Skills Instruction. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Eisenberg, M. B., Lowe, C. A., & Spitzer, K. L. (2004). Information literacy: Essential skills for the information age. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Elmborg, J. (2002). Teaching at the desk: toward a reference pedagogy. Portal 2/3, 455–464. Elmborg, J. (2006). Critical information literacy: Implications for instructional practice. Journal of Academic Librarianship 32/2, 192– 199. Elmborg, J. (2011). Libraries as the Spaces Between us. Reference and User Services Quarterly, 50/4, 338–350. Engeström, Y., Miettinen, R. and Punamäki, R.-L. (eds) (1999) Perspectives on Activity Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 210 Bibliography

Evans, J. (1989) Bias in Human Reasoning: Causes and Consequences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Eubanks, V. (2011). Digital dead end: Fighting for social justice in the information age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eubanks, V. (2013). Keynote speech at How to Avoid Digital Dead Ends: A Teaching and Learning Conference, Blackburn College, UK. Fay, B. (1975). Social Theory and Political Practice. London: Allen & Unwin. Feenberg, A. (2002) Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ferguson, S. (2012). Are Public Libraries Developers of Social Capital? A Review of Their Contribution and Attempts to Demonstrate It. The Australian library journal, 61/1, 22. Fleck, L. (1935). The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Forester, J., ed. (1985). Critical Theory and Public Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foster, S. (1993) Information Literacy: Some Misgivings. American Libraries 24, 344. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge. New York, NY: Random House. Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of other spaces. diacritics, 16(1), 22–27.

Fourie, I. (2009). Learning from research on the information behaviour of healthcare professionals: a review of the literature 2004–2008 with a focus on emotion. Health information and libraries journal, 26/3, 171–186. Fourie, I. (2011). Personal information management (PIM), reference management and mind maps: the way to creative librarians? Library Hi Tech 29/4, 764–771. Fransella, F. and Dalton, P. (2000) Personal Construct Counselling in Action. London: Sage. Franz, J. (1994) Managing intricacy in phenomenographic inquiry. In Phenomenography: philosophy and practice. Brisbane, Centre for Applied Environmental and Social Education (pp. 175–182). Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. In C. Calhoun, ed.: Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (pp. 109–142). Freeman, J. (1984). The Tyranny of Structurelessness . In Untying the Knot: Feminism, Anarchism and Organization. London: Dark Star Press. 211 Radical Information Literacy Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Friedland, R. and Alford, R. (1991). Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices and Institutional Contradictions. In W. Powell and P. DiMaggio, eds.: The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frisch, A., Camerini, L., Diviani, N. and Schulz, J. (2011). Defining and measuring health literacy: how can we profit from other literacy domains? Health Promotion International, 27/1, 117–126.

Fry, H., Ketteridge, S., & Marshall, S. (Eds.). (2008). A handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: enhancing academic practice. London: Routledge. Gardiner, M. E. (2004). Wild publics and grotesque symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on dialogue, everyday life and the public sphere. The Sociological Review, 52/1, 28–48. Gardner, D. P. (1983). A nation at risk. Washington, D. C.: The National Commission on Excellence in Education, US Department of Education. Garnett, F., & Ecclesfield, N. (2012). Towards a framework for cocreating open scholarship. Research in Learning Technology, 19. Garvey, T. G. (2000). The value of opacity: A Bakhtinian analysis of Habermas’s discourse ethics. Philosophy and Rhetoric 33/4, 370– 390. Gastil, J. (1993). Democracy in Small Groups: Participation, Decision Making and Communication. Philadelphia: New Society. Geijer, L. and Olstedt, E. (2009) Vocational Education and Academia: Focus group discussions over time. In Junefelt, K. and Nordin, P., eds: Proceedings from the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspectives and Limits of Dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin, Stockholm, June 3–5. 2009. (pp. 157–170). Gherardi, S., Nicolini, D. and Odella, F. (1998). Toward a Social Understanding of How People Learn in Organizations: The Notion of Situated Curriculum. Management Learning 29/3, 273–297. Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Goldacre, B. (2008). Bad Science. London: HarperCollins.

Graeber, D. (2012). Debt: The first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House. Gramsci, A. (1971). Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Grafstein, Ann (2007). Information Literacy and Technology: An Examination of Some Issues. Portal 7/1, 51. Grix, J. (2002). Introducing students to the generic terminology of social research. Politics 22/3, 175–186. 212 Bibliography Gunton, L. (2011). Religious information literacy: Using information to learn in church community. Australian Library Journal, 60(2), 155– 164. Gustavsen, B. (2001) Theory and Practice: The Mediating Discourse, in Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds) Handbook of Action Research. London: Sage (pp. 17–26). Gwyer, R., Stubbings, R. and Walton, G. (eds.) The Road to Information Literacy: Librarians as Facilitators of Learning. Berlin, de Gruyter. Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action vol 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action vol 2: Lifeworld and System – A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Habermas, J. (1993) Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, E. T., et al (1968). Proxemics. Current anthropology 1968, 83– 108. Hamelink, C. (1976). An alternative to news. Journal of Communication 20, 120–123. Harding, S. (1995). “Strong objectivity”: A response to the new objectivity question. Synthese, 104/3, 331–349. Harris, B. R. (2008). Communities as Necessity in Information Literacy Development: Challenging the Standards. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 34/3, 248–255. Hasselgren, B. and Beach, D. (1997) Phenomenography — a “goodfor-nothing brother” of phenomenology? Outline of an analysis. Higher Education Research and Development 16/2, 191–202. Hepworth, M. and Walton, G. (2009). Teaching information literacy for inquiry-based learning. Oxford: Chandos. Herman, E. (1998). The propaganda model revisited. In McChesney, R., Meiksins Wood, E. and Foster, J. B. (Eds.). Capitalism and the information age: the political economy of the global communication revolution. (pp. 191–205). New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Hess, C. and Ostrom, E. (eds) (2007) Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hirschkop, K. (2004). Justice and drama: on Bakhtin as a complement to Habermas. The Sociological Review, 52/1, 49–66. 213

Radical Information Literacy Hoffmann, D. A., and LaBonte, K. (2012). Meeting information literacy outcomes: Partnering with faculty to create effective information literacy assessment. Journal of Information Literacy, 6(2), 70–85. Holub, R. (1992). Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Holquist, M. (2002). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world. London: Routledge. Holquist, M. (2009) The role of chronotope in dialogue. In Junefelt, K. and Nordin, P., eds: Proceedings from the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspectives and Limits of Dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin, Stockholm, June 3–5 2009. (pp. 9–17). Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1972). The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury. Horton Jr, F. W. (2011). Information Literacy Advocacy—Woody’s Ten Commandments. Library Trends 60/2, 262–276. Hughes, H., Bruce, C. and Edwards, S. (2007) Models for reflection and learning: A culturally inclusive response to the information literacy imbalance. In S. Andretta, ed. Change and Challenge: Information literacy for the 21st century. Adelaide: Auslib (pp. 59– 84). Hultgren, F. (2009) Approaching the Future: A study of Swedish school leavers’ information-related activities. Borås: Valfrid. Huvila, Isto (11/2010). Information sources and perceived success in corporate finance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61/11, 2219.

Inhaber, H. (1976) Environmental Indices. New York: Wiley. Ipri, T. (2010). Introducing transliteracy: What does it mean to academic libraries? College & Research Libraries News 71/10, 532– 567. Julien, H., and Pecoskie, J. J. (2009). Librarians’ experiences of the teaching role: Grounded in campus relationships. Library & Information Science Research, 31/3, 149–154. Julien, H. and Williamson, K. (2011). Discourse and practice in information literacy and information seeking: Gaps and opportunities. Information Research 16(1). Kakkonen, A. and A. Virrankoski (2010). Implementation of the Finnish University Libraries National Information Literacy Recommendation into academic studies at the Kumpula Science Library, University of Helsinki. New Library World 111/11–12, 493– 502. Kammer, J. and Thompson, T. (2011) Information Literate Avatars: Resource-Based Learning in Second Life. In Mackey, T. and Jacobson, T. (eds): Teaching Information Literacy Online, New York NY, Neal-Schulman. (pp. 109–132). 214 Bibliography Kanyengo, C. (2010). Information and communication: a library’s local response to HIV/AIDS in Zambia. Health information and libraries journal, 27/1, 57. Kapitzke, C. (2003) Information literacy: a positivist epistemology and a politics of outformation. Educational Theory 53/1, 37–53. Keen, A. (2007) The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. London: Nicholas

Brearley. Kelly, G. (1963). A theory of personality: The psychology of personality constructs. New York: Norton. Kemmis, S. (2001) Exploring the relevance of critical theory for action research: Emancipatory action research in the footsteps of Jürgen Habermas. In Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds) Handbook of Action Research. London: Sage (pp. 91–102). Kemmis, S. and Grootenboer, P. (2008) Situation praxis in practice. In Kemmis, S. and Smith, T.J. (Eds), Enabling Praxis, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam (pp. 37–62). Kempcke, K. (2002): The Art of War for Librarians: Academic Culture, Curriculum Reform, and Wisdom from Sun Tzu: Portal 2/4. Kenny, P. (2009). News agencies as content providers and purveyors of news: A mediahistoriographical study on the development and diversity of wire services. Doctoral dissertation: University of Stellenbosch. Klein, H. and Truex, D. (1996). Discourse Analysis: An Approach to the Investigation of Organizational Emergence. In B. Holmqvist, P. Andersen, H. Klein and R. Posner, eds: Signs of Work: Semiotics and Information Processing in Organizations. Berlin: de Gruyter. Knight, P. (2000) Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to the X-Files. London, UK: Routledge. Korten, D. (1990). Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda. Westview, CT: Kumarian. Kuhlthau, C.C. (1993). Seeking meaning: A process approach to library and information services. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kurbanoğlu, S. (2012). An Analysis of Concept of Information Literacy. Paper delivered at the IFLA/UNESCO conference on Media and Information Literacy, June 2012, Moscow. Lancaster, F.W. (1970) User Education: The Next Major Thrust in Information Science. Journal of Education for Librarianship 11, 55– 63. 215 Radical Information Literacy Landry, C., Morley, D., Southwood, R. and Wright, P. (1985) What a Way to Run a Railroad: An analysis of radical failure. London: Comedia. Laurillard, D. (2002) Rethinking University Teaching, 2nd edn. London, UK: Routledge Falmer. Lavoie, D., Rosman, A. and Sharma, S. (2011) Information Literacy by Design: Recalibrating Graduate Professional Asynchronous Online Programs. In Mackey, T. and Jacobson, T. (eds): Teaching Information Literacy Online, New York NY, Neal-Schulman. (pp. 133– 158). Leckie, G. J. (1996). Desperately seeking citations: Uncovering faculty assumptions about the undergraduate research process. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 22/3, 201–208. Leckie, G. and Fullerton, A. (1999) The Roles of Academic Librarians in Fostering a Pedagogy for Information Literacy . Proceedings of the ACRL Ninth National Conference (pp. 8–11). Levine, P. (2007). Collective Action, Civic Engagement and the Knowledge Commons. In C. Hess and E. Ostrom (eds.):

Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (pp. 247–276). Limberg, L., Sundin, O., and Talja, S. (2012). Three theoretical perspectives on information literacy. Human IT 11/2, 93–130. Lin, P., Cheng, H., Liao, W. and Yen, Y. (2012) A Study of the Mobile Technology Literacy Indicators in Taiwan. Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Computation and Information teChnologies for Education (ECICE 2012). Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. IAP, Charlotte, NC. Lloyd, A. (2006): Information literacy landscapes: an emerging picture. Journal of Documentation 62/5, 570–583. Lloyd, A. (2007): Learning to Put Out the Red Stuff: Becoming Information Literate through Discursive Practice. Library Quarterly 77/2, 181–198. Lloyd, A. (2010). Information literacy landscapes: Information literacy in education, workplace and everyday contexts. Oxford: Chandos. Lloyd, A. (2010b). Framing information literacy as information practice: site ontology and practice theory. Journal of documentation, 66/2, 245. Lloyd, A. (2012). Information literacy as a socially enacted practice: Sensitising themes for an emerging perspective of people-inpractice. Journal of Documentation 68/6, 772–783. 216

Bibliography Lloyd, A. (2013) Lost in Translation? Interactions, impact and practice of information literacy. What does this mean for the workplace? Keynote speech, i3: Information: interactions and impact, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, June 25–28, 2013. Lloyd, A., & Williamson, K. (2008). Towards an understanding of information literacy in context: Implications for research. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 40/1, 3–12. Lonka, K. (2012) Engaging Learning Environments for the Future. In R. Gwyer, R. Stubbings and G. Walton (eds.) The Road to Information Literacy: Librarians as Facilitators of Learning. Berlin, de Gruyter (pp. 15–29). Loughran, J. J. (2002). Developing reflective practice: Learning about teaching and learning through modelling. London: Routledge. Luckin, R. (2010): Redesigning Learning Contexts: Technology-rich, learner-centred ecologies, London, Routledge. Luckin, R., Clark, W., Garnett, F., Whitworth, A., Akass, J., Cook, J., Day, P., Ecclesfield, N., Hamilton, T. and Robertson, J. (2010). Learner-generated contexts: A framework to support the effective use of technology to support learning. In Lee, M. W. and McLoughlin, C. (eds): Web 2.0- Based E-Learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching. Hershey PA: IGI Global. Luna-Reyes, L. F., Zhang, J., Gil-García, J. R., & Cresswell, A. M. (2005). Information systems development as emergent sociotechnical change: a practice approach. European Journal of Information Systems, 14/1, 93–105.

Lundh, A., Limberg, L. and Lloyd, A. (2013) Swapping settings: researching information literacy in workplace and in educational contexts. Information Research 18/3. Lupton, M. (2004): The Learning Connection: Information Literacy and the Student Experience. Adelaide: Auslib. Luyt, B. and Azura, I. (2010). The sigh of the information literate: an examination of the potential for oppression in information literacy. Information Research 15/3. Lyotard, F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Macevičiūtė, E. (2006). Information needs research in Russia and Lithuania, 1965–2003. Information Research 11/3. Mackey, T. and Jacobson, T. (eds): Teaching Information Literacy Online, New York NY, Neal- Schulman. March, J., Olsen, J. and Christensen, S. (1976) Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget. 217 Radical Information Literacy Marcum. J. (2002) Rethinking information literacy. Library and Information Quarterly 72/1. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mark, A. E. (2011a). Privileging Peer Review: Implications for Undergraduates. Communications in Information Literacy 5/1, 4–8. Mark, A. E. (2011b). Format as a false judge of credibility.

Communications in Information Literacy, 5/1, 21–37. Markless, S. (2009). A New Conception of Information Literacy for the Digital Environment in Higher Education. Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education, 1/1. Markless, S. and Streatfield, D. (2007) Three decades of information literacy: redefining the parameters. In Andretta, S. (ed.), Change and Challenge: Information Literacy for the 21st Century. Adelaide, Australia: Auslib; pp. 15–36. Marton, F. (1981). Phenomenography—describing conceptions of the world around us. Instructional science, 10/2, 177–200. Marton, F. (1995). Cognosco ergo sum. Reflections on reflections. Nordisk Pedagogik, 15/3, 165–180. Marton, F. and Booth, S. (1997) Learning and awareness. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Marton, F., Dall’Alba, G. and Beaty, E. (1993). Conceptions of learning. Journal of Educational Research 19, 277–299. Matusov, E. (2011). Irreconcilable differences in Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to the social and the individual: An educational perspective. Culture & Psycholog y 17/1, 99–119. McCarthy, T. (1984). The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge: Polity Press. McCrank, L. J. (1991). Information literacy: A bogus bandwagon? Library Journal 116/8, 38–42.

McFarlane, A. (ed.) (1997) Information Technology and Authentic Learning. London, UK: Routledge. McGuinness, C. (2007). Exploring Strategies for Integrated Information Literacy: From “Academic Champions” to InstitutionWide Change. Communications in information literacy 1/1, 26–38. Medvedev, P. N. (1985). The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, tr. A. J. Wehrle. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Melucci, A. (1989) Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. London: Century Hutchinson. 218 Bibliography Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, J. and Rowan, B. (1991) Institutionalised Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. In Powell, W. and DiMaggio, P., eds: The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mezirow, J. (Ed.). (1990): Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A guide to transformative and emancipatory learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151–167. Mintzberg, H. (1989) Mintzberg on Management. London, UK: Collier Macmillan.

Misztal, B. A. (2003). Durkheim on Collective Memory. Journal of Classical Sociology 3/2, 123–143. Morgan, G. (1999) Images of Organization, 2nd edn. London, UK: Sage. Morson, G. S. and Emerson, C. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mutch, Alistair (1997): Information Literacy: An exploration. International Journal of lnformation Management 17/5, 377–386. Nara, Yumiko (2007). Information Literacy and Everyday Life Risks in Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems: KES 2007-WIRN 2007: 11th International Conference, Vietri sul Mare, Italy, September 12–14, 2007. Nevison, J. (1976). Computing in the liberal arts college. Science 194: 396–402. Ngoh, L. N. (2009). Health literacy: A barrier to pharmacist–patient communication and medication adherence. Journal of the American Pharmacists Association 49/5, 132–149. Nielsen, G. M. (2002). The Norms of Answerability: Social Theory Between Bakhtin and Habermas. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Norton, F. (2008) Using library and museum materials in the pursuit of scientific literacy and public engagement, keynote speech, LILAC ’08 conference, Liverpool, UK. O’Connor, L. (2009). Information literacy as professional legitimation: a critical analysis. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science (50/2), 79–89.

O’Farrill, R. T. (2008). Information Literacy and Knowledge Management: Preparations for an Arranged Marriage. Libri 58, 155– 171. 219 Radical Information Literacy O’Farrill, R. (2008b). Conceptions of effective information use and learning in a tele-health organization: a phenomenographic study of information literacy and knowledge management at work. PhD thesis, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. Oladokun, O. and Aina, L. (2011) ODL and the Impact of Digital Divide on Information Access in Botswana. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 12/6. Orlikowski, W. J., and Yates, J. (1994). Genre repertoire: The structuring of communicative practices in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly 39/4, 541–574. Orwell, G. (1950). Politics and the English Language. In Shooting an Elephant: Collected Essays, London, Secker & Warburg. Outhwaite, W., ed. (1996) The Habermas Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press. Owens M. (1976). State, government and libraries. Library Journal 101/1, 19–28. Partridge, H., Bruce, C. and Tilley, C. (2008). Community information literacy: developing an Australian research agenda. Libri 58/2, 110. Patterson, D. (2009). Information Literacy and Community College Students: Using New Approaches to Literacy Theory to Produce Equity. The Library Quarterly, 79/3, 343. Pawley, C. (2003). Information Literacy: A Contradictory Coupling. The Library Quarterly 73/4, 422–452.

Pilerot, O., and Lindberg, J. (2011). The concept of information literacy in policy-making texts: an imperialistic project? Library Trends 60/2, 338–360. Pinto, M., Cordon, J. and Diaz, R. (2010): Thirty years of information literacy (1977–2007): A terminological, conceptual and statistical analysis. Journal of librarianship and information science, 42/1, 3. Pinto, M., Escalona-Fernández, M. and Pulgarín, A. (2013). Information literacy in social sciences and health sciences: a bibliometric study (1974–2011). Scientometrics 1–24. Polanyi, M. (1962). Tacit knowing: Its bearing on some problems of philosophy. Reviews of Modern Physics, 34/4, 601–615. Ponjuan, G. (2010). Guiding principles for the preparation of a national information literacy program. The International Information and Library Review 42, 91–97. Pope, A. and Walton, G. (2011). Introduction. In A. Pope and G. Walton, eds: Information Literacy: Infiltrating the Curriculum, Challenging Minds. Oxford: Chandos (pp. 1–15). Prague Declaration (2003). Towards an information literate society. Prague, Czech Republic: UNESCO. 220 Bibliography Purdue, J. (2003) Stories, Not Information: Transforming Information Literacy. Portal 3/4. Rader, H. (2002) Information literacy 1973–2002: a selected literature review. Library Trends 51/2. Ragains, P. (2001). Infusing information literacy into the core curriculum: a pilot project at the University of Nevada, Reno. Portal

1/4, 391–407. Ray, L. J. (1993). Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the Age of Global Social Movements. London: Sage. Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds) (2001). Handbook of Action Research. London, UK: Sage. Reffell, P. and A. Whitworth (2002). Information fluency: critically examining IT education. New Library World 102/11–12, 427–35. Riddle, J. S. (2003). Where’s the library in service learning? Models for engaged library instruction. Journal of Academic Librarianship 29/2, 71–81. Robins, K. and F. Webster (1987). The Technical Fix: Education, Computers and Industry. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Rockman, I. (ed.) (2004) Integrating Information Literacy into the Higher Education Curriculum. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Rockquemore, K. A. and Schaffer, R. H. (2000): Toward a Theory of Engagement: A Cognitive Mapping of Service-Learning Experiences, Michigan Journal of Service Learning 7, 14–24. Rose, N. (1996). The death of the social? Reconfiguring the territory of government. Economy and Society 25/3, 327–356. Roszak, T. (1994) The Cult of Information, 2nd edn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Russell, C. L. (2003). Minding the gap between methodological desires and practices. OISE papers in STSE education, 4, 125–134. Russell. P., & O’Brien, T. (2009). The Irish Working Group on Information Literacy (WGIL), Part II: Report of cross-sector activity

2006–2008 and recommendations for action. SCONUL Focus 46, 101–104. Sadler, E. and Given, L. M. (2007). Affordance theory: a framework for graduate students’ information behavior. Journal of documentation, 63/1, 115. Säljö, R. (1994). Minding action: Conceiving of the world versus participating in cultural practices. Nordisk Pedagogik 14/2, 71–80. Säljö, R. (1997). Talk as data and practice—a critical look at phenomenographic inquiry and the appeal to experience. Higher Education Research & Development 16/2, 173–190. 221 Radical Information Literacy Samson, P. and Pitt, D. (eds) (1999) The Biosphere and Noösphere Reader: Global Environment, Society and Change. London, UK: Routledge. Saracevic, T. (1975). Relevance: A review of and a framework for the thinking on the notion of information science. Journal of American Society for Information Science, 26/6, 321–343. Saracevic, T. (2007a). Relevance: A Review of the Literature and a Framework for Thinking on the Notion in Information Science: Part II: Nature and Manifestations of Relevance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58/3, 1915–1933. Saracevic, T. (2007b). Relevance: A Review of the Literature and a Framework for Thinking on the Notion in Information Science. Part III: Behavior and effects of relevance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58/3, 2126–2144. Sayyad Abdi, E., Partridge, H., & Bruce, C. (2013). Website designers: how do they experience information literacy? The Australian Library Journal, 62/1, 40–52.

Schatzki, T. (2006), On organizations as they happen, Organization Studies 27/12, 1863–73. Schön, D. (1991): The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Aldershot: Ashgate. Schotter, A. (1981) The Economic Theory of Social Institutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schutz. A. (1964) Alfred Schutz: collected papers. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Scoble, B. (2011). Contemporary technologies’ influence on learning as a social practice. In A, Pope and G. Walton, (eds). Information literacy: infiltrating the agenda, challenging minds. Oxford: Chandos (pp. 219–252). Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Seale, J. (2010). Digital Inclusion. A research briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning Phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. London Knowledge Lab, London, [online] Available at: http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalInclusion.pdf. Secker, J. and Coonan. E., eds. (2013) Rethinking Information Literacy: a practical framework for supporting learning. London: Facet. Shapiro, J. J. and Hughes, S. K. (2004). Information Literacy as a Liberal Art: Enlightenment Proposals for a New Curriculum. Educom Review 31/2, 31–35. 222 Bibliography Shenk, D. (1997). Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Shenton, A. K. and Hay-Gibson, N. (2011). Information behaviour and information literacy: The ultimate in transdisciplinary phenomena? Journal of librarianship and information science 43/3, 166. Shor, I. (1996): When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Simmons, M. H. (2005) Librarians as Disciplinary Discourse Mediators: Using Genre Theory to Move Toward Critical Information Literacy. Portal 5/3. Simon, N. (2010). The participatory museum. Museum 2.0. Simon, R. (1991) Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Skagen, T., Torras, M. C., Kavli, S. M., Mikki, S., Hafstad, S., & Hunskår, I. (2009). Pedagogical Considerations in Developing an Online Tutorial in Information Literacy. Communications in Information Literacy 2/2, 84–98. Smith, M. and Hepworth, M. (2012) Young people: A phenomenographic investigation into the ways they experience information. Libri, 62/2, 157–173. Snavely, L. and Cooper, N. (1997). The information literacy debate. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 23/1, 9–14. Špiranec, S., & Zorica, M. B. (2010). Information Literacy 2.0: hype or discourse refinement? Journal of Documentation, 66(1), 140–153. Spurlock, M. (2005). Don’t Eat This Book. London, UK: Penguin.

Standing Conference of National and University Libraries. (1999). Information skills in higher education. London: SCONUL. (A SCONUL Position Paper.) Star, S. L. (1989). The structure of ill-structured solutions: heterogeneous problem-solving, boundary objects and distributed artificial intelligence. Distributed artificial intelligence, 2, 37–54. Sturges, P. and Gastinger, A. (2010) Information literacy as a human right. Libri 60/3, 195–202. Sundin, O. (2008). Negotiations on information-seeking expertise: A study of web-based tutorials for information literacy. Journal of documentation 64/1, 24–44. Steinerová, J. (2010) Ecological dimensions of information literacy. Information Research 15/1. Stevens, C. R. (2007) Beyond Preaching to the Choir: Information Literacy, Faculty Outreach, and Disciplinary Journals. The Journal of academic librarianship 33/2, 254. 223 Radical Information Literacy Streatfield, D. and Markless, S. (2008). Evaluating the Impact of Information Literacy in Higher Education: Progress and Prospects. Libri 58, 102–109. Tagliaventi, M., & Mattarelli, E. (2006). The role of networks of practice, value sharing, and operational proximity in knowledge flows between professional groups. Human Relations 59/3, 291– 319.

Tavares, R., Hepworth, M. and de Souza Costa, S. N. (2011). Investigating citizens’ information needs through participative research: a pilot study in Candangolandia, Brazil. Information development, 27/2, 125. Taylor, R. S. (1979): Reminiscing about the Future. Library Journal 104, 1875. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1959) The Phenomenon of Man. London: Collins. Thompson, D. (2008). Counterknowledge. London: Atlantic. Thompson, K. M. (2007). Furthering understanding of information literacy through the social study of information poverty. Canadian journal of information and library science, 31/1, 87. Thornton, S. (2010). From ‘Scuba Diving’ to ‘Jet Skiing’? Information Behavior, Political Science, and the Google Generation. Journal of Political Science Education 6, 353–368. Tiemensma, L. (2012). Information Literacy Education in Higher Education Institutions in South Africa. In R. Gwyer, R. Stubbings and G. Walton (eds.) The Road to Information Literacy: Librarians as Facilitators of Learning. Berlin, de Gruyter (pp. 155–168). Tippett, J., Handley, J. F. and Ravetz, J. (2007). Meeting the challenges of sustainable development—A conceptual appraisal of a new methodology for participatory ecological planning. Progress in Planning, 67(1). Tolonen, E. and Toivonen, L. (2010). Information Literacy State-ofthe Art Report – Nordic Countries. Online at http://www.ifla.org/ publications/information-literacy-state-of-t he-art-reports [ last accessed 6th Dec 2013].

Tomic, T. (2010). The philosophy of information as an underlying and unifying theory of information science. Information Research, 15/4. Torras i Calvo, M. (2012) Access to Knowledge as a Social Practice: Information Literacy Education for MA Students. In Lau, J., Tammaro, A. M., & Bothma, T. J. (Eds.). Libraries driving access to knowledge. Berlin: de Gruyter. Tuominen, K., Savolainen, R. and Talja, S. (2005). Information Literacy as a Sociotechnical Practice. Library Quarterly 75/3, 329– 345. 224 Bibliography Turner, B. A. (1971). Exploring the Industrial Subculture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Urbinati, N. (1998) From the Periphery of Modernity: Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of Subordination and Hegemony. Political Theory 26/3, 370–391. Urquhart, C. (2010). Systematic reviewing, meta-analysis and metasynthesis for evidence-based library and information science. Information Research 15/3. Urquhart, C. and Rowley, J. (2007) Understanding student information behavior in relation to electronic information services: Lessons from longitudinal monitoring and evaluation, Part 2. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58/8, 1188. van Dijck, J. (2010). Search engines and the production of academic knowledge. International Journal of Cultural Studies 13/6, 574.

Virkus, S. (2003). Information literacy in Europe: a literature review. Information Research 8/4. Voloshinov, V. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. L. Matejka and I. Titunik, New York: Seminar. Vygotsky, L. (1978): Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wall, D. (1999). Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement: Radical environmentalism and comparative social movements. London: Routledge. Wandersee, J. H. (1990). Concept mapping and the cartography of cognition. Journal of research in science teaching 27/10, 923–936. Ward, D. (2006) Revisioning Information Literacy for Lifelong Meaning. Journal of Academic Librarianship 32/4, 399. Warschauer, M. (1999) Electronic Literacies: Langauge, Culture and Power in Online Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Watkins, J. and Russo, A. (2005) Developing communities and collections with new media and information literacy. In Proceedings 8th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (pp. 390– 394). Webber, S. (2010) Information literacy for the 21st century. INFORUM 16. Weber, M. (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Webster, F. (2002) Theories of the Information Society, 2nd edn. London, UK: Routledge. Weiner, J. (2011) Is There a Difference Between Critical Thinking and Information Literacy? A Systematic Review 2000–2009. Journal of Information Literacy 5/2, 81–92. 225 Radical Information Literacy Weiner, S. A. (2012) Institutionalising Information Literacy . The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 38(5), p. 287. Wellmer, A. (1985) Reason, Utopia and The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Bernstein, R., ed: Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wellmer, A. (1991). The Persistence of Modernity. Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E., White, N. and Smith, J. D. (2009) Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities. Portland OR: CPSquare. Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wertsch, J. (2009) Text and Dialogism in the Study of Collective Memory. In Junefelt, K. and Nordin, P., eds: Proceedings from the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspectives and Limits of Dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin, Stockholm, June 3–5 2009. (pp. 33–38).

White, E. J. (2009) Polyphonic Portrayals: A Dostoevskian dream or a researcher’s reality? In Junefelt, K. and Nordin, P., eds: Proceedings from the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspectives and Limits of Dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin, Stockholm, June 3–5 2009. (pp. 87–96). Whitworth, A. (2007). Communicative competence in the information age: towards a critical pedagogy. In S. Andretta, ed. Change and Challenge: Information literacy for the 21st century. Adelaide: Auslib (pp. 85–114). Whitworth, A. (2009): Information Obesity. Oxford: Chandos. Whitworth, A. (2009b). Teaching in the relational frame: the Media and Information Literacy course at Manchester. Journal of Information Literacy 3/2, 25–38. Whitworth, A. (2010) Empowerment or Instrumental Progressivism? Analyzing Information Literacy policies. Library Trends 60/2, 312– 337. Whitworth, A. (2012). The reflective information literacy educator. Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education, 4/1. Whitworth, A., Fishwick, I. and McIndoe, S. (2011). Framing Multiliteracies: A Blended and Holistic Approach to Digital Technology Education. In Mackey, T. and Jacobson, T. (eds): Teaching Information Literacy Online, New York NY, Neal-Schulman. (pp. 47–64). Whitworth, A., Garnett, F. and Pearson, D. (2012). Aggregate-thenCurate: How digital learning champions help communities nurture online content. Research in Learning Technology, 20, 399–415. 226 Bibliography

Whitworth, A., Torras i Calvo, M., Moss, B., Amlesom Kifle, N. and Blåsternes, T. (2014): Facilitating self-reflection and action research in the face of organizational change – the Bibliotek i Endring (Changing Libraries) project. Forthcoming in New Review of Academic Librarianship. Williams, R. and Edge, D. (1996). The Social Shaping of Technology. Research Policy 25/6, 865–99. Williamson, K. and Asla. T. (2009). Information behavior of people in the fourth age: Implications for the conceptualization of information literacy. Library & Information Science Research, 31/2, 76. Wilson, P. (1983). Secondhand Knowledge: An inquiry into cognitive authority, Greenwood Press, London. Winner, L. (1986) Do Artefacts Have Politics? In The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (pp. 19–39). Wyer, P. C. and Silva, S. (2009) Where is the wisdom? A conceptual history of evidence-based medicine. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 15/6, 891. Wynne, B. (1989). Sheepfarming after Chernobyl: A case study in communicating scientific information. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 31/2, 10–39. Yates, C., Partridge, H. L., & Bruce, C. S. (2009). Learning wellness: how ageing Australians experience health information literacy. The Australian Library Journal 58/3, 269–285. Zhang, X., Majid, S. and Foo, S. (2010) Environmental Scanning: An application of information literacy skills at the workplace. Information Research 17/2.

Zurkowski, P. G. (1974): The Information Service Environment: Relationships and Priorities, Report presented to the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, Washington DC. 227 This page intentionally left blank Index Index As well as concepts, this index lists references to the authors whose previously published ideas have featured most prominently in this book. Non-appearance on this list is not meant to indicate insignificance in the fields of information literacy, LIS or any other academic discipline. Action research 84, 193–8 Burchinal, Lee 27, 34–5, 39, 44, 48, Activism 110, 112–14, 159, 185, 192–3 56, 81, 92 Affect, emotion 17, 56–61, 139 Affordance 17–18 Capital 5, 19, 86, 91, 104, 169, Alterity 130, 132 197 Andretta, Susie 50–2, 63, 65, 67, 71 Carr, Wilfred and Stephen Kemmis 4,

[ footnote], 78–9, 163, 174, 176 21–3, 55, 74, 84–5, 93, 107–8, Artifacts 14, 17–20, 23, 26, 151 144, 154, 164–5, 169, 173, Astrology 19–20, 114 193–5, 198 Authority 1, 4, 20, 63, 69, 71, 87, Centripetal and centrifugal forces 92, 99–100, 120–1, 123, 131, 138, 145, 167 136, 139, 141, 147, 175 Chronotope 123, 127–8, 130–2, 134, Redistribution of 1–3, 26, 42, 104, 139, 144, 172 116, 125, 147, 156, 164, 168, Cognition 12, 16–17, 150 171, 197–8 reduction of cognitive work 24, 86, 116 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2–3, 12, 63, 100,

Cognitive authority 1, 3, 5, 20–4, 116, 119–44, 146–7, 154, 162, 39–40, 43, 57, 61, 68, 70, 73, 165, 172, 174–6, 179–82, 203 82, 86, 100, 137, 142–4, 147, [ footnote] 150, 156–7, 160, 165, 186, 200 Blaug, Ricardo 25–6, 86, 101, 106, Colonisation 104–6, 108–10, 119, 111–12, 114, 137, 168, 171, 198 149, 169–70 Breivik, Patricia Senn 2, 49, 75, 81, Communication 11–13, 18, 41, 43, 88–9, 92 83, 103–5, 119–20, 124, 128 Bruce, Christine 1–2, 43, 47–8, 55, Communities 1, 4, 15–16, 23, 26, 63–7, 78, 81, 92, 163, 174, 176, 73, 85, 106, 110–12, 160, 172, 193, 203 [ footnote]

188, 191 229 Radical Information Literacy Knowledge formation in 1, 16, Epistemology 33, 79, 114–15, 21–2, 36–8, 83–4, 108–9, 143–4, 162, 164, 175 159–60, 189–90 Exclusion 23, 109, 143, 145 of practice 15, 55, 110, 152–3, Experience 14–15, 69, 101, 110, 161 135, 156, 163 Concept maps, mind maps 55, 64, 196 Experts, expertise 38, 106, 108–9, Consensus 15, 102, 105, 107, 121–2, 113, 124, 157, 182 203 [ footnote] Conspiracy theories 176 Formal learning institutions 4, 83, Contexts, contextualisation 11,

115, 173, 182, 204 [ footnote] 14–15, 37–9, 42–3, 55, 69–71, 73, 90, 100, 112, 116, 127–8, Genre 123, 125–34, 136, 138–9, 133, 146, 153, 162–4, 169, 146, 151, 154, 162, 168, 184–5, 200 179–82, 203 Counterhegemony See Hegemony Gramsci, Antonio 25, 40–1, 86, 109, Counterknowledge 19, 24, 45 150 [ footnote], 102, 127 Counterpublics 110–11, 113, 123 Habermas, Jürgen 3, 99–113, 115–17, Creative understanding 174–5 [ footnote], 120–3, 137, 139, Creativity 59–60, 106, 120, 122, 124, 147, 203 [ footnote] 133–5

Hamelink, Cees 3, 27, 35–42, 44, Critical theory 2, 4, 100–3, 111, 48, 56, 79, 92–3, 100–1, 110, 159, 169 150, 165, 167, 189–90, 200–1 Hegemony, counter hegemony 40–2, Democracy, democratic practice 1, 6, 44, 86–7, 92, 109–10, 112, 119, 26, 39, 44, 101, 107, 111–12, 150, 167 114, 156, 170, 178, 193, 200 Hermeneutics 64, 75, 79 Dialogism, dialogic ways of thinking Hierarchies, hierarchism 24–5, 71, 1, 12–14, 17–19, 21, 26, 37, 55, 106–9, 112, 114–[?], 137, 157, 59–60, 68, 74, 83, 89, 94, 119, 202 122–3, 131, 135–6, 138, 140–1, Higher education, HE see Universities

159, 163, 165, 180 Double-loop learning see Single- and Ideal speech situation (ISS) 103, 108, Double-loop learning 122, 139 Douglas, Mary 16, 85–87, 144 Inequality 13, 39, 71, 87, 150, 168 Information Elmborg, James 2, 62, 91, 93–4, Definitions of 11 181–2, 185, 187–8 Information and communication Embodiment 13, 18, 83, 150, 153, technology (ICT) 5–6, 19, 27, 156 163 31, 34–5, 43, 48, 54, 174, Emotion see Affect 192–3 230 Index

Information banks 31–3, 38, 83, Kemmis, Stephen: 151–2, 195 103, 122, 189–90, 202 See also Carr and Kemmis Information landscapes 2–4, 13–17, Knowledge, 19, 25–6, 32, 36, 39, 43, 70, 73, formation of 1, 4, 11–13, 21–3, 85, 92, 100, 104, 106, 109–10, 30, 56, 85, 94, 103, 113, 142–4, 115, 126, 128–30, 134, 141, 154–5, 174, 185 146, 151–3, 156, 159–60, indigenous 19, 94, 109 163–4, 168, 181, 190, 198 Kuhlthau, Carol 2, 5, 28, 47, 56–63, Information literacy 81–2, 92, 145, 178, 181–2, 193, Becoming information literate 195–6

14–15, 31–5, 49–53, 73–4, 83, 92, 130, 178 Landscapes [physical] 14, 16, 65, as environmental scanning 158 127, 171–2 as human right 54, 199 Librarianship, library practice 5, 28, Institutionalisation of 1, 3, 5, 44, 30–1, 48–54, 56–62, 88–93, 49, 52, 85–9, 168 160–1, 179–88 in public health 55, 76, 78 Library and information science (LIS) publications 74–81 2–3, 28–9, 60, 62, 75–6, 81, Seven faces of 43, 66 83–4, 87–8, 91–2, 179 Six frames of 66–7, 78–81, Limberg, Louise 2–4, 17–18, 63, 68,

163–4 79, 149, 159 Standards 4–5, 48–53, 55, 81–5, Linell, Per 1, 12–14, 18, 21, 60, 119, 88, 90, 131, 151, 180, 191 123, 130, 136, 147 [ footnote], Teaching of 4, 18, 29, 32, 35, 51, 168, 176 59, 63, 66–8, 90–1, 131, 165, Literacy (general) 12, 37–8, 79, 126, 172–3 141, 202 Information resources 12, 20, 26, 33, Lloyd, Annemaree 1, 3–4, 14, 83, 38, 41, 48, 68, 106, 126, 153–4, 129, 150–2 163, 171, 182, 197 Information systems 2, 25, 28, 39, Manchester 6, 189–90, 204 43, 56, 60–1, 68–9, 85, 89, 93,

[ footnote] 107, 134, 136–7, 140, 150–1, Mapping 14, 65–6, 158, 161–3, 153, 163, 167, 170, 197, 202 165–6, 177, 196 Informed learning 67, 92 Media, media literacy 36–8, 42, 95 Institutionalisation (general) 74, [ footnote], 101, 110, 131, 167, 85–9, 107, 144, 149, 168 177 Intellectual property 32, 42, 145 Methodology 6, 17, 21, 43, 47, 57, Intersubjectivity 12–13, 16, 21, 56, 63, 68, 79, 100, 132, 135, 102, 104, 107, 113, 120–1, 137, 170 151, 154 Mind maps see concept maps 231

Radical Information Literacy Monologic thought 1, 12, 18, 21, 55, Queensland University of Technology 69, 83–4, 99, 102–3, 122–3, (QUT) 6, 63, 204 [ footnote] 136, 138, 140, 144, 147, 163, 165, 170, 181 Radical IL 1, 4–5, 13, 26, 42–3, 101, 114–16, 121, 146, 149–50, Narratives 176–7, 195, 200 167–9, 171, 178, 182, 185, Nation at Risk, A 48–9, 88 187–9, 196, 198–9, 201–3 Noösphere 12–14 Radical infrastructure 41–2 Ratatouille [movie] 97, 172–3 Objectivity 20–3, 121, 123, 142, 198 Rationality 21, 99, 101–3, 107, Operational proximity 184–5 114–15, 119, 122, 138, 144, Organisations 25, 105–7, 157, 160,

187, 195, 198, 203 184, 197 Relativism 19, 24, 71, 113, 120, Outcome space 65–6, 68, 70, 161–2, 135, 139, 142, 169, 195 164–5, 175 Relevance 28, 32, 39, 63, 73, 83, 102, 122, 154, 157, 163, 189, Peer review 21, 145–6, 173 191 Personal construct psychology (PCP) 2–3, 57–62, 67, 92, 168, 177, Saracevic, Tefko 2, 28, 39, 61, 83, 195, 197 122, 178 Phenomenography 2–3, 47, 63–70, Science, dialogic views of 20–3, 74–5, 115, 149, 162–5, 201 142–4, 170–1 critical phenomenography 69–70,

Scrutiny 1, 5, 21–2, 24, 40, 43, 68, 149, 168 103, 105, 114, 116, 134, 143, Pluralism 31, 33, 63 150, 155, 158, 161, 176 Positivism 93, 143–4 Search engines 83, 94, 145 Power 1, 5, 38, 40, 43, 79, 92, 99–101, Single- and double-loop learning 56, 104, 108, 112, 120–1, 126, 141 59, 62, 106, 109, 113, 155, Practice 2, 6, 14, 17, 63, 68, 79, 87, 158–9, 168, 184 101, 109, 137, 149–65, 173, Social relations, social networks 13, 181, 194, 201 18, 79, 157, 161 reflective 55, 84, 154–5, 173–4, Sociocultural practice theory 177–8, 194

[ see practice] practice architectures 152, 154, Standards (general) 17, 24, 48, 70, 156, 158 82, 164, 194 Production (of texts) 135–6, 202 Subjectivity 12, 15, 21, 56, 62, 79, Professional development 4, 55, 66, 121, 128 69, 154, 159, 187 Superaddressee 139–40, 146 Prosaics 100, 124, 131, 137, 142, 147, 196 Theory-practice gap 74, 84–5, 87, Psychology 47, 56–62, 89, 139, 196 89, 94, 99, 109, 150, 171 232 Index Thompson, Damien 19, 45 Vigilance 26, 106, 114–16, 169

[ footnote], 102, 127, 139, 142 Transformation 3, 38, 40, 70, 79, Wenger, Etienne 15, 19, 55, 116, 92, 94, 100–1, 109, 114, 132, 153, 161, 164, 171, 149, 156, 167–8 189–90 Wilson, Patrick 1, 14, 20, 22, 24, 68, Unfinalisability 82, 123, 134, 186, 82, 136–7, 142, 144, 157, 160, 194 165, 178, 185–6 Universities 14, 32, 34, 50–2, 61, 74, Workplace learning 5, 43, 66, 112, 78–9, 84–5, 87, 94, 146, 160–1, 157–9 181 Words, definition of 17, 125, 128 Utterance 12, 120, 123–4, 132–4, 136–7, 146, 202

Zurkowski, Paul 2, 27, 29–39, 44, 48, 56, 76, 79, 81, 83, Validity claims 23, 40, 87, 110, 112, 88, 92, 122, 179, 187, 190, 130, 140, 143, 155, 193, 200 202 233 This page intentionally left blank

Document Outline Cover Radical Information Literacy: Reclaiming the Political Heart of the IL Movement Copyright Contents List of tables About the author Introduction Part 1: Deconstructing IL 1 Basic concepts and terminology Notes 2 The early days of IL Notes 3 The diversity of IL Notes 4 The institutionalising of IL Notes Part 2: Reconstructing IL 5 Colonising IL Notes 6 Mikhail Bakhtin and IL Notes 7 Practising IL Notes 8 Reclaiming IL Notes Bibliography Index