13 - Information Literacy Theorised Through Institutional Ethnography

Summary

Introduction

Imagine the following scene: a student, let us call her Laura, participates in an information literacy class at a university. She has just started her bachelor programme and is generally a bit unsure about how she is supposed to act in order to be perceived as a good student. The librarian who teaches the class talks widely, accompanied by a PowerPointpresentation, about the importance of students being able to determine their information needs, access information effectively and efficiently, being critical about information and information sources. Not only should one be able to understand the economic, legal and social issues surrounding the use of information, but there is also the need for accessing and using information in an ethically and legally correct way. The student is overwhelmed. Hardly anything of what the librarian says is of the sort that Laura usually thinks of when she is trying to find information on the web or elsewhere. It feels as if she has entered a world foreign to her.

From a research perspective, taking an analytical approach, the imagined scene functions as an illustration of how two traditions of approaching information literacy collide. Even if it is likely that Laura has not approached the concept of information literacy before experiencing the event in the university library described above, she probably has an idea of what it means to be able to find and use information in a purposeful way. However, this activity is not something that she consciously has formulated or put into words before.

This collision between two different ways in which information literacy is being understood can be described with the help of a distinction suggested already in the 1980s by the literacy researcher Brian Street. He distinguishes between an autonomous and an ideological approach to studying and understanding literacy (e.g. Street 1984; 2006). The former is grounded on an assumption that literacy – autonomously – will have beneficial effects beyond particular literacy events. The autonomous approach anticipates, in Street’s (2006, 1) words, that ‘[i]ntroducing literacy to poor, “illiterate” people, villages, urban youth etc. will have the effect of enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, making them better citizens, regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for their “illiteracy” in the first place.’ The ideological approach, on the other hand, conceives of literacy as inseparable from the context in which it is enacted.