8 - Information Literacy Through an Equity Mindset

Summary

Introduction

This chapter focuses on Dr Estela Mara Bensimon’s concept of equity mindedness and its application to information literacy scholarship, both theoretical and empirical. Equity mindedness is an orientation to our scholarship that influences the decisions we make about how we approach information literacy-related research, including the theories and methodologies we draw upon to shape our explorations. I argue that an equity mindset requires us to interrogate how information literacy is understood and valued in various contexts, including communities, organisations or institutions, as well as how individuals access critical information about expectations for the development and enactment of information literacy within those contexts, by drawing upon existing theories related to sense-making (Dervin, 1983; 1998) and critical social theories (Bourdieu, 1986; 1993; Coleman, 1988; Lave and Wenger, 1991). Communities, organisations and institutions, including learning environments, are not neutral spaces and an individual’s identity characteristics are likely to influence how they navigate a particular community and how they are perceived by others in the community. Equity mindedness extends the existing scholarly discourse about the sociocultural nature of information literacy by exploring the role of power dynamics and how information literacy could be used to marginalise or empower.

In the content that follows, I will first define and describe an equity mindset, as it has been developed by Bensimon (2005). A critical aspect of equity mindedness is the use of data to explore inequities within particular contexts, as well as applying an equity mindset to the analysis and interpretation of data. When an equity mindset is used to interrogate the cause of inequities, it requires one to consider systemic causes of inequities at the community, organisational or institutional level(s). Then I will outline three critical assumptions that we must make about the nature of information literacy to apply an equity mindset to our research and scholarship. These include the acknowledgement that information literacy is shaped by and situated within communities that have their own value systems; that information literacy is characterised by complex ways of thinking, knowing and communicating and is not simply a discrete set of skills that is durable across communities or contexts; and that power, privilege, oppression and exclusion are part of the contexts or communities in which information literacy is situated.