Information Literacy Landscapes: Information Literacy in Education, Workplace and Everyday Contexts

Citation

Winzenried, A. (2011), "Information Literacy Landscapes: Information Literacy in Education, Workplace and Everyday Contexts", Library Review, Vol. 60 No. 2, pp. 164-166. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531111113122

Information literacy (IL) remains just a little illusive in terms of its precise meaning, and current research has only tended to highlight the situation. Possibly, because of its direct link with information, a phenomenon that is itself difficult to contain to any simple definition, IL has been a constantly changing and moving target.

For the past 20 years or so, it has been largely described by a rather formalised skills approach within the formal education context. Schools, universities and libraries have been largely considered to be its base and its natural focus. Underpinning this approach has been the assumption that IL is a specific set of generic skills that will give the learner the necessary ability and that once having acquired those skills they will be set for life. Ongoing growth in these skills has generally been either assumed or ignored. In this environment, formal library operations have, to some extent at least, built a justification for their continued existence often in the face of strong opposition from economic forces. Lloyd notes this rather library‐centric view of IL and begins by warning of the weakness of such an approach. For this author, becoming information literate is all about a person engaging with information within their own personal context, a context that changes throughout the life of that individual. IL is an informing practice, not a set of predetermined, generic skills.

The critical value of this new work is that it argues for a much wider context for IL. Lloyd puts the case very coherently for an IL that occupies a host of contexts both formal and informal. Where so many works before have confined IL to schools and libraries, Lloyd opens out the context to include the workplace and, indeed, all of our normal everyday occupations. IL is seen as a catalyst for learning, something of “meta‐practice” that is embedded in every part of our lives. It is dependent on the specific “landscape” in which we function as lifelong learners. It becomes much more than a set of perhaps limited and unrealistic skills taught within a formal education context.

One of the strengths of this work is an underlying research base (a follow on from doctoral research) that studied the information behaviours of fire fighters in training (Lloyd‐Zantiotis, 2004). Lloyd noted that the novice fire fighter will act out their role early in the training process. However, it is the ongoing transfer from “institutionally sanctioned” information towards a “development of collective competencies” that leads to their real ability to “speak a fire”. IL, in their case the real knowledge that enables them to be a “professional” fire fighter, comes as an ongoing experience whilst functioning in the workplace.

This fire fighter example leads Lloyd to seriously question the concept of IL as a set of “generic skills”. It supports her view of IL as practice. Early in the work, Lloyd sets out to establish a conceptual framework for her understanding of a meta‐practice. Information handling is not confined to a set of rules; it changes with each new situation. It is more than the ability to know the rules of soccer, it is to play the game; it is the ability of an artist to mix their colour, the ability of the ambulance crew to meet an entirely new situation with confidence because they have faced so many other “different” situations before. Selecting from a range of theories and discourses, Lloyd lays strong theoretical foundations before moving on to a study of the literature and practice surrounding current information situations. Higher education, the workplace and public libraries are considered in the light of the practice theory.

Lloyd points out that while much research has been undertaken in the higher education sector, very little focuses on the workplace. This leads her to redefine IL in terms of community rather than skills. For her, the information relationship is a landscape traversed by those who would be information literate (though they may not necessarily be conscious of this), where a continual series of transactions inform the individual. These situations occur in each life situation whether it is a car accident, a fire or a new theory. Regardless of whether the information faced is tacit or explicit, the information literate person will absorb necessary information and so become more information literate as part of a continuous, sometimes unconscious, practice. The experience is ongoing and it is communal – it is a situated “informing” practice.

Drawing on empirical research from various sectors, Lloyd argues convincingly for a much more holistic approach to IL than has been the case in the past. In a dynamic information environment, the move from a “novice” to lifelong learner is seen as progressive and social. The learner moves through a series of information landscapes towards greater and greater understandings of the context in which they live and move.

Information literacy landscapes is an impressive work that challenges many of the popular ideas of IL and how it needs to be approached. Opening the wider horizons of workplace and community, Lloyd sets IL free from its enslavement to the formal learning environment and highlights the importance of transactions that we make with information as we progress through life. It is a truly special work that reminds us that our information landscape is very much one of wide skies and broad vistas.