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Bodies are central to the information experience, but are not often accounted for as a source of information, that is central to the information literacy experience. Based on research with emergency services personnel and with nurses, this chapter explores the role of the body as a locus for understanding and meaning-making. Drawing from a sociocultural perspective, the author suggests that the concept of information experience as a stand-alone conception is meaningless. A solution is to acknowledge the referencing of embodied experience against social conditions and ways of knowing that inform peoples’ experience of practice, as located within the body. Key questions for researchers considering an information experience approach are posed.

The purpose of this book is to open a conversation on the idea of information experience, which we understand to be a complex, multidimensional engagement with information. In developing the book we invited colleagues to propose a chapter on any aspect of information experience, for example conceptual, methodological or empirical. We invited them to express their interpretation of information experience, to contribute to the development of this concept. The book has thus become a vehicle for interested researchers and practitioners to explore their thinking around information experience, including relationships between information experience, learning experience, user experience and similar constructs. It represents a collective awareness of information experience in contemporary research and practice. Through this sharing of multiple perspectives, our insights into possible ways of interpreting information experience, and its relationship to other concepts in information research and practice, is enhanced. In this chapter, we introduce the idea of information experience. We also outline the book and its chapters, and bring together some emerging alternative views and approaches to this important idea.

Recent figures show that half the world’s refugees are children, with young people now representing more than 50 percent of victims of global armed conflict and displaced persons. Increasing numbers of refugee youth are entering their host nations’ compulsory and postcompulsory educational systems having experienced frequent resettlements and disrupted education, which in turn, pose major barriers for educational and future employment. The consequences of these experiences raise pressing equity implications for educators and educational systems. However, the picture is not uniformly bleak. Employing Bourdieu’s thinking tools of habitus, field and capital, Yosso’s concepts of community cultural wealth and photovoice methods, this chapter draws on studies of refugee youth of both genders from diverse ethnic and faith backgrounds, conducted in regional Australia. It examines how everyday spaces for learning, for example, church, faith-based and sporting groups and family can play a crucial role in enabling young people to build powerful forms of social and cultural capital necessary to successfully access and negotiate formal education and training settings. Its findings suggest first that everyday spaces can act as rich sites of informal learning, which young refugee people draw upon to advance their life chances, employability, and social inclusion. Second, they suggest that how one’s gender and “race” intersect may have important implications for how refugee youth access social and cultural capital in these everyday spaces as they navigate between informal learning and formal educational settings.

In this chapter, we present two examples of research projects aimed at amplifying voices that are often silenced in research: those of children and/or youth from refugee backgrounds. Refugees are often excluded from research for both ethical and practical reasons: because of their assumed vulnerability as well as the challenges related to language or access. In the research projects presented, we aimed to employ methods that suited these groups of children and youth to understand their experiences in ways that they wanted to express them, and in situ. We argue that starting from, and finishing with, the point of view of the knowledge holders illustrates one means (although not exclusively so) by which to amplify their voices and knowledge to counter epistemic injustice in educational research.

Children of recent refugees and immigrants are the fastest growing student population in the US public education system. Thus, it is imperative to create research-based pedagogies that value linguistic diversity, provide academic and social–emotional support and embrace life experiences that are often vastly different from those of the teachers and typical students. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of an instructional model designed to address specific academic and social–emotional competencies of linguistically and culturally diverse students on the writing of eight and nine-year-old students (n = 10) enrolled in an afterschool programme serving students from refugee families. The model of explicit writing instruction implemented in the study included culturally responsive literature, mindfulness practices, and differentiation in teaching genre-specific text structure and academic vocabulary. Pre- and post-test personal essays were scored for holistic quality of writing and use of academic vocabulary. The findings indicate that explicit and differentiated instruction in both writing organisation and vocabulary use was effective in increasing the holistic quality of students' personal writing and their ability to integrate academic vocabulary appropriately and meaningfully in independent writing. Implications for culturally responsive instruction for refugee students are discussed.