organizations, institutions and settings, and the people in them, create practice architectures which prefigure practices, enabling them and constraining particular kinds of sayings, doings, and relatings, among people within them and in relation to others outside them. The way these practice architectures are constructed shapes practice in its cultural-discursive, social-political and material economic dimensions, giving substance and form to what is and can be actually said and done by, with and for whom.

Revisiting the practice perspective for information literacy

As we discussed in Chapter 2, framing the information landscape through a practice perspective allows us to see that each information landscape or site is shaped by the nature of information and by the relationship between people and information. It is this relationship that creates site knowledge and influences specific ways of knowing within the landscape. Just as each topography has its particular defining characteristics that shape the surrounding landscape, so too does information reflect the landscape of particular settings.

The first step in conceptualizing an architecture for information literacy is to recognize the ontological and epistemological arrangements that help position the researcher or practitioner in terms of how we think about and understand reality. An ontological understanding of information literacy may be described as a way of knowing about what there is (the constructed realities of a context) in an information landscape or the nature of reality (Lincoln and Guba, 2003). If we accept that information literacy is a practice that leads to a way of knowing and that an information literate person is a knowing user of information, then we can turn our attention to focusing on epistemological questions related to what there is (i.e. social, physical and textual sites of knowledge) and how we come to know. Understanding these elements puts us in a position to suggest how to facilitate information literacy practices that will then allow us to know these sites of knowledge.

As I indicated in Chapter 2, my approach to information literacy draws from socio-cultural perspectives and practice theory. This means that my view about the nature of reality (my ontology) is influenced by an understanding that there are multiple realities that influence the nature of knowledge and understanding. From this perspective, information and knowledge are understood as relational and constructed through engagement with discourse and objects in situ. This in turn produces between members who share the same intersubjective space, a web of shared understandings about place, identity and performance. The shared understandings are manifest and operationalized through site-specific practices, including information practice.

My epistemological approach, how we come to know, is formed through this site ontology (Schatzki, 2002). Consequently, we come to know through constructing meaning in negotiation with other people, through practices that are situated and shaped over time by social, cultural, economic and material arrangements that shape certain types of action (in addition to enabling or constraining them) and are revealed through the ‘sayings and doings’ of people as they participate in a setting (Schatzki, 2002; Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008).

Consequently, and to rephrase Chapter 2, when I think about information literacy as a socio-cultural practice, I do so from a practice perspective that frames information and knowledge as being relational to a social site. Meaning making is emphasized as a collaborative process occurring in situ, leading to the production and reproduction of identity, to ways of interacting and to ways of knowing. Therefore, an understanding of information literacy practice also requires us to understand the information experiences of embodied performance, in addition to the abstract and reified constructions of a particular site. Understanding information literacy as a holistic practice therefore requires us to account not only for the activities and skills commonly ascribed to information literacy but also to the socio-cultural dimensions within the site, through which these skills and activities are enabled.

An emerging architecture for information literacy practice

In considering a conceptual architecture for information literacy, one that provides a basic design of sensitizing concepts for research and pedagogical development, a number of broad features must be taken into account. These features are introduced here, as context, which influences discourse and information modality. These in turn influence the affordances that constitute information literacy as socio-cultural information practice. The way these features emerge will depend on how they are sanctioned within context. Each will be described later in this chapter. Accounting for these features allows us to understand how information literacy is enabled and experienced as a dispersed practice (Schatzki, 2002). Dispersed practices flow within all areas of social life and are embedded in other integrated practices (e.g. teaching, working, library or learning practices). Integrated practices are in turn shaped and situated by culturally discursive, political and material arrangements (Schatzki, 2002). The architecture should also allow us to consider how information is enabled and constrained.

Why context matters

This leads us back to the point that context matters and highlights the importance of understanding the setting and situations through which information literacy is practised and from which research and pedagogy will emerge. In discussing the idea of context, Brenda Dervin (1996, p. 32) suggests that ‘context is something you swim in like a fish. You are in it, it is in you’. Dervin is right in suggesting this; we are a product of our contexts and at the same time are producers, shapers and interpreters of it. Context is constructed over time and has social, political, and economic trajectories that sanction some practices and process and exclude or contest others. Therefore, to become information literate is to understand the information landscape that bounds the setting for practice, and to understand that this knowing is influenced by the processes and practices that are contextually sanctioned. This point is made by Flyvbjerg (2001, p. 42) when he suggests that ‘context is important for defining what counts as action’.

In the practice of library and information science research, context is usually briefly described in order to provide a background against which the research object will be explored (Talja et al., 1999). This approach tends to marginalize the role that context plays in framing how a phenomenon is brought into view. However, in information literacy research, understanding how the features and characteristics of a given context shape, form and influence the participant’s experience with information becomes an important task for the researcher. Viewing this experience through its context allows us to see what activities and processes influence the nature and manifestation of information literacy. It also allows us to understand which of these are transferable and which have specific temporal and spatial dimensions.

Therefore, the first task for researchers and practitioners becomes the mapping of the context or setting. This is not just as a backdrop that situates the research, and, something that can be forgotten as the researcher focuses on the research object. Context is a central feature that influences and determines the information experience and the range of process and activities that affect the manifestation of information literacy practice.

In defining context, Schatzki (2002, p. xiv) describes it as a ‘setting or backdrop that envelops and determines phenomena’ and which ‘envelops entities’ and helps determine their existence and being (Schatzki, 2002, p. 20). According to Schatzki (pp. 61-63), context predetermines practices, which in turn prefigures the types of activities that will occur. It is characterized by three aspects, it:

This determination has its foundation in social, political and historical arrangements that are laid down and embedded over time and give shape to the context, its discourses and practices. In this respect, what is learnt and how it is learnt; the forms of learning that are legitimized; what information and knowledge is valued; the practices, including information practices, that are legitimized; what subjectivities (knowing self) and intersubjectivities (knowing us) are spoken into existence; and what is contested, are predetermined for those who enter the contextual doors. In the educational landscape, for example, the library-centric view of information literacy that prevails in formal educational settings is the basis of existing information literacy standards and guidelines. This view reflects the types of activities undertaken by librarians, and the skill sets they use, in searching for information that is explicit in that landscape’s definitions of an information literate person.

If context predetermines practices, as Schatzki suggests, then understanding the nature of information literacy requires us to explore how people experience information in context and how this experience is afforded in relation to the:

Power within discourse

In accounting for power, Prus (1999, p. 272) suggests that power is not an ‘objective phenomenon’ but a ‘social, meaningful enacted essence’. In the preparatory stages of learning within educational, workplace or community settings, people connect with epistemic sites of knowledge. Engaging with information, in the form of written rules, practices and procedures, positions newcomers in all sectors in relation to the organizational expectations, allowing them to form an institutionally recognized identity, i.e. they learn to act as a student/practitioner/participant. The transition from the periphery of participation requires engagement with an altered discourse that reflects the social and/or corporeal realities that make up the narrative of the experienced student/practitioner/participant. In the workplace, for example, experienced workplace practitioners play a powerful role in the transition process for newcomers. Power is enacted through discursive practices of the collective who mediate the information environment by guiding novices towards the sites of knowledge that reflect the realities of their workplace practice and performance. By engaging with social and corporeal sites of knowledge, novices are drawn away from the artificial constructs of practice developed in preparatory training, towards collective stories and workplace practices that reflect the realities of their actual work. Through this engagement they are repositioned into the intersubjectively shared constructs of the community of practice, and learn to become practitioners.

Epistemic modalities

Epistemic modalities act as knowing locations for know-why or know-that information, which has been codified into written rules and regulations for practice, which can be clearly articulated and evaluated against a set of sanctioned criteria. Information within this modality is used to enact the institutional identity that enables members to be recognized. Universities, schools and training organizations are centralized around epistemic modalities and their information practice, activities and skills are shaped by epistemic forms of knowing, through disciplinary knowledge often seen as fixed and invariable in time and space. From an organizational perspective, this modality reflects the public face of the institution or organization, for both employees and the general public. It will be highlighted through the rules, regulations and guidelines for internal and external practice.

In this modality information is tightly bound to institutionally sanctioned forms of knowledge, which can be characterized as theoretical and context independent and underpinned by a ‘general analytic rationality’ (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 15). This modality is distinguished by the use of the written word as text (print or digital). Within this modality information and knowledge are experienced by the user as universal, generalizable and abstract. There is a common belief that truth is objective, discoverable, can be reproduced and is assessable.

As we have seen in previous chapters, an educational conception of information literacy is often reduced to the acquisition and development of a set of skills that relate closely to library literacy or computer literacy programmes and ways of learning and teaching in formal contexts. These are centralized around access to textual sources of information. Therefore, library classes at the minimum will focus on orienting the user within the library and its resources. At the other end, information literacy session training sessions will focus around a set of skills (defining, locating, accessing, evaluating and presenting information) that are intended to support the student in their engagement with textual information. These skills are normally bolted on and therefore similar to traditional literacy approaches. However, there have been challenges to this approach and there is an emerging body of thought that advocates for an embedded approach whereby information literacy is taught in relation to the disciplinary content.

The language used to define information literacy connects the phenomenon to the educational setting and is readily understood by teachers and librarians who are stakeholders in the learning process. The emphasis of this concept of information literacy is on developing skills and competencies with information in order to access and evaluate information, to think about information and to demonstrate and document the process of that thinking. The concept as it is viewed in this context is influenced by a rationalist perspective, with an emphasis on print and digital cultures that focus on abstract and immaterial representations of coming to know (Morris and Beckett, 2004). This approach is illustrative of the dominant voices within education, which identify learning as a product (Hager, 2004). It also requires learning outcomes to be demonstrated and assessed against a standard measurement and aligned with a construct of what a good student should be or, in our case, what an information literate person should be. In an educational setting information literacy emerges as a tangible set of processes and the development of a set of skills and attributes that characterize an information literate person.

In this respect, information is discursively produced and its use promoted by specific communities that represent particular ideological positions, values, beliefs and attitudes. Textbooks, guidelines, standards and procedural documents are examples of epistemic genres. Engaging with these modalities produces a subjective position in relation to the codified, objective information that is sanctioned by the institution or organization.

Social modalities

The social modality is constituted through accounts of action and social interaction and produce embodied know-how or tacit knowledge (Ryle, 1949). This type of information is sourced from the situated experiences of collective participation, practice and reflection on action. Social information is drawn from an individual’s personal biography as well as collective histories of people in shared practice. Foundational to this modality is experiential information, and information that represents the real and ongoing values and beliefs of participants in practice. Consequently, in this modality information is fluid and the ways of knowing are constantly changing. Social information is difficult to articulate though text but is highly valued by the collective because it shapes the initial subjectivities and then enables the enacting of intersubjectivity once members engage with the actual practice of the setting. This allows them to move from the reified identity produced through engagement with epistemic information (learning to act) towards the construction of a collective identity (becoming).

This type of information is located within and through the community of practice with which an individual connects, and it is through this modality that information about working culture and identity are shared (Brown and Duguid, 2001). Social information has both subjective and intersubjective dimensions that are intertwined.

For newcomers to a community, access to social information provides an explanatory framework from which to construct a sense of place and a perspective on practice. This enables them to begin the process of reshaping identity from an institutional identity, gained through initial access to the epistemic modality, towards enacting a collective workplace identity that reflects the shared understandings about practice. The negotiation of collective identity occurs through access to information that is rich in its historical, political and social contribution to the maintenance of community perspective. This modality can be further categorized into two dimensions.

In this respect social modalities are context-dependent and value-laden in relation to truth and competing interests. This modality is also variable, pragmatic and action oriented (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 57). Social modalities, therefore, are intrinsically based in experience and act as a source of situated knowledge. This modality can be thought of as the knowing location from which wisdom about practice and culture are derived, rather than the location of axiomatic truth. Social modalities are closely associated with reflection and reflexivity about professional practice and professional identity.

This type of information is accessed through the storylines of the community and the stories of individuals within the community. Sondergaard (2002, p. 191) describes storylines as ‘… a condensed version of a naturalised and conventional cultural narrative, one that is often used as the explanatory framework of one’s own and other’s practices and sequences of action’. Deconstruction of narrative and storytelling, provides newcomers with access to information that draws them away from the periphery to which they have been brought by their institutional learning, towards the community, allowing them to develop or reinforce a sense of place, and a perspective on practice. Social information is richly historical, political and cultural and therefore makes a critical contribution to the reinforcement and maintenance of community perspective.

Corporeal modality

The corporeal modality is formed through experience and manifests as information that is embodied and situated. It is, therefore, a context-dependent modality that acts as a knowing location for know-how information or practical knowledge (Ryle, 1949; Billett, 2001). This type of information is tacit, or contingent, and it is disseminated through demonstration and observation of practice or accessed through the tactile and kinaesthetic activity associated with actual practice. Corporeal information cannot be easily articulated or expressed explicitly, and, when it is, it is only partially explicit (Blackler, 1995). I have previously (2006, p. 575) argued that bodies reflect the consciousness of engagement with information. They act as a collector of sensory information, a site of knowledge and as a disseminator of physical experience. The body in action provides its own narrative that must be observed through practice. In performance the body becomes the intersection between epistemic information, information drawn from actual performance and information drawn from interaction with the community of practice.

Information from the corporeal domain, accessed through the senses and the action of the body of others, provides the baseline for embodied practice and leads to intersubjective constructions about the collective life of practice and profession. According to O’Loughlin (1998, p. 279) bodies are ‘not simply subject to external agency, but are simultaneously agents in their socio-construction of the world’. Bodies are therefore used as a source of sensory and sentient information gathering, as an instrument of non-verbal communication about practice and as a symbol of community that reflects the discourse in which the body is situated socially, politically and historically.

Information from this site is critical for the construction of meaningful practice and corresponds to Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) account of the lived body as the centre and symbol of learning and experience and the development of intersubjectivity in collective practice. For Merleau-Ponty bodies become storehouses of information and understandings that find a commonality of shared meanings within the culture. Intersubjective meaning is created through the perception of commonality, which suggests that embodiment is culturally produced (O’Loughlin. 1998).

Accounting for the body in the construction of knowledge, Dewey emphasizes the social body and the sociality of experience through bodily interaction, which leads to intersubjective conceptions of practice and profession. Dewey’s conception of the social body is highlighted by O’Loughlin (1998, p. 286) when she states that:

Goffman (1983) also emphasizes the role of the body in social interaction. According to this author, the body plays a central role in the generation of meaning by providing visual information cues about roles and practices, which lead to the establishment of shared vocabularies and meanings, which facilitate embodied knowing.

By observing the bodies of other people in practice, as they rehearse or are in action, we are able to access information that can be used in reflections about the veracity of our own practices. Drawing information from the body organizes the mind through the coupling of formal statements about work, which are predicable and articulated as rules and codes for practice, against uncertain bodily experience. These cannot be articulated or written down as procedure, because it must be experienced and transformed into information and then constructed as knowledge.

In the fire fighter study cited in Chapter 4 the use of physical information to develop fire sense has parity with the miners’ development of pit sense (Sauer, 1998; Somerville, 2002). Research by Sauer (1998) identified that miners’ development of pit sense was gained through sensory information that could not be articulated through text. This research also concluded that while ‘miners may draw on previous training and experience; they do not call on texts at the moment of action to help them react. Nor do they record their reactions in written communications’ (Sauer, 1998, p. 161). Like pit sense, fire sense is ‘physical and sensory knowledge in the most literal of senses’ (Sauer, 1998, p. 137). Somerville’s (2002) study of miners reinforces the idea of ‘embodied situated knowledge’ (p. 46), which originate through physical experiences and become embedded in social practices and traditions. Embodied knowledge is valued as a significant information source as opposed to epistemic or paper knowledge because it has evolved through the complex interaction between the ‘worker’s body and the place of work’ (Somerville, 2005, p. 19).

An awareness of the body as an important source of information in manual labour is also evident in the work of Veinot (2007). In keeping with practice theory, this author accounts for the body of a vault inspector in her description of workplace information practice. In describing the safety protection clothing worn by these vault inspectors, Veinot (2007) also draws attention to these workers’ awareness of corporeal information and the vital contribution it makes to embodied performance.

In the initial stages of training or learning to work, the physical modality is an action space through which an individual’s interaction produces an individual subjectivity in relation to performance and practice. That is, novices learn how to act as a practitioner, but at this preliminary stage they cannot become a practitioner, because they lack the experiential grounding that comes from actual practice. However, as interaction with the workplace environment and with the community of practice increases, corporeal information, which is grounded in the experiences of the body in action, also grounds intersubjectivity (Sheets-Johnstone, 2000). As novices interact with the bodies of other workers they develop a mutuality of understanding, which reflects the collective understandings of how practice and the performance of work should proceed.

Through interaction with other actors within context, the novice body is drawn in and turned towards the community of practice. SheetsJohnstone (2000, p. 344) draws on the concept of joint attention to describe how learning is a corporeal and/or kinetic relationship, which grounds intersubjectivity and is at the heart of novice learning. Joint attention is the result of the body being turned towards other situated bodies. This occurs when novices are located initially on the periphery of a community of practice. In their preparatory learning, novices’ bodies are turned towards the community in a number of ways (e.g. through rehearsal and by observation of others).

In summary, information is located within modalities, each with distinctive characteristics that influence ways of knowing and reinforcing the practices and procedures that enable knowing about context to occur. Therefore, within an epistemic modality ways of knowing may focus on disciplinary knowledge that is factual, with information-related activities being benchmarked against criteria and standards (e.g. know-why knowledge). In social modalities, ways of knowing will focus on intersubjectively shared understandings that are tacit, and nuanced and that may contest epistemic knowledge. Formal benchmarking will not occur, but may take the form of social benchmarking through acceptance within the group. Corporeal information is embodied and knowing focuses on know-how, where information practices will take the shape of physical activity such as rehearsal, observation and informal benchmarking will take the form of acceptance of performance.

Affordance

The drawing in of the individuals towards co-participation occurs through affordance. These are understood as activities and interactions and defined here as ‘invitational opportunities’ (Billett et al., 2004) furnished by the environment. According to Gibson (1979), who first coined the term, affordances focus on the sources of information available to people (e.g. symbols and artefacts) available within an environment. In discussing the definition of affordance, Gibson (1979, p. 27) suggests that: ‘the affordances of the environment are what it offers the animals, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.’ Affordances are therefore opportunities that the setting provides, which promote interaction and action. Gibson’s (1979) use of the term relates to the perception of artefacts and symbols that characterize an environment and the meaning that people, who are engaged with that environment, attribute to them. Therefore, an affordance must be perceived as information that is meaningful or that makes a difference. Affordances are contextual, but they are not a prerequisite for action unless they are meaningfully recognized by the participants within the context (Gibson, 1979; Barnes, 2000; Lloyd-Zantiotis, 2004).

Affordances furnish information, and in relation to information literacy, they can be classified as textual, social, and physical. Textual affordances are those opportunities that allow members to engage with the codified knowledge of the institution or organization enabling them to come to know the institutional landscape and its accepted practices. Social affordances are found in the interactional opportunities that occur between members as they negotiate a shared understanding about information and practice (i.e. a sense of collaborative identity and place). Through co-participation members are afforded information about the collaborative nature of professional practice (i.e. the nature of relationships between members). The information afforded is implicit and nuanced, reflecting the shared values, beliefs and norms of the community of practice. Occasionally this information will conflict with the institutional affordances provided to members when they first engage with the institution. Physical affordances manifest through an engagement with the signs, symbols and tools and physical environments of practice. These affordances provide opportunities for members to develop, connect and become reflexive with embodied or contingent information that is closely related to the know-how aspect of performance and cannot be adequately articulated in written form.

Like information, the relationship between the affordance and the information has to be understood as meaningful and useful to particular practices (Chemero, 2003). This suggests that affordance must be understood situationally, as part of the information experience and as forming an ongoing part of knowledge construction. Examples of activities that afford opportunities to connect with information may include guiding, mentoring, rehearsal, scaffolding, modelling or coaching, narration and storytelling (Gibson, 1979; Billett 2001; Lloyd, 2005). Affordances may enable access to embodied information relating to experiences about practice. Most importantly, for an affordance to be taken up by an individual, that individual must perceive the opportunity, which suggests that the value of the affordance (which might be a resource, a tool, or a person or a piece of information) must be recognized by the individual.

When we consider affordances as part of an architecture for information literacy practice we need to account for how the range of information activities occur within a setting and how and why a person interacts and forms relationships with symbols, artefacts or environmental stimuli, including people within an information environment. Having said that, it is also important to understand that the provision or opportunities to engage with information are not evenly distributed or made available to everyone within a setting and not everyone who participates will be given the same or similar opportunities to engage and experience the information environment. In the workplace, for example, access to information affordances may be affected by the nature of work, e.g. differences between part-time workers and full-time workers or novice and expert workers, or the contesting of practice between the two groups. In other settings, such as libraries, access to affordances may be affected by librarians’ perception of their clients or librarians’ conception of themselves as gatekeepers. In an educational setting, opportunities to access information may be a teacher’s perceptions of students’ abilities or need for information.

The nature of the activities and desired outcomes will influence what affordances are valued and how they are offered through co-participatory practice and used by participants. From the perspective of information literacy practice, affordances can be conceived as information experienced in the landscape, through formal, informal or incidental information seeking and dissemination activities, which encourage an individual to become reflective and reflexive about their practices and then draw individuals into membership.

In educational contexts, affordances may occur through the librarian–student interaction and be centrally focused around engaging with the online world through computer instruction (to access databases or catalogues) or instruction about analysing and evaluating textual sources (print and information and communication technology literacy) specific to the student’s discipline knowledge. In workplaces, affordances may be centrally focused on engaging and guiding the newcomer through the opportunities offered in the storylines of the community of practice. They may also provide opportunities for novices to engage with tacit and contingent sources of knowledge, which cannot be articulated or expressed in textual form but are still central to developing knowledge about practice and work performance.

Interacting with sources of information that are afforded within the context facilitates meaning making and allows the individual to develop an individual subjective position (the individual as learner) and, over time, an intersubjective position in relation to others who act in consort as a community of practice. In this respect, activities including information seeking and information dissemination, are enmeshed and shaped within context, and facilitate information engagement and experience. This enables the individual to move towards participation in the performance of meaning making activities, including engaging with signs and symbols that are valued by the community and by making connections with others already engaged with the community.

Information work

Information work is a situational activity. In other attempts to define this activity, information work has been discussed, as it is operationalized by the individual in ‘dealing with purposive, conscious and intended actions’ and focusing on what is done with information (Savolainen, 2007, p. 123). In the context of information literacy practice and of this architecture, information work refers to the strategies that are employed not only by members but also the collective strategies of the community to ensure that all members engage with information, sites of knowledge and employ appropriate information skills, which reflect the ways of doing things as sanctioned by the community. The way in which information work is operationalized will depend on the way information and knowledge are understood by the domain, and this in turn will influence the type of activities that occur and become legitimized. For example, in the emergency services studies (Lloyd, 2007) the flow of information is managed by the institutions. Novices were not encouraged to go outside of their training settings in order to access information about practice. Rather, they were corralled within the confines of their training organizations and provided with information that was considered relevant to their preparatory training. The formation of epistemic barriers that act to keep members within the confines of the knowledge domain or alternatively to act as a barrier to outsiders, is a common feature of communities of practice, noted in the work of Brown and Duguid (1991) and Wenger (1998).

Experts and newcomers alike perform information work as they engage in collaborative participation. Information work may be constituted through the epistemic modality as the development of activities and strategies that engage members with sources of codified knowledge. Activities may include members’ skill development in searching, organizing, analysing, evaluating and presenting information. Strategies may relate to reflection of content, and a reflexive view about the application of information skills.

Within a social modality information work may be constituted through the mapping of appropriate relationships within the community and may involve judgements about trust and reliability that will be assessed against nuanced information. However, mapping is not just an intra-community activity, the mapping of socially distributed networks also becomes important, particularly to experienced members who will search for salience, which they can use to inform and improve their own practice as well as the practices of the community as a whole.

Demonstration engages novices with information about the range of actions required in professional practice. Demonstration allows the new members to situate the body in relation to the expectations and standards required of the practice. It allows experienced members to mediate information in relation to the action or performance and at the same time turns new members’ bodies towards joint attention that will produce a shared focus that in early stages is preparatory. This activity allows the body to be signified by other practitioners as a novice body. Rehearsal of demonstrated practices affords new members with an opportunity to develop a suite of bodily actions that may mirror those of experts, but is still unconnected to the realities and uncertainties of actual practice. For intersubjectivity to develop, bodies must be physically turned towards one another. In the early stages of novice learning, epistemic, social and physical modalities prepare the novice bodies for perfunctory performance, but they cannot prepare them for the uncertainties of practice.

Influence work

The community plays a critical role in facilitating the transition of new members towards co-participation and shared practice. The community acts as a site for access to information by mediating the information landscape and wider environment on their behalf. Influence work describes how the community actively engages the new member in the negotiation about identity and ways of interpreting practice. In undertaking this activity the community actively shapes:

As part of an information strategy, influence work aims at repositioning new members towards the community and the renegotiations of their identity.

Communities of practice are essentially informal and define themselves according to the way they engage in practice (e.g. learning practice, work practice or community practice). This concept of practice differs considerably from the reified and abstract concept of institutional practice that new members engage with as part of their initial membership. This point is made by Wenger (1998, p. 119) when he suggests that ‘the landscape of practice is therefore not congruent with the reified structures of institutional affiliations, divisions, and boundaries. It is not independent of these institutional structures, but neither is it reducible to them’.

Through experience of interaction with other members and through the actual performance of work, information is grounded and subsequently meaning making takes on an intersubjective shape. Membership of a community of practice requires the production and reproduction of identity. The aim of influence work is to create an intersubjectively constituted reality about practice and procedure through the mediation and interpretation of information as it is experienced in actual practice. Influence work may emerge as the narration of events, story telling or interpretation of procedural materials. It is also constituted through the mediating and interpreting activities that occur within a setting. From a corporeal level it may manifest through activities such as the demonstration of embodied experience.

Information sharing

The activity of information sharing is central to both information work and influence work. This feature has not been considered in relation to information literacy research, nor has it been widely researched in the library and information sector. Where this is the case, it is often referred to as an information practice (Talja and Hansen, 2005). However, in the framework of practice that has been employed for this work, information sharing is understood not as a practice but as an activity that is purposeful and one that is affected and influenced by the sayings and doings of the environment. Information sharing is a purposeful activity, which enables a member to give and receive information. When it is considered in the light of collaborative socio-cultural practices it is the receipt of information that is of interest because this affects the information and influences work that occurs within information literacy practice.

Coupling

As a central activity of information literacy practice, coupling is the process by which information from the textual sites, from bodily experience of authentic practice and from the socially nuanced site are drawn together and render the member ‘in place’ within the intersubjective space. Coupling facilitates emergent awareness of where information is situated, and the strategies used to operationalize access to it within the various modalities.

Becoming information literate, knowing the information landscape and its access points characterizes the embodied practice that renders the individual in place and facilitates the transfer from subjectivity to intersubjectivity. Engaging with information through the situated information modalities via the affordances of experienced members in the setting enables new members to connect with the intersubjective framework of established practice and identity and as well as with the collectively agreed ways of knowing. Coupling is central in the transition from peripheral to embodied practitioner. It is attended to through the affordances (information and influence work) in which information accessed from textual, social and corporeal sites are drawn together and render the newcomer in place.

Coupling engages the institutional knower with the physical and social sites of knowledge and facilitates the transition from acting to becoming.

Through coupling of the mind, body and experience, the institutional knower is positioned by the affordances of the community that influence the actions and activities required in practice.

 the influence of context on the prefigurement and shaping of information modalities within a setting; and

 the role of information affordances in enabling access to information about practices and the activities that facilitate information literacy within context.

Implications for information literacy education

Information literacy is a situated socio-cultural practice that informs other practices and in doing so enables understanding and intelligibility to occur. It is constituted through a range of information activities and information skills that are operationalized within a community. By constructing an architecture for information literacy we are able to make explicit the key features of this practice.

The concept of information literacy must be understood through its use. This suggests that an understanding of how information literacy as practice is situated within a social site becomes a critical first step in developing effective pedagogy. As I suggested in an earlier chapter, educational institutions are preparatory. They prepare people to enter work or to participate in the community. To be effective in this task, librarians and information literacy educators must be able to recognize how practice is constituted outside their own field and account for this in their teaching practice. This is a big task at the best of times and for library educators it can be incredibly difficult, given the tensions that they must contend with in relation to their status, often not as faculty, and with limited resources. But try we must!

The architecture I have proposed here takes the concepts of practice and situatedness and attempts to identify the key features for information literacy that will be present in all contexts. It does not focus on skills because the development of skills is, I believe, a situated practice that needs to be understood, as it is operationalized, rather than be determined by librarians who may lack a broader understanding of information practice outside of their own setting. The architecture is not perfect and should be an ongoing construction as more research and thinking about information literacy across a range of settings is conducted. It should not be followed slavishly, but it should encourage you to think about the role of information literacy education and how you might prepare students for the world outside the library or the classroom.

There are implications of this approach for the library and information science profession and for librarians who champion information literacy. For library and information science educators:

For librarians and information literacy educators there is a need to:

The research into workplace information literacy highlights that the current behaviour and skills approach is not suitable for wider settings. If information literacy is to truly underpin notions of lifelong learning then librarians and information literacy educators need to understand the broader conception of information literacy as a collaborative practice and work towards students and clients developing skills and approaches to information that are not solely focused around text, but also include oral communication skills and visual skills, such as observation. They also need to develop in students the ability to become reflective and reflexive practitioners who are able to critically assess and question not only the information but also the conditions through which it is provided.

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