Sanna Talja and Annemaree Lloyd

The domain-dependent nature of literacies and the challenge for embedded information literacy teaching

As David Woolwine has pointed out, there are diverse and conflicting views on whether information searching, use, and evaluation can be taught as discrete activities in isolation from domain-specific information, document and genre contexts. In the sociocultural approach to learning that informs most chapters in this volume, the concept of situated literacies is a key component. The emphasis on the situated nature of literacies is in contrast to the generic skills approach which has informed traditional approaches to information literacy teaching. Many of the contributors to this volume argue that information literacy needs a context and subject-specific content of it is to be meaningfully discussed.

Mikko Tanni’s research shows that teacher education does not yet appear to have developed working solutions for embedded information literacy teaching, despite the increased acceptance of and move towards inquiry-based learning. Teachers’ awareness of the need to integrate information literacy teaching into existing courses may be higher in countries other than Finland, which is where many of the case studies reported here were carried out. There is, however, ample evidence especially from the context of higher education that information literacy as a concept is not recognized by faculty (Kautto 2004; Leckie & Fullerton 1999). This does not only have to do with the term information literacy, which is not necessarily familiar to those working outside of learning and information research. Empirical studies also show that there is considerable disciplinary variation in faculty members’ perceptions of the necessity of teaching information practices (Kautto & Talja 2007). Whereas some disciplines, such as medicine, see information skills to be at the core of their disciplinary practices and learning, some disciplines make little or no effort to communicate their conceptions of and approaches to information skills to students explicitly (Kautto 2004).

There is more to domain-specific information practices than knowing about the core information resources of a domain.¹ Given David Woolwine’s result that there is substantial variation in the interpretation of key concepts, such as authority, timeliness, credibility and reliability, across domains, more effort is needed to contextualize information practices within the epistemic cultures, relevance criteria and nature of knowledge production within distinct domains. Each domain has its own distinctive set of epistemic and social considerations, its core genres, document forms, and document architectures. Domains differ in their criteria for relevance, credibility, quality, trustworthiness, good searching skills, good reading and good writing practices. The very description of domain practices is a challenge. How to convert this understanding into domain-embedded teaching is an even bigger one.

Research on situated knowledge and alternative epistemologies

We could say that the entire volume underlines the need to constantly be aware of the possibility and existence of ‘other ways of knowing’. We are accustomed to thinking that formal teaching provides basic learning skills and provides students with the potential to become competent learners and informed citizens. Many chapters in this volume argue that this assumption is incompatible with emergent epistemic cultures within digital environments and communities. But how do we acknowledge, include and respect other ways of knowing and the existence of multiple literacies in our research and teaching?

In the past, primary and secondary schools and higher education were the primary settings from which the information literacy discourse was constructed. Thus far, the most significant and groundbreaking information literacy research has emanated from this sector. Many chapters in this volume propose new ways of looking at these contexts ‘from the ground up’, through focusing on situated interactions and happenings as they unfold in the classroom.

Chapters contributed to this volume by Annemaree Lloyd, Kirsty Williamson, Saraleena Aarnitaival and Suzanne Lipu highlight the importance of addressing a wider range of situated learning contexts in diverse, culturally specific, out-of-school contexts. Studies such as theirs inform research into learning and literacies by enabling us to know and learn from different information landscapes and learning experiences. Studies undertaken in diverse work and everyday life settings convey a fuller understanding of the range of variation in what can mean to be information-literate. In studying settings that are different from those that we are accustomed to looking at, there may be less emphasis on source landscapes and more on sociality as the location from which information practices and literacies emerge.

For instance, the problems faced by immigrants as they attempt to reconcile their own cultural understandings with those of their adopted countries revealed that the standardized skills sets that characterize the goals of ICT and information literacy teaching within formal courses may in fact act as impediments for meaningful learning. The outcome for immigrants may be an inability to situate themselves as subjects in full control of their own learning activities. Communication barriers and asymmetric social relations arise when the adopted country’s naturalized, taken-for-granted discourses and the languages of information technology, which both implicitly foreground specific orientations toward technology and ways of doing things with technologies, are not something to which the person feels attuned.

Even more generally, discourses of learning have been dominated by the viewpoints prevailing in schooling and formal training. These create reality and reflect webs of truth which in turn influence the way in which education and training in practice proceeds. The information landscapes, technologies and expected ways of interacting with information may, for those with experience from other ways of knowing and ways of learning which are embedded in practices and performances specific to work or everyday living, result in feelings of disenfranchisement and marginalization. Therefore, our explorations should encompass the full range of social arrangements, settings and information-related activities that facilitate the emergence of information literacy.

Gendered information literacies

As Suzanne Lipu has pointed out in this volume, information literacy research and theorizing has not yet discusscd issues related to gender in depth. Yet, significant gender differences have in recent decades been identified in literacies and learning. This is visible in, for instance, the negative reports concerning boys’ deteriorating degrees of fiction reading and literacy success in schools, on the one hand, and the positive findings concerning the powerful learning curves and literacies present when boys engage in video gaming (Gee 2003; Sanford & Madill 2007) on the other. These somewhat contradictory research concerns {joint to the complexity of literacy practices and also show the numerous types of literacy practices in which both boys and girls are actually engaging—in different ways, with different expectations, with different outcomes, and to different degrees. To say that both literacies and information literacies are gendered not only underlines the fact that the degrees of engagement of boys and girls with diverse information genres and modalities and tools may be different. The more important issue is that features of the information environment, the information genres and ways of learning about practice, are different for boys and girls. Gender also comcs into play in considerations of relevant pools of information and the tools and technologies through which to access them.

Literacies present in both school practices and out-of-school practices always also have to do with the construction, circulation and naturalization of gender identities (Rowan et al. 2002). What it means to be male and what it means to be female are issues that are continuously defined and redefined in numerous invisible and implicit ways in societies. For example, in a study of teenage girls’ relations to computing, Oksman (1999) discovered that active engagement with computing was not associated with feminine subjectivity. A deep engagement with computing and gaming are considered as natural for boys—even to the extent where mastery of these activities may assume a ritualistic and symbolic significance of being part of growing into manhood (Nieminen-Sundell 1999). However, both femininity and masculinity are performed in multiple ways and always remain shifting ground, not only as culturally changing but also in their embeddedness in situated practices and settings. As insiders in a culture or a practice, such as gaming or stamp collecting, it is difficult to see where and how gender comes into play in our doings and sayings. And what gets demonstrated for us as researchers to a large extent depends on how we adjust our lenses for observing. Studying practices as gendered thus always requires a strong analytical stance.

The research challenges for considering the gendering of information literacy practices are not necessarily easy to define. We may, however, expect that boys and girls engage in different information literacy practices and that they experience different degrees of successes with diverse forms and genres of texts, information and technologies. Feminine and masculine readings and sensings of the same information, whatever its form, may differ to the degree that information that exists for one does not exist for the other. Taking gender into an object of analysis may help to see why, for instance, girls may seem as less knowledgeable in their use of computers, and why boys might seem as less successful with print-based literacy practices. Research might offer insights into how forms of education and learning that may be supportive for boys, such as learning through gaming, may not be equally supportive for girls.

Theorizing information technologies

A central theme in this book has been the understanding of information literacies as socially constituted practices. Information literacies are embedded in specific knowledge domains and practices which entail shared interests and concerns, specific tasks and specific ways of performing them and thinking about them. Practices also entail tools and technologies for conducting the work and for producing, accessing and using information. Although work practices are always based on material technologies and artefacts, these are rarely analyzed in information literacy research as actors in themselves. However material tools, technologies and artefacts offer specific kinds of possibilities and constraints for action and learning. The reason why we have not granted technologies their due status as actors is that literacies and information literacies research have traditionally privileged information and mind over materials, practice and work (New London Group 1996). Fully accounting for technologies’ ‘own’ action is a challenge that requires new methodologies and extensions in the scope of theory building.

Studying the affordances of technologies requires the use of methods such as close observation, photography or videotaping. Methods such as these are frequently used in workplace studies (Suchman & Trigg 1991; Heath & Luff 2000; Luff, Hindmarsh & Heath 2000). Theories of technology developed within the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies have much to offer for conceptualizing and studying the nature and affordances of technical artefacts. Information literacies research, workplace studies, and science and technology studies are adjacent fields also because many empirical studies within these traditions focus on the detailed study of information work practices—on the production, preservation, classification and filing of documents for the purposes of work and in the course of work. Typically, workplace studies have placed equal importance on the uses and affordances of traditional technologies, such as paper documents, and of digital technologies and electronic documents (Berg 1996; Harper 1998). An important insight from studies such as Harper (1998) is that information work, when mediated by a new technology, does not remain the same. As new technologies require new intellectual and bodily moves and skills, new needs, meanings, practices and purposes arise in the work task.

Studies adopting a sociocultural and practice theory, such as Annemaree Lloyd’s chapter in this volume, are oriented towards gaining a detailed understanding of how groups organize their work practices through interacting with texts, coworkers, technologies and other material objects. The interplay between work and everyday activities and enabling technologies is an important consideration also in information literacy. Thus far, not many information literacy studies have sought to take a deeper look at the social and situated character of technologies within diverse practices and learning environments. This is an important challenge for future research, since, as observed above, the same technology may be an essentially different technology for different groups of people and in different contexts.

The challenges of learning transfer

This book has highlighted the point that, when we speak about information literacies, we are not only speaking about information skills but are considering the social practices that entail the use of these skills. The sociocultural perspective affords a more holistic and intersubjective understanding of how people engage with information, how they learn collaboratively, how they are brought into membership affiliation, and how they learn to speak in their communities and act with others within them.

Practice theory and sociocultural theory both maintain that information and knowledge are site-specific, which also raises the difficult question of what then the key features of information literacies are. What common elements exist across landscapes? How are the site-specific social practices constituted as part of other practices?

The issue of transfer and transferability of skills is a challenge for researchers to engage with and yet it is a critical issue to focus on in future research. As Annemaree Lloyd’s research has suggested, formal education is largely preparatory. Therefore the question that naturally follows is, what is the preparation for? Does formal education and teaching need to reconcile to a greater degree its understanding of information literacies with the way these manifest in other settings to ensure that what is taught has applications outside of educational settings? It may be that questions such as these cannot be answered until much more research is undertaken in a wider range of contexts on how information literacies are shaped in the concrete settings of work and everyday life.

There is also a need to consider, as James Herring does in his chapter, what exactly is being transferred in teaching and schooling? What does the good learner, constituted through teaching and schooling, look like? How is the good learner constituted? Many chapters in this volume have described not only how learning manifests within a setting, but also how that learning is constituted through discursive, material, economic and political dimensions, and how invisible influences from history continue to shape teaching and schooling. These dimensions implicitly influence the ways in which people come to know their settings, and the modes of information and knowledge that are foregrounded. Sociocultural approaches also enable us to problematize understandings of literacies, learning and knowing, and may provide us with new ways of talking about learning and knowing.

References