When I was growing up, we were allowed one hour of television a night. I wisely chose to invest this time on The Goodies and Doctor Who. Tom Baker, with his long scarf and jelly babies, has remained an enduring memory. So has the devastation I felt when he regenerated into Peter Davison. There were tears, I’m not going to lie. I recall learning that TARDIS stood for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. I had absolutely no idea what that meant, but that didn’t dull the fascination I felt about something being bigger on the inside than on the outside.
The term information literacy (IL) is a little like the TARDIS. It means more on the inside that it appears on the outside. Two words that lay claim to their own definitional debates. How do you define information? And how do you define literacy? Is information simply bits of data, or a vehicle for purposefully communicating meaning? Could literacy just be a measure of competency in reading and writing? Or has its meaning changed to match the different ways we now access and use information? And what happens when you put the two words together?
Three perspectives of IL prevail. The behaviourist approach suggests that the term represents a measurable cache of digital skills that must be acquired. A sociocultural approach posits that information literacy is a collaborative practise that is developed through communities of people within a particular context. Finally, IL can be seen more as a recognition of the complexity evident when users engage with information in different ways. Bruce et al. (2006) suggest that IL educators are daily challenged by an environment in which colleagues and students bring very different perspectives to their teaching and learning (p.1).
Whichever approach or perspective you ascribe to, what seems evident is that a measure of an individual’s information literacy must be dependent on purpose and context. Dr Who always had a crisis to uncover, a world to save, a purpose to fulfil. He also always had an assistant to help. He engaged with an astounding amount of information and made sense of it in concert with others in a particular context. In similar ways, we as educators are purposed to help students learn to critically examine and ethically use information they engage with in order to develop as effective and collaborative global citizens.
Kutner and Armstrong (2012) state that TLs have a unique role to play in producing information literate students within a twenty-first century global societal context (p.25). Ultimately, they suggest that the role of the TL is to transcend the debate of IL being a set of digital skills to master versus a social process of learning about the world by bringing the two together to produce learners who are aware of their place within a global context and are able to manage that effectively (2012, p.29).
This is what every Dr Who has done. Stepped into the enigma that is the TARDIS and used their skills and knowledge of the entire universe to solve problems and save the world. What a task for the humble teacher librarian – to head into students’ learning contexts and teach them to successfully make sense of the overwhelming information environment they encounter.
Let’s help students step into their TARDIS and save the world.
Cath
Bruce, C., Edwards, S., & Lupton, M. (2006). Six frames for information literacy education: A conceptual framework for interpreting the relationships between theory and practice. ITALICS, 5(1), 1-18.
Kutner, L. & Armstrong, A. (2012). Rethinking information literacy in a globalised world. Communications in information literacy, 6(1), 24-33. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.15760/comminfolit.2012.6.1.115
Tom Baker and the TARDIS (n.d). Image. Tom Baker (4th Doctor) to Return to Doctor Who. Retrieved on 16th May, 2020 from https://tobescifitakeover.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/tom-baker-4th-doctor-to-return-to-doctor-who/