What is information literacy? Well after a couple of weeks reading it seems there is no clear consensus.
What do I think information literacy is? Good question!
Breaking down the term into its elements is a place to start:
Literacy is such a broad term to me it encompass reading, writing, talking, listening, comprehending, understanding, commanding and using. We now also have to think of literacy as being multimodal (Kalantzis & Cope, 2015). Being literate helps us understand the world we live in and we receive messages about our world in a many different ways.
Information is also a broad term. Information means different things to different people and with the invention of the internet information is now readily accessible at the touch of a button. Ultimately I think information is something that tells us something whether we are asking a question or not.
So information literacy to me is vast – it is a skill and a process, it is vital for students to be information literate and it is embedded not only in what we are trying to learn (e.g. subjects taught) but also what we learn without trying (e.g. reading tweets that tell us a movie is great). And like everything in life information literacy will be coloured by our own experiences.
So how does this relate to the role of the TL? I believe we need to provide our students with experiences where they can learn information literacy skills, but also learn the value of these skills and how they can be transferred between subjects (and real-life needs). Herring (2011) concludes that students find information seeking difficult and that they are not very good at transferring information literacy practices. TL’s as information specialists need lead schools in defining their information literacy policies, they need to teach information literacy skills, they need to encourage fellow teachers to teach information literacy skills and they need to guide students in transferring the information literacy skills they have across subjects.
References
Kalantzis, M. & Cope, B. (2015). Multiliteracies: Expanding the scope of literacy pedagogy. New Learning. Retrieved May 2016
Herring, J. (2011) Year 7 students, information literacy, and transfer: A grounded theory. School Library Research 14, 2-31. Retrieved March, 2017
