ThoughtCatalog / Pixabay

Kalantzis, M. & Cope, B. (2015). Multiliteracies: Expanding the scope of literacy pedagogy. New Learning. https://newlearningonline.com/multiliteracies

• diverse social, cultural and ‘domain-specific’ contexts result in different ways of making meaning
• communication now requires understanding patterns of meaning across different contexts
• making meaning is also more multimodal than before [the mode ‘tactile’ has been added to the 5 modes I’m familiar with]
• literacy pedagogy cannot solely focus on/privilege the alphabet anymore
• digital media is equally important, especially as it allows for a “pedagogy of synaesthesia, or mode switching.”

Chapter 6, Understandings of literacy. Pages 147-159, in Education for all: Literacy for life, UNESCO, 2005. https://web.oas.org/childhood/EN/Lists/Recursos%20%20Bibliografia/Attachments/22/20.pdf

• the work of academics on defining the term ‘literacy’ has had a direct impact on pedagogy. (p.148)
• 4 understandings of literacy:
  • literacy as skills (reading, writing and oral; numeracy; knowledge access) (p.149-150) – the ‘reading wars’ (phonics vs ‘reading for meaning’); linear thinking; numeracy as the ability to process, interpret and communicate mathematical information; interpreting signs and symbols [semiotic system]; multiple literacies:
    • information literacy
    • media literacy
    • visual literacy
    • scientific literacy
  • literacy as applied, practised and situated (p.151) – originally seen as functional, neutral, independent of social context but this has evolved; questions the designations ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’; literacy practices vary depending on context; a social practice; literacy’s potential to help people move into “fuller economic, social and political participation” (social justice)
  • literacy as a learning process (p.151) – constructivism; Dewey & Piaget; ways in which we make sense of our learning experiences; personal experiences a key resource; collaborative learning, distributed learning, communities of practice – shift to a social context for learning; Paulo Freire: learner’s socio-cultural realities brought into the learning process which is then used to challenge the social reality; critical literacy (critical thinking).
  • literacy as text – the subject matter or nature of texts; literacy located “within wider communicative and socio-political practices that construct, legitimate and reproduce existing power structures”; is the literacy being taught still relevant?

Ackerman, E. (2001). Piaget’s constructivism, Papert’s constructionism: What’s the difference? Future of Learning Group. https://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf

• Sociocultural approach
• diverse environments call for ‘auto-determination‘
• Piaget, Papert, Dewey, Freynet, Freire etc. emphasise learning as “putting one’s own words to the world, or finding one’s own voice, and exchanging ideas with others.” (‘open school movement’) (p.2)
• Jean Piaget (1896-1980) → Constructivism
• studied children’s ways of doing and thinking at different developmental stages (p.3)
• children have coherent and robust views of the world which are stubborn yet constantly evolving and differ from adults’ views (p.3)
• experiences in the world  and subtle pressures [e.g. social norms, normalised and/or challenging representations] influence children’s changing conceptual understandings
• “teaching is always indirect” – learning involves interpretation and translation, and this varies between individuals due to their own knowledge and experience (p.3)
• “the transmission model” is not enough – knowledge is not information passed from one person to the next, to be memorised and then applied. It is experience. (p.3)
• don’t ignore the reasons why children might resist what you are teaching (p.3)
• “learning” is “building knowledge structures through progressive internalisation of actions” (p.4)
• Seymour Papert (1928-2016) → Constructionism 
• worked with Piaget in Geneva in the 60s and 70s, built on his theories of constructivism
• adds to Piaget’s constructivism by positing that learning happens with “the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity” (p.4)
• focuses on learning through making
• emphasises “how ideas get formed and transformed when expressed through different media”, in particular contexts, by individual minds (p.4)
• focus shifts to the individual learner’s interactions
• key to learning is how we project outwards our feelings and ideas, making them “tangible and shareable” which in turn clarifies them (p.4)
• Complements Vygotsky‘s research into “the role of cultural artefacts – tools, language, people – as a resource for drawing out the best of every person’s cognitive potential.” (p.5)
• knowledge is grounded in contexts, shaped by uses – it is ‘situated’ and ‘pragmatic’ (p.5)
• situated = “knowledge as it lives and grows in context” (p.5)
• questions/challenges the view “that abstract or formal thinking is necessarily the highest form of intellectual development” (p.6)
• theorists consider ‘cognitive growth’ to be a gradual shift from “intuitive towards rational thinking”, from everyday thought to scientific reasoning (p.6)
• both Piaget and Papert consider higher-order thinking/reasoning to be the result of a movement from ‘local’, ‘context-bound’ thinking to ‘general’, ‘context-free’ thinking, from ‘externally-supported’ to ‘internally-driven’ (p.6)
• 

  Free-Photos / Pixabay

  “Traditional epistemology gives a privileged position to knowledge that is abstract, impersonal, and detached from the knower, and treats other forms of knowledge as inferior. But feminist scholars have argued that many women [and/or scientists] prefer working with more personal, less detached knowledge and do so very successfully. [If] this is true, they should prefer the more concrete forms of knowledge favoured by constructionism” (pp.6-7)

• Papert reclaims this “deeply grounded, experience-based, and subjective nature of human cognition”; ‘concrete thinking’ is just as important as abstract

Lloyd, A. (2007). Recasting information literacy as sociocultural practice: Implications for library and information science researchers. Information Research, 12(4). http://informationr.net/ir/12-4/colis/colis34.html

• Being information literate means engaging with different modes and mediums in context to build meaningful knowledge (p.2)
• rethink information literacy (IL) from skills-based towards “a catalyst for meaningful learning in all contexts” (p.2)
• knowing an information environment is a ‘whole body’ experience; there’s a complex, dynamic relationship between physical, social and cognitive information (p.2)
• shift from skills-based definition of information literacy to a holistic (whole body) one (p.3)
• information literacy (IL) is a complex sociocultural process (p.3)
• symbolic interactionism = emphasises the importance of ‘taken-as-shared’ meanings i.e. understanding symbols, events or actions in similar ways and “the interpretation of meanings in the creation of reality” (p.3)
• social constructionism = “focuses on social processes and how individuals seek to interpret or construct meaning” within social, historical and political contexts i.e meaning (‘interpretations’) is not constructed in isolation (p.3)
• IL is “a dynamic process that facilitates knowing”; ‘knowing’ is not an abstract (p.5)

Farrell, R. & Badke, W. (2015). Situating information literacy in the disciplines: A practical and systematic approach for academic librarians. Reference Services Review, 43(2), 319-340. https://www-emerald-com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/insight/content/doi/10.1108/RSR-11-2014-0052/full/html

• socio-cultural approach = ‘situated learning’ = learning in specific contexts (situations) (p.320)
• ‘CUNY’ model (City University of New York) puts librarians in the position of ‘curricular consultants’ who can design, in collaboration, learning opportunities that are ‘design authentic’ and ‘situated’ (p.320)
• different from the idea that a discipline is a ‘body of knowledge to teach’ (p.321)
• the classroom should instead be a culture where knowledge is shaped by inquiry, discovery and debate, and be in a constant state of ‘flux’ (p.321)
• enables skills to include problem-solving and be transferrable
• establishing information literacy as the purview of Library and Information Science specialists “has not helped students to acquire the kinds of information practices” they need (p.322)
• This means that the Behaviourist Approach is limited as it is decontextualised and restricted to research competencies: it does not encourage critical thinking
• librarians need to  understand what “what [the] disciplines are and how information practices are a part of them” (p.323) – i.e. become more knowledgeable about the different subject areas to make IL more discipline-specific, rather than focus on a generic set of skills and a blanket approach
• doing so requires understanding three essential elements of disciplines and their information processes: epistemology, metanarrative and methodology (p.323)
• epistemology refers to the ‘nature of the sources of information’ that are valued within a discipline (p.323); information does not exist in a vacuum (p.323)
• each discipline has a ‘metanarrative’, a “cultural concept involving the beliefs and values of the discipline that shape it to be what it is” (p.323)
• the method is “the chosen means by which the discipline does research, evaluates evidence and carries out its discourse” (p.323)
• therefore ‘process’ is as important as content and build students’ ability to “do the work of the disciplines rather than just learning about them” (p.324)

Talja, S. & Lloyd, A. (2010). Integrating theories of learning, literacies and information practices. In Talja, S. & Lloyd, A. (2010). Practising information literacy: Bringing theories of learning, practice and information literacy together. Centre for Information Studies. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9781876938796500194

• Information literacy is seen as a ‘central scaffold’ to participating in all areas of life
• traditional concepts of literacy challenged by ‘new literacies’ and ‘multiliteracies’; new technologies present a challenge to the print-based (pre-digital) ideas of what literacy means (para.2)
• ‘multiliteracy’ = there is more than one type of literacy (an ‘endless number’) because of the variety of ‘domains of life and knowledge’ (i.e. contexts) and ‘subcultural diversity’ (para.2)
• information literacy was originally defined as ‘library-based research’ and ‘systematic research skills’, expanding to an office workplace context and then more widely to computer and internet literacy in the 90s (para.3)
• Since expanded into a concept that includes learning abilities that lead to ‘lifelong learning’ and the “skills of learning to learn” (para.4)
• aim is to empower people as well as meet workplace expectations but the latter gets privileged more (para.5)
• speak in pluralities – literacies and literacy practices “rather than about literacy as something that an individual either possesses or does not possess” (para.6)
• sociocultural approach doesn’t see information literacy as “an acquired personal attribute” as this leads to “trivialised human information practices” and “de-contextualised, artificial information literacy instruction” (para.10)
• sociocultural approach = “shared ways of interacting and communicating”; sees literacy “as something that develops in social contexts and is specific to a particular community”
• moves “learners to the centre of educational practice and enable them to take responsibility more fully for learning and knowledge-building” in their communities.

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). https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/14028/36236.pdf?sequence=1

• education is a challenging environment because of the different perspectives brought to it by teachers, students, curriculum designers etc. and because of the need to apply pedagogy to information literacy (p.1)
• Six Frames for Information Literacy Education is a tool for analysing, interpreting and understanding these challenges
• the Six Frames are
  1. the content frame
  2. the competency frame
  3. the learning to learn frame
  4. the personal relevance frame
  5. the social impact frame
  6. the relational frame
• content frame = discipline focus; often through lectures
• competency frame = behaviour and performance focus
  • what should learners be able to do, and at what level of competence?
• learning to learn frame = constructivist approach
  • what does it mean to think like an information literate professional?
  • How have the information processes informed your learning or your approach to the problem?
• personal relevance frame = experiential orientation
  • develop a sense of what information literacy can do for you;
  • what experiences are required to enable you to engage with the content?
  • typically assessed with a portfolio and self-assessment
• social impact frame = social reform orientation
  • how IL impacts society
  • how it can help communities inform significant problems
  • issues and values focus re the ‘digital divide’
• relational frame = self-aware learners; critical perspective of information literacy
  • design experiences that help learners discern more powerful ways of seeing the relevant phenomena

Abilock, D. (2015). Information literacy. Building blocks of research: Overview of design process and outcomes. NoodleTools. https://web.archive.org/web/20160409135915/http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/1over/infolit1.html

• “Information Literacy is a transformational process in which the learner needs to find, understand, evaluate, and use information in various forms to create for personal, social or global purposes.”
• a website that lists different skills and attributes for students/learners, teachers, curriculum design etc.

Kutner, L. & Armstrong, A. (2012). Rethinking information literacy in a globalised world. Communications in Information Literacy, 6(1), 24-33. CSU Library. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/docview/1312440468/fulltextPDF/E1F4163DC6EF47CBPQ/

• relevant to the debate regarding information literacy as skills-based versus learning-based
• which best prepares students for “productive citizenship in today’s complex and increasingly globalised world”? (p.25)
• skills-based approach is no longer sufficient (p.25)
• ‘global citizenship’ has emerged as a “key strategic principle in higher education” (p.26)
• emphasises problem-based learning, interdisciplinary education, service and experiential learning, and transformative education (p.26)
• greater collaboration between teaching faculty and librarians is needed to expand information literacy to include “meaningful external as well as internal engagement with information” (p.28)
• information literacy broadens to include a social justice context (p.28)
• “deep information literacy” = includes the “larger context of the global information world in which we live”, as well as skills (p.28). Guiding questions include:
  • How does the information we engage with, reach us?
  • “What are the societal and economic forces at work that allow us access to unprecedented amounts of information?”
  • “what are the consequences of global information inequality?”
  • “Who has the greatest and least access to information, and why?”
• situates students in the larger information world and encourages them to think critically about their world (p.28)
• means students think critically about the “vast array of databases to which they have access”; “how to use these resources effectively”; and where the majority of research on their topic originates from (p.29) – leads to thinking about who creates and ‘owns’ the information, whose perspectives are included, whose voice is silenced
• students themselves are “increasingly becoming producers of information in addition to information consumers” (p.30)
• the conversation and reflection should occur at 3 levels:
  1. Pedagogical: why do we teach what teach as information literacy, and how do these programs support broader educational initiatives?
  2. Pragmatic: how do we balance the reality of limited time with students with an expanded notion of what we must teach them? (how can we cover it all?)
  3. Information literacy standards: need to update guiding professional standards to better reflect the holistic, relational and experiential nature of information literacy. This needs to allow room to engage with the ‘messier’, hard to measure contextual aspects of information in a globalised context (p.30)