“Literacy has been dissected and put on display in glass cabinets in the rooms of whichever discipline has taken a knife to it since its conception.”
Definitions for literacy abound in the multitudes in textbooks across disciplines and websites throughout the infosphere. The term, to put it bluntly, has been dissected and put on display in glass cabinets in the rooms of whichever discipline has taken a knife to it since its conception. The result is not a deeper understanding of the concept – instead, this dissection has only served to make it smaller, and smaller, and smaller, removing one definition from the next and establishing one “literacy” as separate from another. There is what is called the “traditional” literacies – the ability to read and write – and a whole host of niche literacies branching off it. There is visual, oral and aural literacy, critical, cultural and workplace literacy, and now with the development of the infosphere and the digital world, even sub-branches of ICT, media, digital and information literacies.
My English teaching background tends to shudder in horror at this dismantling of a concept that, really, can be summed up and applied so simply across a range of disciplines:
to understand.
Evidently, the concept of literacy is far more complicated that can be communicated in two words – I’ve no misconceptions about its complex nature, rest assured. But I feel no matter which direction you take when you look at it whether as a concept, process or skill – for all three is certainly is – the dissecting of literacy into smaller and smaller niche literacies is counterproductive, to say the least.
To be able to read is to comprehend – to understand. To be able to write is to understand how to communicate using the written word. To be visually literate is to understand how meaning is created and conveyed through images, and to communicate with them. To be orally literate is to understand how to communicate using the spoken word. To be aurally literature is to understand the spoken word. To be critically literate is to understand how to critique what we see, hear and read – and know why we must do so. To be culturally literate is to understand how cultures operate on macro and micro levels, to understand what cultures consist of – and therefore how to navigate them. To be workplace literate is to understand how to successfully enter the workforce, and navigate it (and learn how to do so with specific skills) once you get there. To be ICT, media and digitally literate is to understand how they work, to understand how to access them, to understand how to navigate them, and to understand how to use them.
And to be information literate is to understand information. To understand how to find it, and where to find it. To understand how to assess it, and why we need to do so. To understand what to do once we find it, and what to do with it once we’ve got it. To understand what to do if we can’t find it, and must rethink how to do so.
In this sense, then, literacy in all its complexity as a concept, a process and a skill can indeed be defined most succinctly in two words:
to understand.
Evidently what one tags on the end of this “to understand” will be discipline-specific, but to understand is an inherent feature of literacy as a concept, a process and a skill. Literacy cannot therefore be “new”, but is rather a concept, process and skill that has been developed over time. As the means of communication have changed, the requirements of our understandings have changed too. As a result, what students are required to know and be able to do – what skills they must understand how to use, what processes they must understand how to engage in – have changed over time.
This is what is central to the concept of information literacy, and the diverse perspectives presented in Module 5 reflect the changing demands on what it means “to understand”, and indeed what it entails. As an information specialist, then, these discussions and the multitude of definitions and dissected sub-definitions will guide me in my planning as information literacy and inquiry learning specialist. To know what students need to know, from processes to skills, I need to understand the requirements of what the English curriculum has so aptly termed this plethora of literacies: multi-literacies.
“A wholistic (or multi-literacies) approach to information literacy is imperative”
The technologies will continue to change, and so the ways of “understanding” will continue to morph with them, but to separate literacies into separate entities suggest a separate approach to each. This can lead only to confusion and a surface-level understanding of each. A wholistic (or a multi-literacies) approach to information literacy is imperative, just as an awareness of how these changes will impact how students will navigate the world is therefore crucial to teaching the processes and skills they will require to understand, and therefore access and navigate it. Staying on top of educational developments, research and pedagogy has never been (or seemed) so important.