LILAC 2006

How do students develop information literacy – through formal

education or social participation?

---Ola Pilerot, Skövde University

Libraryola.pilerot@his.se

LILAC 2006

LILAC 2006

Outline

• Approaches to IL• Embedded IL• A study of bachelor theses• Analysis• Conclusion

LILAC 2006

The IL discourse

• Two dominant perspectives:• IL as a fixed set of skills.

– Those who think and act in an appropriate way; identify information needs, locate information sources, perform searches in these, retrieve the suitable information and merge this information with what is already known.

• Relational approach – “IL is learned when different ways of

experiencing it are discerned” (Bruce, Edwards, Lupton,

2006)

Background

Emerging approach

• The sociocultural approach to IL– Emphasizes IL as something learned in

situational contexts in relation to artifacts, to people, and to specific knowledge.

“…away from instrumental, skill-based definitions…toward an understanding of [IL] as a culturally situated phenomenon based in the way communities construct meaning and belonging” (Elmborg, 2006)

Background

Compare with Critical IL as described by:Holschuh Simmons, M. (2005)Luke, A. & Kapitzke, C. (1999)

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Teachers and Librarians

“…teachers tend to stress the subject matter of a learning assignment and underestimate the complexities of information seeking for the students. Librarians, on the other hand, will often prefer to focus on the information search process and disregard subject content or learning outcome”.

(Limberg, L. 1999)

Background

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Incentive

• To produce a substantiated argument for the sociocultural approach which the analysed results in this study indicates is crucial for successful embedding of IL.

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From generic to embedded IL

• Extra curricular classes and/or self paced packages (generic).

• Extra curricular classes and/or self paced packages that complement the curriculum (parallel).

• Classes and packages that are part of the curriculum (integrated).

• Curriculum design where students have ongoing interaction and reflection with information (embedded).

(Bundy, A. 2004)

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Empirical material

• Bachelor theses written within two study programs, product engineering design, and nursing.

• 2 x 9 theses from the same year.

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Directives for theses

• Formulated on three levels.– Nationally in the Higher Education Ordinance.– Locally at the university by the Research- and

Education Board.– Within the frame for the respective study program.

• Both student categories are supposed to use scientific methods of inquiry; be theoretically aware, critically questioning; and relate to research findings, and when it comes to the engineering students, be able to seek information and obtain knowledge.

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The students

• Product engineering design– Bachelor degree – Three year programme– Mainly focused on theoretical content

• Nursing– Bachelor degree – Three year programme– Mainly focused on theoretical content; some

periods of practice

Both categories have been offered and participated in a credit bearing IL course.

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Sociocultural aspect

• What are the ideas, thoughts and values on information seeking and use held by the people that meet and teach the students most often?

• A brief literature review has been performed to answer this question.

• The results of the review will be linked to the results of the study.

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Nurses’ and engineers’ information behaviour • Both groups are:

– frequent information users – moderate users of printed information of

scientific nature found outside their own organisations.

• Information use can be seen as tool for a group to shape an identity.– for the nursing profession scholarly

information use is an important tool for creating an identity as a “proper” academic discipline.

(Sundin, O., 2003)

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Method

• Quantitative: counted and compared all references.? What information was used?

• Carefully read the theses to find out if they followed the directives.? How, if at all, did they use theories and

methods, and did they refer to related research?

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Quantitative results, PED-students

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Quantitative results, Nursing students

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Content analysis results 1(2)

• Nursing theses– Common ”template” (investigative, in

accordance with directives)– Explicitly qualitative (one exception)– Literature reviews– Categorization of results– To some extent connected to nursing

theories– To some extent relating to previous

research

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Content analysis results 2(2)

• PED theses– Descriptive (rather than investigative)– Common template reminding of another

genre, i.e. a technical report– Explicit accounts for method(s) are rare– Hardly any theory base– Hardly any references to previous studies

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Analytical tools

• Communities of practice (CoP)• Cognitive authority (CA)

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Communities of practice

• Components of a social theory of learning:– community, ("learning as belonging"),– identity,("learning as becoming"),– meaning,("learning as experience"), and

– practice, ("learning as doing")

(Wenger, 1998, 5).

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CoP (cont.)

Those who learn within a community of practice:

[…] do not receive or even construct abstract, "objective," individual knowledge; rather, they learn to function in a community /---/ They acquire that particular community's subjective viewpoint and learn to speak its language. In short, they are enculturated.

(Brown & Duguid, 1991.)

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Cognitive authority

“If all we could know of the world was what we could find out on the basis of first-hand experience, we would know little”. (Wilson, 1983,9)

“the person whom I recognize as having cognitive authority is one whom I think should be allowed to have influence on my thinking, for I suppose he has a good basis for saying what he does” (Ibid., 14-15)

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Cognitive authority

Wilson claims that the… “…student is to develop a taste

consistent with those of the teachers, and it is not frowned upon for the student to take the teacher as a model whose taste is to be emulated as far as possible.”

(Ibid., 66-67)

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CoP

• A community of practice is a unique combination of three fundamental elements: a domain of knowledge, which defines a set of issues; a community of people who care about this domain; and the shared practice that they are developing to be effective in their domain”

(Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2002, 27)

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Analysis

• Nursing students seem to share the repertoire of their teachers.

• In the CoP of nurses IL is seen as important, it’s an issue (cf. Wenger).

• Librarians are therefore more likely to be welcomed into the local CoP of nursing, and they therefore gain cognitive authority.

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Analysis

• PED students also share the repertoire of their teachers.

• But in the CoP of PED IL is not a high priority, it’s not an issue.

• Since librarians are not seen as members of the CoP of PED they are not recognized as cognitive authorities.

• IL has a greater chance of being easily embedded within the nursing disciplin than in the PED disciplin.

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Overview

Higher education discourse

Directives

Product engineeringdesign

Nursing

IL-course

Behavioural sciences

Product engineering discourse

Health care discourse

IL as an“issue”

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Conclusion

• To foster communities of practice consisting of subject teachers together with librarians, is a way of achieving embedment and thereby increasing the cognitive authority of the teaching librarian.

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”…there is a big difference between a lesson that is about the practice but takes place outside of it, and explanations and stories that are part of the practice and take place in it.”

(Wenger, 1998, 100)

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References

• Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation. Organization Science, 2(1), 40-57.

• Bundy, A. (Ed.) (2004) Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework. 2nd ed. Adelaide : Australian and New Zealand Institute for Information Literacy (ANZIIL).

• Elmborg, J. (2006). Critical information literacy: implications for instructional practice. Journal of Academic Librarianship. Article in press.

• Holschuh Simmons, M. (2005). Librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy. Portal: Libraries and the Academy. 5(3), 297-311.

• Limberg, L. (1999). Experiencing information seeking and learning: a study of the interaction between two phenomena. Information Research. 5(1), http://informationr.net/ir/5-1/paper68.html

• Luke, A. & Kapitzke, C. (1999). Literacies and libraries: archives and cybraries. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. 7(3), 467-491

• Sundin, O. (2003). Informationsstrategier och yrkesidentiteter [Information strategies and occupational identities]. Borås : Valfrid.

• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press.

• Wilson, P. (1983). Second-hand knowledge: an inquiry into cognitive authority. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood P.