The Concept of Information Literacy in Policy-Making Texts: An Imperialistic Project?

Organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) put a lot of effort in advocacy and policy making for information literacy (IL). Their ambition to foster IL can be seen as a part of a multinational educational project. By exporting a Western IL model focused on textual information sources and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into non-Western contexts that to a great extent lack ICTs, the educational project for IL runs the risk of turning into an imperialistic project. A discursively oriented analysis of two prominent policy documents—discussed in the light of the so-called new imperialism and the idea of invisible technologies—indicates a standardized one-size-fits-all-model of IL. Through establishing a close contact between the policy-making strand and the research strand in the IL literature and by adhering to the broad concept of information literacies, the risk of imperialism and oppression might lessen.

[1]  Patricia A Iannuzzi.  Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education , 2000 .

[2]  P. Brown,et al.  Education, globalization and social change , 2012 .

[3]  M. Heller,et al.  Voices of authority : education and linguistic difference , 2001 .

[4]  K. Tuominen,et al.  Information Literacy as a Sociotechnical Practice1 , 2005, The Library Quarterly.

[5]  James W. Marcum.  Rethinking Information Literacy , 2002, The Library Quarterly.

[6]  N. Fairclough.  Discourse and social change , 1992 .

[7]  S. Lipu.  Chapter 15 – Exploring information literacy from feminist perspectives , 2010 .

[8]  Almuth Gastinger,et al.  Information Literacy as a Human Right , 2010 .

[9]  Annemaree Lloyd,et al.  Practising information literacy : bringing theories of learning, practice and information literacy together , 2010 .

[10]  Anna Hampson Lundh,et al.  Informationskompetenser: Om lärande i informationspraktiker och informationssökning i lärandepraktiker , 2009 .

[11]  Bertram C. Bruce,et al.  The Disappearance of Technology: Toward an Ecological Model of Literacy , 1998 .

[12]  James Elmborg.  Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice , 2006 .

[13]  Laurel Evelyn Dyson.  Indigenous australians in the information age: exploring issues of neutrality in information technology , 2003, ECIS.

[14]  Hester W. J. Meyer,et al.  The influence of information behaviour on information sharing across cultural boundaries in development contexts , 2009, Inf. Res..

[15]  Annemaree Lloyd,et al.  Towards an understanding of information literacy in context , 2008, J. Libr. Inf. Sci..

[16]  Kimmo Tuominen,et al.  "Isms" in information science: constructivism, collectivism and constructionism , 2005, J. Documentation.

[17]  Allen Bundy.  Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework , 2004 .

[18]  J. Bindé.  Towards knowledge societies: UNESCO world report , 2005 .

[19]  John M. Budd,et al.  Discourse Analysis and the Study of Communication in LIS , 2006, Libr. Trends.

[20]  David Bawden,et al.  Conceptions of "information poverty" in LIS: a discourse analysis , 2007, J. Documentation.

[21]  Jay L. Lemke.  Letramento metamidiático: transformando significados e mídias , 2010 .

[22]  Jack Andersen.  The public sphere and discursive activities: information literacy as sociopolitical skills , 2006, J. Documentation.

[23]  Jr. Forest Woody Horton.  Understanding Information Literacy: A Primer , 2008 .

[24]  A. Lloyd.  Information Literacy Landscapes , 2010 .

[25]  Annemaree Lloyd,et al.  Framing information literacy as information practice: site ontology and practice theory , 2010, J. Documentation.

[26]  Michael C. McKenna,et al.  Handbook of Literacy and Technology : Transformations in A Post-typographic World , 1998 .

[27]  Hester W. J. Meyer.  Information use in rural development , 2003 .

[28]  C. Malone.  Information literacy: Essential skills for the information age , 1999 .

[29]  J. Haider,et al.  Development and the Documentation of Indigenous Knowledge: Good Intentions in Bad Company? , 2010 .

[30]  Annemaree Lloyd,et al.  Information literacy landscapes: an emerging picture , 2006, J. Documentation.

[31]  L. Tikly.  Education and the New Imperialism. , 2004 .

[32]  A. Lloyd.  Learning to Put Out the Red Stuff: Becoming Information Literate through Discursive Practice1 , 2007, The Library Quarterly.

[33]  Louise Limberg.  Information Literacies beyond rhetoric: developing research and practice at the intersection between information seeking and learning. Keynote address , 2009 .

[34]  By John Buschman.  Information Literacy, “New” Literacies, and Literacy1 , 2009, The Library Quarterly.

[35]  Louise Limberg,et al.  Constructing librarians' information literacy expertise in the domain of nursing , 2008, J. Libr. Inf. Sci..

[36]  J. Lau.  Information literacy : international perspectives , 2008 .

[37]  Cushla Kapitzke.  INFORMATION LITERACY: A POSITIVIST EPISTEMOLOGY AND A POLITICS OF OUTFORMATION , 2003 .

[38]  Pamela J. McKenzie,et al.  Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Discursive Approaches to Information Seeking in Context1 , 2007, The Library Quarterly.

[39]  Olof Sundin.  Negotiations on information-seeking expertise: A study of web-based tutorials for information literacy , 2008, J. Documentation.

[40]  D. Ashton,et al.  Education, Globalisation and the Future of the Knowledge Economy , 2008 .

[41]  E. Matusov,et al.  Print literacy as oppression: Cases of bureaucratic, colonial, and totalitarian literacies and their implications for schooling* , 2004 .

[42]  Sanna Talja,et al.  Disciplinary Socialization: Learning to Evaluate the Quality of Scholarly Literature , 2007 .

[43]  Intan Azura Mokhtar,et al.  The sigh of the information literate: an examination of the potential for oppression in information literacy , 2010, Inf. Res..

[44]  R. Catts,et al.  Towards information literacy indicators , 2008 .

[45]  Michelle Holschuh Simmons,et al.  Librarians as Disciplinary Discourse Mediators: Using Genre Theory to Move Toward Critical Information Literacy , 2005 .

[46]  V. Choukhande,et al.  Information Needs and Information Seeking Behaviour , 2008 .

[47]  H. Gintis,et al.  Schooling in Capitalist America , 1976 .

[48]  Cushla Kapitzke.  (In)formation literacy : a positivist epistemology and a politics of (out)formation , 2003 .

[49]  R. Morrison,et al.  Critical Information Literacy , 2008 .

[50]  Louise Limberg.  Information Literacies at the intersection between Information Seeking and Learning: contexts and values , 2010 .