Conceptualising the Sociocultural Nature of the Development of Information Literacy in Undergraduate Education

Abstract

With a few exceptions, the social nature of the development of information literacy has remained largely implicit in the library and information science literature. Given the ratio of practitioners to both scholars and practitioner-scholars in academic librarianship, it is not surprising that the literature related to information literacy has mostly focused on pedagogical and practical strategies, with emphasis on brief, one-time instructional interventions (i.e., ‘one shots’) that still remain ubiquitous in higher education. Relatively recent literature focusing on critical pedagogies in information literacy instruction (see Tewell 2015 for an overview) has highlighted the need to develop students’ critical or socio-political consciousness, not just their ability to select keywords and search relevant databases, which can be difficult to do within a single instruction session. Although important to recognise, this narrow focus does not account for the ways in which students’ information literacy develops within the broader undergraduate academic landscape in which students’ leaarning is situated, as well as barriers to the development of (critical) information literacy, student learning and student academic success.