{"title":"Rethinking the teleological essence of information literacy","authors":"Dijana Šobota","doi":"10.11645/18.1.592","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This think-piece critically examines (critical) information literacy ((C)IL) and its teleological essence. Despite substantial scholarly inquiry and progress, IL remains invisible and undervalued beyond academia. IL silos and CIL’s embeddedness within critical pedagogy and its focus on epistemological issues hinder its theoretical development, reduce it to an academic abstraction and undermine its salience and emancipatory goals. A multidisciplinary/multidomain approach is needed, leveraging insights from critical (social) theories and engaging with the ontological, to facilitate a novel understanding of IL and transform it into real-life action literacy for positive social change. The paper concludes by interrogating assumptions about (C)IL’s benefits, highlighting potential inadvertent disempowering effects, and issues a call to consider it a dynamic concept that evolves by accounting for sociopolitical realities.","PeriodicalId":38111,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Literacy","volume":"15 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Information Literacy","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.11645/18.1.592","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This think-piece critically examines (critical) information literacy ((C)IL) and its teleological essence. Despite substantial scholarly inquiry and progress, IL remains invisible and undervalued beyond academia. IL silos and CIL’s embeddedness within critical pedagogy and its focus on epistemological issues hinder its theoretical development, reduce it to an academic abstraction and undermine its salience and emancipatory goals. A multidisciplinary/multidomain approach is needed, leveraging insights from critical (social) theories and engaging with the ontological, to facilitate a novel understanding of IL and transform it into real-life action literacy for positive social change. The paper concludes by interrogating assumptions about (C)IL’s benefits, highlighting potential inadvertent disempowering effects, and issues a call to consider it a dynamic concept that evolves by accounting for sociopolitical realities.
这篇思考文章批判性地审视了(批判性)信息素养((C)IL)及其目的论本质。尽管学术界进行了大量研究并取得了进展,但信息素养在学术界之外仍不为人所知,其价值也被低估。信息素养的孤立性和信息素养在批判教育学中的嵌入性及其对认识论问题的关注阻碍了信息素养的理论发展,使其沦为学术抽象概念,削弱了其显著性和解放目标。我们需要一种多学科/多领域的方法,利用批判(社会)理论的洞察力和本体论的参与,促进对 IL 的全新理解,并将其转化为现实生活中的行动素养,以促进积极的社会变革。最后,本文对(C)IL 的益处提出了质疑,强调了其可能无意中产生的削弱能力的影响,并呼吁将其视为一个动态的概念,通过考虑社会政治现实而不断发展。
期刊介绍:
JIL is an international, peer-reviewed journal that aims to investigate information literacy in all its forms to address the interests of diverse IL communities of practice. To this end it publishes articles from both established and new authors in this field. JIL welcomes contributions that push the boundaries of IL beyond the educational setting and examine this phenomenon as a continuum between those involved in its development and delivery and those benefiting from its provision. This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. The journal is published under the Gold Open Access model, because the CILIP Information Literacy Group believes that knowledge should be shared. It is therefore free and requires no subscription. In addition authors are not required to pay a fee to be published in JIL. The Journal of Information Literacy is published twice a year. Additional, special themed issues are also possible and the editor welcomes suggestions. JIL has an acceptance rate of 44% for articles submitted to the journal.