Information Literacy: Innuendo Or Insight?

Information Literacy: innuendo or insight?

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference (September 11-14 1997: University of York)

Abstract

We present as problematic the definition of literacy in the ‘Information Age’ and the nature of the experience, skills, knowledge and understanding that teachers will need to develop in continuing professional development. This paper will critique an approach to information literacy; outline the use of a framework of ‘good practice’ in using information technology in the classroom and propose that information literacy for teachers is more than competence and capability in information retrieval and presentation, but requires awareness of the ideological, cultural, epistemological and pedagogical practices in which these capabilities are developed.

Introduction

There is much discussion about the definition of literacy in the ‘Information Age’ and the nature of the experience, skills, knowledge and understanding that teachers will need to develop in initial teacher education and in continuing professional development. This discussion is currently taking place in a context in which literacy, numeracy and Information Technology (IT) skills are given prominence in English teacher education, both in the development of educational policy and the direction of statutory requirements. The summer of 1997 has been filled with writing responses to Dearing, the Stevenson Committee, Oftel, the National Grid for Learning, the People’s Lottery and the Teacher Training Agency’s proposals for a Teacher Training Curriculum in IT.

We are concerned that the discussions about ‘teacher knowledge’ and pedagogy should be more closely linked with discussions of literacies and what it means to be educated in the ‘Information Age’. At a time when there are calls to measure teachers’ IT abilities, there needs to be more detailed consideration of the construction of those abilities (Selwyn 1997). There is a danger of a headlong rush to embrace IT - accepting the claims made for its potential to challenge and extend teaching and learning and inferring the links between those claims and the action that teachers will be asked to take in their professional development. We need to explore the nature of those links in our research efforts in order to gain more insight into teachers’ ‘information literacy’.

This paper will outline our areas of concern; discuss an approach to information literacy; highlight some questions raised and consider another framework for thinking about effective pedagogy with IT. We then raise questions about the implications of this framework for our teacher education courses, our project work and our research.

Literacy in the ‘Information Age’

A discussion of the development of teachers’ information literacy should acknowledge that it is embedded in culture, epistemology and pedagogy. The culture of IT, that is, the perceived images and purposes of the use of IT in our society, billows into the classroom with the children, trailing links between their home, school and street experiences. The epistemology which underpins the use of IT, reflects the understanding of how IT can represent ways of knowing within subject domains - from fractal geometry to hypertext narratives and the digital arts. The pedagogy of IT can be the practical expression of the understanding of the challenges that IT presents to the role of the teacher - What are teachers for in the Information Age?.

Models of information literacy

Niederhauser (1996) described the need for educators to reassess what it means to be literate in our society. He proposed a view of an information society which demands critical thinking and problem-solving skills of the individual members of society. Training structures in education would need to be reformed and resourced to provide teachers with the opportunity to develop basic technological skills, subject knowledge and collaborative ways of working in order to integrate IT in the curriculum. There are similarities between these aims and the description of ‘IT Capability’ in the National Curriculum (NC) in England and Wales (NCC 1990, A1): knowledge about IT applications and about IT tools; the skill to use appropriate IT skills effectively; an understanding of the new opportunities IT provides; and knowledge of the effects and limitations of IT. The National Curriculum view of information literacy describes the ways in which IT - characterised by the storage, organisation, processing, representation and transmission of data - is expected to enable the learner to identify and access information; organise it for analysis and present outcomes to an audience in an appropriate manner.

Niederhauser's view of the process of change is essentially a 'top-down' model of teacher education, in which the provision of resources and the design of courses to integrate IT skills into the curriculum is supposed to bring about change. In addition, the model he offers has features of technological determinism in which “advancements in electronic technology” drive the ”information revolution”. The solution seems simple - teach the teachers, and they will then be equipped to help their pupils ride the wave of progress. This seems to be, for example, the view of Anthea Millett, Chief Executive of the Teacher Training Agency in the UK, who suggests that in order to promote the use of IT by the teaching profession we need to show teachers, “super programs that go to the heart of what they are trying to do and then say to them: ‘Do you like this software? We will show you how to use it.’” (TES, October 18 1996)

This approach is reminiscent of Street’s (1993) description of an autonomous model of literacy in which sets of competences are thought of as separate from the situations in which they are used. These capabilities of technical skill, thinking and problem-solving are treated as if they can be learned and taught independently of the cultural context. In opposition to the autonomous model of literacy, Street puts forward the ideological model. This view recognises that literacy is not a generalised, culture-free process, but a set of specific practices embedded in particular social contexts. An ideological model would highlight the culture-specific view of information literacy, recognising the range of contexts in which learners experience IT - from the anxiety of parents filling their children’s bedrooms with ‘edutainment’, to the ways in which young people appropriate IT resources to their own club cultures. We would argue that it is this perspective which should guide our understanding of how information literacy arises and develops - within society and policy making, within the home and school environments, within classroom activities and within the individual’s experience of a subject and construction of knowledge.

Critical Thinking about IT

In moving towards an ideological model of information literacy, there needs to be a discussion and questioning of issues relating to the social and economic potential of IT to empower or constrain; the construction of images of human and artificial intelligence; the role of IT in the representation of knowledge and the challenges to teachers in the development of teaching strategies and skills.

Literacy, numeracy and information skills are given priority in current educational policy in the UK, reflecting perceptions of the ‘information society’ which are associated with images of economic progress, modernity, intelligence, cultural change and power. (Beynon & Mackay 1993; Bowers 1988; Chandler 1995; Matthews 1992). Such perceptions, however, are not straightforward and the debates about these images and their relative importance are far from closed. For example, critics of the idea of an ‘information society' challenge the implicit link that is often made between information processing and knowledge or understanding (Roszak, 1994). The image of 'economic progress' is used to both attack educational practice and to justify curricular reforms yet the relationship between education and economic well-being is far from clear (Apple, 1996). In the UK context, now that the National Curriculum has been established, pedagogy itself is challenged by those who would limit the control of methods of teaching and learning by the classroom teacher (e.g. the emphasis given to ‘direct instruction’ as a teaching method in DfEE 10/97). Finally, analysts of discourses of power in the classroom force us to consider the ways in which IT might reinforce and exacerbate social inequalities (Fisher 1993. Also Bernstein 1996, provides a relevant analysis of such discourses).

At the level of particular activities, the features which characterise IT can give insight into the nature of the subject focus itself, changing the experience, construction and representation of knowledge. Mathematical and scientific ideas and relationships can be modelled and presented in a variety of ways, from fractal geometry to Fermat’s Theorem (Casti 1997). The process of writing and crafting a text, from mark making and editing to restructuring and publication can be supported and extended, perhaps transformed (Landow 1992). Digital data can be used as a medium to represent, manipulate and transmit meaning in the visual arts. (Loveless 1997; see also Mitchell 1994).

Having acknowledged the wider context in which the use and purpose of IT is perceived, it is important to consider the ways in which IT is taken up and experienced within classrooms and schools. Demands are made of teachers’ pedagogical practices and questions raised about ‘fitness for purpose’ (Alexander, Rose & Woodhead 1992)when IT can be used to support a range of learning experiences from individualised instruction to collaborative learning (NCET 1996; Scrimshaw 1993, 1997). In planning and developing their teaching strategies, teachers need to consider the learning demands of the activities (this is true of course for any classroom teaching e.g. see Galton 1995) and in particular the role that IT might play in supporting or changing ways of learning (Kemmis, Atkins & Wright, 1977, Crook, 1994)

Some observations about the impact of IT on our notions of literacy

Much that has been written about the impact of new technologies on literacy suggests that although there are continuities with our ‘traditional’ notions there are also fundamental differences (e.g. see Landow 1992, 1994; Lanham 1993; Ong 1982). However, the National Curriculum for English gives little recognition to these shifts of process and skill. Apart from the standard all-inclusive caveat that pupils should be given opportunities to develop and apply IT, curriculum documents for English refer to IT as little more than a tool for getting information. There is scant recognition that how English is used or understood might be different in the context of new kinds of language tool.

Nevertheless, we are forced to recognise that the function and relevance of print itself is giving way to an increasingly ‘audio-visual’ environment in which the boundary between traditional symbols of literate activity and modern electronic means of communication and dissemination is altogether less clear. For example, we can no longer set aside television as a nice but non-essential extra in the classroom; neither can we ignore the properties of such mundane instruments as the telephone, not normally regarded as a technology of literacy. The convergence of the telephone, television and the computer through the common medium of binary bit-streams simultaneously enables the development of language in new directions and challenges our deep assumptions about the role of the printed and written word in teaching and learning.

One problem is that even as we remark upon the perceived problem with standards of literacy in our educated young the very definition of literacy is changing. At a simple level we can see how the widespread use of American spell-checkers and even grammar-checkers can intensify, if not cause, such changes in the UK context. But beyond these sorts of details the very notion of a narrative is also challenged by the presence of digital media and the way in which they enable not just an intertextuality but also a multimedia variety of it. For we are now no longer limited by the physical constraints of the page and its implied linearity. Hypertextual environments, of which the World Wide Web is the most well-known example, lead us into a world where the word is also an active link to another text, another image, another sound. Where once we judged the quality of a product by ‘internal’ criteria such as narrative structure, well-formed sentences, a clarity of expression, we now see looming on our pedagogic horizon the idea that we must view such creative products in other terms:

...our sense of what “publication” means is bound to change. We will be able to make our commentary part of the text, and weave an elaborate series of interlocked commentaries together...It seems reasonable to assume that as the definition and nature of “publication” changes, our system of academic rewards and punishments will change as well. If we keep an eye on these changes, they may change for the better. (Lanham 1993, p22)

We already see these kinds of changes infiltrating our activities. Style guides written for the production of WWW materials sometimes discuss good and not-so-good ways to construct sentences - e.g. that the links they contain are positioned in a way that is conducive to the reader’s eye or that the sentence structure should try to take account of the fact that the reader might have arrived at a certain point in the text from an external link (see Berners-Lee 1995). Thus perhaps we ought to judge the quality of the writing (in a WWW page) in terms other than the ‘traditional values’ of good style because ‘good’ style in the context of the WWW includes notions about well-formed approaches to the presentation of intertextual links.

Yet at present there is little that teachers can do or say about this because few of us have engaged in the artful construction of hypertextual materials. It is not easy for educators to have an opinion about whether one collection of hypertext materials is better than another, worth a grade ‘A’ or a grade ‘B’. What we do know is that the very standards by which we evaluate the quality of an educational product are changing rapidly as the tools and technologies of literacy provide ever more breathtaking capability for dissolving the traditional lines of demarcation between the visual, musical and the literary arts. Why not click on the Mona Lisa’s smile for a tour through the history of smiles, to visit a gallery of smiles, to explore the function of the smile in comedy, the biology of laughter or the psychology of grins?

Of course we can fall back on established analytical categories such as relevance and appropriateness. We can argue that a hypertextual link should not be arbitrary, that links should be based on meaning. The extreme case of a WWW document where every word, every image (or part of an image) is a link to something else should still conform to such standards. The links you make should be relevant, meaningful, and should not throw the reader into an ocean of fragmented information. However, so few of us are used to the conventions of electronic reading and writing that ‘meaning’ and ‘relevance’ are easily obscured by the strangeness of these conventions.

A framework for ‘good practice’

Our aim in the discussion of the definitions of information literacy is to raise questions about the purposes for which we use IT in our classroom work; how these ideas translate into ‘good practice’ in the classroom, how we might identify effective teaching, and how in turn new teachers can be educated into their use.

In this paper we use Alexander’s model (Alexander 1996) of general pedagogy to describe the concept of ‘good practice’ to think about the purpose and meaning of our work in teacher education. An important theme is that ‘good practice’ is an aspiration as much as an achievement; about dilemmas more than certainty, compromise rather than consensus.:

... good practice, created as it is in the unique setting of the classroom by the ideas and actions of teachers and pupils, can never be singular, fixed or absolute, a specification handed down or imposed from above in the manner charted in the Leeds research ... [It] is plural, provisional and dynamic: there are thus as many versions of good practice as there are good teachers striving to attain it.(Alexander 1996, 71)

Alexander’s model consists of five dimensions or ‘considerations’:

There are two important points to make about this model. Firstly, ‘good practice’ relies on an interaction and balance between all five dimensions. Mere ‘practice’ is a reflection of the political and pragmatic dimensions only. Secondly, the five considerations are not equivalent - there have to be reasons for preferring one course of action over another. Thus in Alexander’s model values are central and are expressed in real classroom situations. Empirical considerations are a critical adjunct to matters of value and belief, to enable us to distinguish between the strengths and weaknesses of different classroom strategies but in order for classroom teaching to be effective we must have a notion of what it means to be educated.

This framework can be applied to the use of IT in the classroom. It can be argued that the current situation in schools generally reflects ‘practice’ rather than ‘good practice’ (Watson 1993; Loveless 1995). Political considerations lie in the expectations and pressures upon teachers to use IT in response to requirements of the National Curriculum, the demands of parents and the political policies to promote technology in schools. Pragmatic considerations can be seen in terms of what is manageable with particular resources and classroom constraints and the skills and competency models of initial teacher education.

In order to develop and promote ‘good practice’ therefore an exploration of value considerations is needed - the beliefs and values about the role of IT in our society and the ways in which it supports and extends knowledge; empirical considerations must also be taken into account - how teachers develop knowledge and understanding in their teaching strategies; and not least conceptual considerations - claims about how IT can support learning and teaching.

How do we reflect these ideas in our research?:

The Brighton Digital Creativity Project

The Brighton Digital Creativity Project is addressing these issues in the context of art education and the use of IT in Primary education. The project, which is a collaboration between the University, the Arts Council of England, South East Arts and Lighthouse and the Brighton Media Centre, was prompted by concern that ‘political’ and ‘pragmatic’ considerations were driving both policy and planning in schools, without full attention being given to the broader context in which children and teachers used IT in the creative visual arts. In Alexander’s terms, IT in the creative visual arts was seen to be stuck at the level of ‘practice’.