Communicative competence in the information age: Towards a critical theory of information literacy education

Abstract

Insights developed from critical social science, particularly the work of Jürgen Habermas, are used to analyse the development of information literacy as a subject and its contemporary definitions. The challenges facing information literacy educators are located in potential contradictions between the subject’s strategic, technical elements and its more critical, communicative and social aspects. The critical potential of information literacy can also suggest why it is politically sensitive, and may struggle to attract status and funding.

Keywords:

• critical pedagogy
• information society
• data smog
• Habermas and societal learning

Modernity has become reflexive (Beck, 1992). The learning processes of society are increasingly devoted to learning about, not the problems posed by nature, but by its own ongoing development. These include the material and information products that constitute the environment in which we now live. Information literacy (IL) education is one such response, but it faces challenges of its own. This paper analyses these challenges from the perspective of social theory, particularly the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas. As Forester states (1985: ix), for critical theory to be a living force it must be developed in relation to contemporary problems. It is a family of theories with a wide range of possible applications and Blaug (1999) summarises dozens of attempts to use the explanatory tools provided by critical theory in areas from psychiatry to environmentalism. He notes, however, that they are mostly applied to cultural criticism rather than informing empirical work.

Education, however, is an innately practical activity (Carr & Kemmis, 1986). The response of individuals and organisations to the control of the processes of cultural reproduction by the interests of informational capitalism (Luke & White, 1985) does not take place in abstract space but on the ground (Webster, 2002: 199), in everyday microsituations. What, then, can information literacy education offer individuals struggling to find their way through the inequitable labyrinth of the information society? More pertinently, why should such education matter and why does it face so many challenges? It is hoped that this paper, by rooting the meaning of IL in critical theory, can help identify some of the challenges encountered by IL educators.

The argument is structured around a narrative that describes the evolution of social science paradigms, from positivism to interpretivism, and finally into a critical social science. It will be shown how a positivist approach to social science contributes to technological solutions to the problem of information glut; this is one part of a potential solution to the problems, but it cannot inculcate in students the flexible and critical approach to meeting their information needs which is implied by information literacy. This will be illustrated by a thorough investigation of the claims made by one particular definition of information literacy, that of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL, 2000). Yet simply declaring that a more critical approach is required is not straightforward. The stages of the narrative do not simply supersede each other. Instead each is layered over its predecessors. The theories and practices which emerge at each stage do so not into a blank space where their chance of flourishing depends only on their own qualities. Instead, the terrain, and therefore the available resources, have been shaped by what has gone before. The challenges that new developments face come about precisely because of their need to draw on resources from technological and educational environments which have been substantially defined by these earlier paradigms.

There is no space here to describe this narrative in detail. However, let us first briefly note the contribution of Comte (1869), who equated positive methods of studying human society with the use of scientific method. Comte’s sociology was “based on the models and methods employed in the natural sciences, addressing itself to the discovery of scientific laws which explain the relationships between various parts of society” (Burrell & Morgan, 1979: 42). Discovery of natural laws is not undertaken for its own sake, but in order that phenomena can be predicted, and ultimately controlled. Scientific explanations “lay the foundation for the instrumental control of phenomena by providing the sort of information which would enable one to manipulate certain variables in order to bring about a state of affairs or prevent its occurrence” (Fay, 1975: 37). Understanding of environmental factors and processes, in this case, social ones, is intended to lead to mastery over that environment.

Politics, however, with its fundamental values of interaction and participation, its divergent end points, and its pluralist nature (Arendt, 1958), is a chaotic idiom which is not necessarily compatible with this positivist will-to-control. For an ideal positivist social science, the question of how best to arrive at a desired end-point is “a factual question and therefore decidable scientifically” (Fay, 1975: 49). Fay (ibid: 27-8; 54) notes that this ideal therefore effectively amounts to the negation of politics. A decision reached consensually may be more democratically legitimate, but is both less efficient, and less scientific, than imposing decisions as the result of policy-scientific deliberations. Policy science values not the expressed, subjective opinions of the people and their subsequent political interactions, but objective considerations of cost, benefit and efficiency. A polity based around the principles of policy science is also made to run more smoothly by fomenting apathy and subservience in the populace, as opposed to encouraging active citizenship (Habermas, 1976; Offe, 1984). As a result the number of variables in the social situation are being reduced, deliberately, or indirectly.

Policy science, therefore, directly or indirectly shapes the informational resources on which political actors can draw. Habermas (1989) describes how the principle of the active bourgeois public political sphere, which reached its apotheosis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with “critical assessment of public policy in rational discussion, oriented to a concept of the public interest” (Outhwaite, 1996: 7) is transformed into a “manipulated public sphere in which states and corporations use ‘publicity’ in the modern sense of the word to secure for themselves a kind of plebiscitary acclamation” (ibid). Habermas’s conception of the public sphere cannot be accepted uncritically (Calhoun, 1992); a conclusion Habermas himself reached, hence his subsequent development of the lifeworld concept (Habermas, 1984; 1987). Nor should his insights be applied in toto to the online public sphere(s) which have emerged. But despite, or perhaps because of, the positive claims made by some of its early evangelists, for example Rheingold (2000), similar transformations of the online sphere proceed apace.

Indeed, the distinction between online and offline has essentially disappeared as we enter what some have called an information society. Even if the existence of the genuine structural changes implied by this term can be disputed (Webster, 2002), there can be no doubt cast on the assertion that the sheer quantity of information now available even to the average person, of the rich world, is overwhelming. Indeed, this data smog (Shenk, 1997) is recognised as a pathology of the information revolution in the same way as physical smog was vis-à-vis the industrial revolution. Even on a purely instrumental level, that at which policy science functions, this is considered problematic. Schools and universities are criticised for not preparing the right sort of students for this environment: “People want to ensure that colleges are actually preparing students for the future, the future being an information society”.¹

However, the idea that this process of societal learning can result in society-wide solutions to the pathologies of modernity is a flawed one. The trouble is that, first, the future is not yet with us and the skills students will need in, say, ten years’ time are not necessarily known at this point (were the universities in the 1980s remiss in not giving their students the Internet skills they almost certainly need twenty years later?). To compound this problem, what are useful skills for one student are not necessarily useful for others, just as athletes in different sports do not need to become athletic in the same way (Reffell & Whitworth, 2002: 428). But a positivist, policy scientific approach to educational problems devotes itself to objective investigation of learning environments in order that the conditions for effective learning can be revealed, and, by implication, can be implemented by practitioners (Carr & Kemmis, 1986). The usual implication is that there is one best way to proceed, one solution waiting to be discovered, uncertainty and diversity notwithstanding. In times of transition, where gaps open up, or are perceived to open up, between the curricula of schools or universities and the reflexive learning needs of society, pressure is placed on educators to transform themselves through innovative teaching strategies accompanied by the use of new technologies, the desirability of which has been established through the research of educational scientists and policy makers.

Computers in education were first used to teach their own discipline, computer studies, which had as its objective the production of computing professionals (Capel, 1992; Mackay, 1992). The emphasis was on achieving mastery over the machine, not over its products. For example, an early definition of computer literate connoted “a person who has written a computer program” (Martin, 2003: 12)². The need for a growing stream of computing professionals was considered a vital input into national competitiveness in Britain and most of its economic competitors (Mackay, 1992: 129). Computer studies was economically-relevant education (Young, 1990: 11); improving the health of the economy as a whole and the prospects of those who hoped to earn a living within it. In 1985 Shirley Williams MP said: “The ability of the education system to match the needs of the information society for highly educated people has now become the main determinant of a country’s employment prospects.” (Mackay, 1992: 129). As IT diffused still more rapidly through the 1980s and 1990s, with computers increasingly seen in homes or ordinary office desks, the more generic IT skills superseded computer studies, though the latter was retained as a specialist subject. Yet the dominant approach remained policy-scientific, and the suggested benefits economic. A decade on from Williams, Langlois in 1997 made exactly the same appeal: “As a service to their students, universities have to enhance Information Technologies as, in future years, it [sic] will be widely spread in all areas of the labour market. Information literacy will be essential for all future employees.” (Martin, 2003: 7). The US Government’s current No Child Left Behind Act includes a commitment to “ensuring that every student is technologically literate by the time the student finishes the eighth grade” (Zeller, 2005: 2) despite a lack of “agreement on whether such skills can be taught, much less measured in a test…” (ibid: 1).

However, information literacy is interested not in the machine, but in one of its most significant products: information. While information literacy as a term has entered academic discourse only recently, the concerns are not new. Vannevar Bush, for example, wrote that:

“there is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.”

(Bush, 1945)

As is now fairly well-known, Bush proposed as a solution to this problem the memex or memory extender. The solution was technological. However, even a sympathiser for IT might admit that it is the major cause of the problem it seeks to solve. IL education will always have a basis in technology (Martin & Rader, 2003); conversely, technological aptitude and flexibility will, among other things, have to incorporate elements of IL (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004; Gilster, 1997). The available tools are too useful to ignore when conducting searches for information. But because a positivist, policy scientific approach to information literacy invariably casts the problem of data smog as a technical problem with economic implications, there have been few real advances since Bush’s day in exploring the meaning of information literacy. The technical aspects have, in fact, damaged its ability to be seen as a subject whose tools may include technological ones but whose field of interest is social.

Many writers on, and practitioners of, IT education have declared a need for it to address social as well as technological issues. For example Lin (2000) and Garson (2000) suggest that students need the skills to criticise and evaluate the information they find (see also Reffell & Whitworth, 2002; Martin & Rader, 2003). Langefors (1970) proposed replacing the technological subject of computer studies with a broader informatics, the teaching of which did not depend on access to computers (Capel, 1992: 55). These kinds of skills cannot be taught by a one-size-fits-all approach, nor one that sees a set of IT skills as an end-in-itself, the level of achievement in which is measurable objectively. As Garson (2000: 192) says, this “is sharply at variance with learning needs in an era of rapid change when the specific is transient and the abstract is that which must carry the learner through a lifetime of education and re-education.” Why, then, is the history of this field one of missed opportunities? (Capel, 1992).

To better answer this question let us henceforth focus on one specific definition of information literacy. This may seem limiting, but the source is respected, and at first glance, the definition sound. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL, 2000) defines the information literate person as someone who:

1. determines the nature and extent of the information needed

2. accesses needed information effectively and efficiently

3. evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into their knowledge base and a value system

4. uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose

5. understands many of the economic, legal and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally³.

Note the apperance of “effectively” and “efficiently” which are standard tenets of positivism. But §3, critical evaluation of information, and §5, which comprises two points (inquiry into underlying conditions and meeting pre-existing definitions of correct usage), are less easy to explain from this perspective. Here we begin to see the impact of the critique of positivist social science, to which we will now turn. However, as will be explained, these stances are not necessarily compatible and this incompatibility gives rise to some of the problems facing IL educators: for example, acquiring institutional support and funding for their discipline, and emerging from the shadows of a purely technological approach. Yet with an understanding of critical political theory can these problems be revealed and, possibly, resolved.

Dating back to Kant, interpretivist social science arguably has a history longer than that of positivism, though until recent times it has been subordinate to this other paradigm. However, it was revitalised in the later 20^th century through the work of post-structuralist analysts of language such as Saussure and Wittgenstein (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). The essential difference is that for interpretivists, reality cannot be defined objectively, through the ongoing discovery of natural laws. Rather, it is subjectively created by an interaction between each individual’s perceptions and his/her a priori knowledge. There is not one reality to discover, but a multitude, each resident in the mind of an individual; hence, there is no one best way of acting in a given reality. Individual situations can only be explained by interpreting actions and their collective manifestations, such as cultural phenomena, texts, or organisations. The analogy is with learning a language, and “an intepretivist social science thereby increases the possibility of communication between those who come into contact with the accounts of such a science and those whom it studies” (Fay, 1975: 80).

Interpretivism clearly emphasises the “human”. It has had considerable influence on both the theoretical study of technology (Mitcham, 1994; Williams & Edge, 1996) and its practical design and use (Schuler & Namioka, 1993; Checkland, 1999). To an extent, IL is part of this trend. Return to the ACRL definitions noted above and observe how §1–§4 comprise a process. The information-literate person has a particular need to fulfil. They need to know how to access information that may help fulfil that need, although built into the ACRL terms is the assumption that too much information will be acquired. This is a consequence of both data smog and people’s natural tendency to absorb more information than is required; we “narrow and concentrate rather than expand awareness” (Schott, 1991: 59). The selection of relevant information must therefore take place before it can be used to fulfil the end which provoked the cycle in the first place. (§5 is less easy to fit into this sequence; it will be returned to below.) What seems clear is that within this cycle, the crucial stage that is selection must be performed against criteria that are unique to the particular situation. This uniqueness arises because of the specificity of the original information need and the preexisting cognitive schema of the individual (Augoustinos & Walker, 1996).

However, there is a crucial word included in this definition. That word is “critically”. Both gramatically and in context, §3 makes sense without it, so is this pleonasm? Or did the ACRL intend it merely to serve as a summary of various ways of categorising the selection of information, for example: selection against criteria of reliability, accuracy, relevance, comprehensiveness, authority, soundness of argument or facticity? (Berge & Collins, 1995). Educational science and policy scientists prefer educational criteria which are quantitative and objective (this leading, incidentally, to the emergence of “a lucrative market… for testing companies that are willing to fill the perceived need.” (Zeller, 2005: 1)). But even with these more nuanced criteria, some, or possibly all of these, are situation dependent. Should IL take it on itself to judge the validity of a given situation (and against what terms)?

We have yet to establish the relationship of §5 to the other elements. Let us consider what we have left if it is removed. What disappears is any possibility of judgment being cast over not only the retrieved information itself, but the specific purpose which provoked the need. Without §5, the would-be poisoner who seeks out information on ricin manufacture would be approved of, if he/she did so in an effective fashion and incorporated the new knowledge into a value system, which in all likelihood would be one that diminished the value of human life. The ACRL presumably recognise this danger, hence their inclusion of §5. It is this which gives IL its potentially critical tone, and which may advance it beyond a vague, relativist set of skills and competencies. If all selection criteria are therefore equally valid, how can one then guarantee that relevant information will be “used [or indeed selected]… ethically and legally”, as stated in §5? Self-contradiction arises. But if IL undertake such work, how can it do so within a purely interpretive framework?

Fay’s criticises interpretivism, saying that within it there is no place for “an examination of the conditions which give rise to the actions, rules and beliefs which it [or rather now, the information literate actor] seeks to explicate” (Fay, 1975: 83-8). Nor can it appreciate conflict, whether between beliefs and actions (as exemplified by espoused theory versus theory-inuse: Argyris and Schön, 1974), or between belief systems. Intepretivism cannot explain the structural causes of conflict which can lead both to individual and societal learning, but also result in resistance to the products of learning processes (that is, critique and the subsequent drive to embed new social structures). This point is better explained by considering the impact of postmodernism. Post-structralism helped revive interpretivism in social science: it also contributed to a postmodern approach to politics. Postmodernists have criticised metanarratives in history which have led to such exclusionary principles as positivism; the imposition of certain ways of thinking and thereby, tightly-defined selection criteria for what constitute valid inputs into decision making, cultural reproduction, art and many other fields, these often having been drawn up by groups in a dominant cultural position (e.g. in the UK, white males). But by celebrating difference, postmodernism risks abolishing it (Callinicos, 1989: 25-8). Actors are left with no grounded justifications for resisting dominant forces in society. Postmodernism may have challenged the “rational hubris” of positivism (Young, 1990: 7) but it has not only “dissolved into […] irrationalism” (ibid), it has done so well before the social, educational, technological and political structures constructed under the influence of positivism have ceased to have an impact on our lives. Indeed, the opposite is true: by refusing to mount a challenge, postmodern politics yields to those pressures. For example, Miyoshi has suggested that the rise of multiculturalism in HE, however laudable as a tactic to reduce exclusionary educational practices, has left academics unable to resist the further commodification of education (Miyoshi, 2002). Lacking any criteria other than their own against which to judge the relevance of the information they are faced with, little wonder that the postmodern navigator of data smog is “shower(ed) […] with words and images” which only sporadically make “moves in discourse” (Kolb, 1996: 15). When the surface gloss of the glut of information is penetrated, there is nothing beneath: “information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanised.… We have everything at our fingertips but we don’t value anything” (Shenk, 1997: 26-7). The possibility of critique is thereby diminished even as the quantity of information available increases.

Information of quality is not the only political resource, but it is becoming an increasingly important one because it contributes to a person’s or organisation’s political power (Wrong, 1995). Even relatively conservative mainstream political commentators worry about digital divides, information poverty and IT illiteracy as constituting not just economic deficits but democratic ones (Cushman, 2005). Will a lack of information literacy, and IT, skills push people to the margins of the digital polity? Shenk notes this can happen not just through exclusion from information, but because of its fecundity: “[i]n the era of limitless data, there is always the opportunity to crunch some more numbers, spin them a bit and prove the opposite” (Shenk, 1997: 91). Shenk calls this “paralysis by analysis” (ibid: 89). Simultaneously, decision makers, policy scientists and business executives are increasingly insulated from public scrutiny. The information on which to base political arguments may have become more freely accessible, but “increasingly specialised forms of argumentation become the guarded preserve of experts and thereby lose contact with the understanding processes of the majority of individuals.… as the insulation of expert cultures grows, so does the incapacity of the average individual to make effective use of the cognitive arsenal of cultural modernity” (White, 1988: 116-7).

Information literacy is clearly a potential weapon in the cognitive arsenal available to the citizen of the information society. It is claimed to have the potential to empower and emancipate the learner (Andretta, 2005). To fulfil this potential its users must not only interpret the informational environment but work to change it. This paraphrased exhortation from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach has become something of a standard, but the point is valid, and in it lies the progression from an interpretive social science into a critical one. Critical social science retains an emphasis on interpretive methods, but also:

“recognises that a great many of the actions people perform are caused by social conditions over which they have no control.…[it] seeks to uncover those systems of social relationships which determine the actions of individuals and the unanticipated, though not accidental, consequences of these actions.”

(Fay, 1975: 94).

Critical social science does not just accept the felt needs of social actors, it explains them with reference to the (in)adequacy of the social order’s ability to fulfil them in certain ways (ibid: 96). Actors can come to understand their situation as:

“the product of certain inherent contradictions in the social order, contradictions which they can remove by taking an appropriate course of action to change this social order.”

(ibid: 97).

The contemporary critical theorist par excellence is Jürgen Habermas, who has dealt at length with the pressures brought to bear on public discourse, on the stock of accessible information and, combining these factors on societal learning processes. “Societal learning is based on individual learning. Habermas suggests that the relevant learning mechanisms belong to the basic equipment of the human organism (whether and to what extent actual learning takes place, however, is dependent on contingent, in part phase-specific, empirical conditions)” (McCarthy, 1984: 254). Existing conditions therefore impact upon individuals’ or societies’ ability to learn, which is contingent on available resources (cognitive and material). Learning, in turn, shapes these resources, as the “results of evolutionarily relevant learning processes find their way into the cultural tradition, the world views and interpretive systems of society; in the form of empirical knowledge and moral-practical insights, they comprise a kind of cognitive potential that can be drawn upon… when irresolvable systems problems require a transformation of the basic form of social integration.” (ibid.: 254-5). But how are we to judge what is “evolutionarily relevant”? What selection criteria can be used to make this judgment?

Habermas contends that the only universally applicable criterion by which morally, ethically and politically valid judgments can be made in a given situation, conflictual, or otherwise, is their adhering to principles of communicative rationality. “Only if there is a symmetrical distribution of the opportunities for all possible participants to choose and perform speech acts does the structure of communication itself produce no constraints” (Habermas, 2001: 98). Democratically and morally legitimate activity is not defined against abstract principles, whether scientifically, constructed or not, but achieved through communally followed procedures in “everyday communicative practice” (Habermas, 1994: 101; McCarthy, 1984: 351). Habermas’s work can provide normative grounds for critiquing situations that diverge from this ideal.

The relationship of Habermasian theory to the actual functioning of social spaces, democratic, or otherwise, is complex, and a full examination of this goes beyond the scope of this paper⁴. However, we have a definite interest in what the theories can tell us about IL. Among the things which can drag public discourse away from Habermas’s ideals is distorted information, but what does distortion mean here? Partly it is a matter of being prevented, whether legitimately or not, from being heard in a particular decision making process, or from submitting certain propositions even if permitted to speak, both of which have been employed to manipulate public debate and decision making.⁵ More than this, however, Habermas is interested in the inherent validity claims of actual speech acts. What makes an utterance valid, whether it be a single word or a long text document? What characteristics does it possess which encourage hearers or readers to interpret it as a seriously-meant contribution to discussion? Certainly, utterances should be comprehensible and grammatically valid, but in addition to this, the speaker claims that what he/she says is true, that his/her intentions are being truthfully expressed, and that the utterance is appropriate in the particular communicative context (Habermas, 1991: 58 and 63; McCarthy, 1984: 280; Blaug, 1999: 711). If any of these claims are not met, in other words, if the speaker is lying, if they are deceiving the hearer vis-à-vis their intentions, and/or if their utterances are inappropriate in a given context, then the information delivered by the utterance is distorted in some way.

It must be stressed that Habermas is describing an ideal. In real discourses, distortions such as these take place all the time. This is precisely the point, however. Interpretive, postmodern approaches flatten out distortions such as these and leave few grounds, for judging between competing opinions, other than on the basis of instinct. Therefore, the opportunity for (potentially) information-literate students to critically select from the wealth of available inputs by scrutinising speakers’ (or writers’) validity claims and revealing any distortions for themselves is severely limited. Cast adrift from such criteria, we are left with IL techniques from which political engagement has been erased. These tendencies contribute to what Habermas has termed the colonisation of the lifeworld.⁶ Society’s ongoing reproductive processes become steered not by free public debate but by money and power, which come to substitute for it (Habermas, 1987: 180-5). Education is one such process (Young, 1990), as is the PR industry and other institutionalised consciousness engineering (Luke & White, 1985) engaged in by the powerful to deflect and nullify public scrutiny of their own validity claims.

The lifeworld is defined rather vaguely but is nevertheless one of Habermas’s most critical concepts (Habermas, 1987). It is that area of society reproduced through communicative action which is “always already” there, underlying strategic actions. It comprises culture, society, and personality. Habermas uses:

“the term culture for the stock of language from which participants in communication supply themselves with interpretations as they come to an understanding about something in the world… society for the legitimate orders through which participants regulate their membership in social groups and thereby secure solidarity… [and] personality… the competencies that make a subject capable of speaking and acting, that put him [sic] in a position to take part in processes of reaching understanding and thereby to assert his own identity.”

(Habermas, 1987: 138)

For Habermas, communicative competence therefore works at both the general and specific level. In specific terms, communicatively competent participants in discourse are constantly attending to the validity claims made by each utterance, their own and others. In general terms, they are functioning at the highest of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, orienting their actions towards “universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons” (McCarthy, 1984: 250-1; Kohlberg, 1971; Habermas, 1990: 150). In this way, the power to reproduce the lifeworld is taken back from colonising, systemic institutions and from their abstract, policy-scientific, or commercial, judgments of relevance. Instead, the primacy of public discourse is reasserted, and the claims of all contributors opened to scrutiny rather than being concealed behind walls of expertise. People not only understand, but speak and act, and thereby work to bring about change. That these democratic tendencies are often stifled by colonisation is not to negate their importance, but specifically to accentuate it. It becomes possible to argue that the objective of IL education should be to assist students towards becoming communicatively competent in both the specific sense (acquiring an ability to scrutinise the validity claims of actual texts and utterances) and the general (orienting their actions towards principles of justice and respect for others).

Returning to a point made earlier, if the use of the word “critically” in §3 is not pleonasm, then it can now be seen to stand in opposition to statements made in §2 and §4; viz, the “effective” and “efficient” use of information to achieve a “specific purpose”. In Habermas’s terms, these elements are strategic action, oriented to goals defined instumentally, rather than communicative action, oriented to reaching an understanding in conditions of communicative rationality. Critics of Habermas sometimes fail to appreciate that he never claims all strategic action is undesirable: merely that it is inappropriate in lifeworld-oriented situations. The difference is between achieving mastery over a situation, and understanding it (Habermas, 1984: 11). Contrary to the view promoted by the positivist ideal, in this case there is not an implied progression between the two precisely because of the presence of other communicatively rational human beings in the situation, whose “specific purposes” may not be wholly compatible with those of the (strategic) actor.

The dual presence of strategic and communicative action in the ACRL definition is not a fatal contradiction, but it does produce some specific challenges for information literacy educators, which manifest themselves in questions of pedagogy. Each ACRL standard can, in principle, be reduced to technical points which can be taught behaviouristically, as long as the full implications of the word critically in §3 are ignored. The teacher can specify certain technologies to be useful, certain techniques appropriate, certain selection criteria preferable, and certain uses legitimate. They can even prescribe information needs in advance, if the syllabus and assessment are so devised. Ethics can be reduced to stock concerns such as reference to anti-racism or equal opportunities legislation. These are valid and necessary concerns of course, but reducible to technical teaching which deflects attention away from the structural causes of inequality, whether informational or of any other kind. This type of teaching is in contradiction with the use of the term “critically”. It reduces information literacy to technical, strategic action, instead of appreciating its social scientific nature. Strategic action, by definition, contributes to the colonisation of the lifeworld and, as noted earlier, to the increasing insulation of expert discourse from public scrutiny.

The important point to be made is that this is not just a concern for radicals or liberals. In fact, this type of information literacy teaching fails even on its own terms. Young suggests that it cannot be effective at embedding in students a flexible, enquiring attitude, the perceived need for which has driven much mainstream discourse in favour of information literacy:

“The point being made here is not that teachers are pursuing sinister purposes or that they are ‘cultural fools’. The aims they pursue, the goals of their lessons (the validity claims inherent in them) may be unobjectionable. The point is that they are pursuing them in a manner which tends to result in students accepting these claims on grounds other than those which seem valid to them in their own frameworks of reference. This results in a shallow knowledge, unconnected with students’ deepest beliefs, which is soon forgotten after leaving school. Ultimately, the perlocutionary pedagogy, however well-intentioned, is self-defeating — its content goals are not reached in any sustained way and it fails to provide opportunities for students to develop the critical interlocutionary capacities that would enable them to develop a mature ability to continue to learn.”

(Young, 1990: 109).

Without embedding in its students a mature ability to continue to learn, IL will not even deliver the flexible, adaptable workers the business/industrial sector declares it needs, let alone the critically enquiring minds citizens important to a democracy. As Forester writes:

“In both cases of calling factual (truth) and normative (legitimacy) claims intoquestion, citizens step outside of their immediate contexts of interaction and seek recourse to domination-free discourses to check and learn about the validity of the uncertain claims. Where citizens have no recourse to such discourses, analysts will discover not the social and technical learning that can check, test, evaluate and refine ongoing patterns of interaction and claims-making, but rather they will discover policy traps. Without institutionalised possibilities of learning, citizens will be ignorant rather than more knowledgeable, subordinate rather than authoritative, cynical rather than co-operative, and confused rather than increasingly aware of the issues affecting their lives.”

(Forester, 1985: 273).

A more critical pedagogy firstly calls into question the one-size-fits-all, instrumental design of information literacy syllabi (Reffell & Whitworth, 2002; Whitworth, 2005). Second it involves the acknowledgment that students, of any age, enter educational settings with not only their own opinions, but the means of forming opinions, which have been structured by society and their prior experience of education (Shor, 1996). Young does, however, question the implication of critical educators, such as Shor, who suggest that the best way to resolve these contradictions in the lifeworlds of students is to attack and undermine the foundations of their knowledge and opinions. He worries this will cause resentment and further crisis, not enlightenment, in students (Young, 1990: 71). Instead, he suggests the role of the educator should be to assist students in making new constructions: not mere destruction, but creation.

If lack of attention to pedagogy is one omission from the ACRL definition, Young’s argument suggests another important element of critical information literacy, namely information production. This is infrequently addressed in the IL literature, perhaps because of IL’s implied critique of data smog. When the interest is all in filtering and reducing information, it seems a little perverse to also declare an interest in its production. Yet the two are fully complementary. Amongst the consequences of colonisation is the nurturing of certain roles played by individuals in society, principally those of the consumer and the client (of welfare or other services provided by the government or private corporations: Habermas, 1976). Active roles played by individuals, the citizen and the employee, are subject to increased surveillance and control by the system and a corresponding loss of control by the individual. The ability to use these roles to change even personal situations is greatly circumscribed (Habermas, 1984: 319; Luke & White, 1985: 36-9). As consumer and client, the only information we are expected to produce ourselves is sterile data, responses to market research surveys and the like. As the subjects of research we are passive and abstracted from, feeding into the deliberations of policy science as mere numbers, rather than as free beings with needs and motivations of our own.

The lack of active citizens and, though this claim is made rather less frequently, active employees, is another societal problem whose solution is frequently claimed to rest with education. Neither students nor educators should lie, passively, in the path of the information flood and expect it to serve their purposes. Instead, the task of both groups must be to “participate in the new media explosion, not just watch from the sidelines… we can argue that they have a responsibility to do so” (Gauntlett, 2000: 4). Producing information turns the student from a mere listener to a communicative actor. Once again, this is not just promoting a radical perspective, but a declaration that without this crucial aspect IL cannot meet even the strategic, economic (validity) claims made for it. The creation and shaping of information is central to the new information economy, yet poor practice in information production just adds to the glut: even in strategic terms this causes waste, and the resultant need to resort to ever-coarser attempts to attract the attention of consumers. Shenk (1997: 102) observes that this becomes a “vicious spiral”. Yet “literacy” surely connotes not just the ability to read (critically), but also write with to the same high (critical) standards (see Whitworth, 2005). Producing information, not just accessing information produced by others, is one characteristic of the active citizen and a counterpoint to the ongoing colonisation of the lifeworld by money and power.

Robert Reich, a member of the Clinton administration, observes that “[c]ritical thinking is a central aspect of the new economy” (Zeller, 2005: 3). With support from such a source, it seems odd that information literacy continues to face challenges such as those described by the other authors in this collection. Yet Habermas can help suggest to information literacy educators why they face political challenges in institutionalising their subject, not only in educational institutions, but throughout society’s manifold learning processes. Though not all definitions of information literacy actually contain the word “critical”, it remains implied even in more system-oriented ones such as Hepworth’s (2000, p. 24):

“The ability to participate in the development of one’s profession and the ability to continuously gather information in one’s professional field; ability to develop one’s tasks and continually search for data, information and knowledge to fulfil these tasks.”

Carr and Kemmis (1986) root their arguments directly into the need for educators to develop professionally through critical enquiry into the conditions and practices of their working life. The difficulty is in institutionalising such processes of enquiry, because they are not always directed towards the agendas set by managers, funders, external auditors, the designers of technological infrastructures and so on. These structural factors, whose validity claims can be challenged, may be declared to be part of the problem, not the solution. Yet:

“To achieve a greater degree of control of the historical process we must learn to understand the nature of the contradictions we face at any given time, and we must institutionalise the process of reflection on these, rather than institutionalising protections against change which, like poorly built dams, eventually burst, creating greater suffering.”

(Young, 1990: 27)

Disciplines which provide the sort of cognitive weaponry by which individuals can self-reflect on their situation, challenge validity claims and, potentially, change their lives are often treated as suspect and denied institutional validity, funding, status and so on (Young 1990, p. 53). Information literacy falls into this category. Yet at the same time its economic benefits are proclaimed by writers such as Reich, and educators are exhorted to respond. In this seeming contradiction lie not only the challenges facing information literacy, but their potential resolution.

To conclude, this paper has argued that information literacy educators must work in environments substantially defined by social science paradigms, positivism, and to a lesser extent interpretivism, which are not compatible with its aims. But if information literacy adopts certain practices and orientations suggested by critical theory—principally, attending to pedagogy by moving beyond an over-emphasis on technology and also focusing on the matter of information production— information literacy educators may find it easier to start attending to the social issues raised by information technology, data smog and the colonisation of the lifeworld. White writes that “the processes of modernity have expanded the degree to which individuals can test the norms they conform to by criteria they learn as they become communicatively competent.” (1988: 43-4). The information society poses new challenges to educators, but it also offers opportunities, as long as information literacy educators realise their subject is intimately bound up with the tenets of critical social science.

Biography

Andrew Whitworth is Programme Director for the MEd: ICT in Education at the School of Education, University of Manchester. His research stands at the intersection of information technology, education and critical theory.

Notes

¹ Quote by a project manager (Zeller, 2005: 2).

² original quote: Nevison, 1976: 401

³ This list was originally bulleted. I have included the numbers to facilitate later cross-reference using the symbol §. The numbers may imply a sequence; as will be explained, this is a partially, but not completely, valid interpretation of the original order in which they were presented.

⁴ for a discussion on the functioning of social spaces see Blaug, 1999

⁵ see Kemp’s 1985 discussion of the UK public inquiry system, for example

⁶ This concept offers an improvement over Habermas’s earlier model of the “public sphere”. For a more detailed exploration why this is the case see Habermas (1984, 1987, 1989).