It takes a community to build a framework: Information literacy within intercultural settings

Abstract

Information literacy practice plays a key role in the transitional processes of individuals within new intercultural settings. While this ability to adjust to new cultural contexts is increasingly important within today’s multicultural societies, campuses and workplaces, typical approaches to information literacy education struggle to scaffold the newcomer’s disrupted information landscapes. In focusing on prescriptive skills, information literacy standards position linguistic and cultural difference as a learning deficiency. Yet when alternative information literacy frameworks centre upon personal habits of mind, they fail to account for contextual dynamics. In this conceptual paper, the authors use research into the health practices of resettling refugees as an example to argue that a move away from behaviourist approaches to information literacy refocuses our attention on questions of adjustment and engagement with cultural understandings of information, and forms a more inclusive way to consider the diversity of today’s information societies.