Report fron #ecil2014 - Towards a radical information literacy

Talk three today, liveblogging from the European Conference on Information Literacy, held in Dubrovnik, was Andrew Whitworth on Towards a radical information literacy. He said that he wanted to close the "research practice" gap. He identified three approaches. He started by identifying phenomenography as a research methodology and also as a pedagogy (I think he was referring to variation theory here). The second approach was sociocultural practice, using Lloyd's work as an example, seeing information literacy as a source of practice, different contexts having different practices. Whitworth identified some elements of the context or landscape being "more open to transformation than others".
Whitworth went on to talk about mapping experience within a course, with use of different approiaches. Finally he talked about discourse analysis, which he felt should be included because "The reality of organisational life is not that all contexts are equal, not all experiences of variation can be expressed" because he felt that "practice architectures and the ways of thinking they represent, are pushed by dominant interests. He proposed that the work of Bakhtin on prosaic communication was valuable for understanding the discourses. Whitworth's idea of radical information literacy involved redistributing authority whilst including the concept of stewardship (a role for librarians) and he emphasised that it involved working with those in other fields and communities.

This is his book, that Whitworth was referring to in his talk: http://store.elsevier.com/Radical-Information-Literacy/Andrew-Whitworth/isbn-9781843347484/
Photo by Sheila Webber: view frommy window, Dubroknik, October 2014