Can We Be Neutral?: Librarianship and Social Justice in the Digital Age

Blair KuntzEveline HoutmanUniversity of Toronto

TRY ConferenceMay 8, 2012

Can We Be Neutral?: Librarianship and Social Justice in the Digital Age

Part 2. In our day-to-day practice

Library instruction is often…

How to find books What is peer review? How to find journal articles How to evaluate websites

Accuracy Authority Bias Audience level Currency

Research paradigms

(Cooper & White, 2012)

Critical pedagogy

Any viable vision of critical education has to be based on larger social and cognitive visions. In this context, educators deal not only with questions of schooling, curriculum, and educational policy but also with social justice and human possibility.

(Kincheloe, 2008, p. 7)

Critical literacy

Critical literacy education involves a theoretical and practical attitude towards texts and the social world, and a commitment to the use of textual practices for social analysis and transformation.

(Luke, 2000, p. 454)

Critical information literacyA useful starting point would be to recognise that information literacy is a product of a particular sociohistorical context — driven largely by the profit motive of the information technology and marketing industries — and not a set of universal, internalised skills for ‘fact-finding’…. Because information literacy practices intersect with variables of gender, class, religion, culture and ethnicity to generate different learning outcomes in different contexts, it cannot be viewed as an autonomous, neutral framework generating universal learning outcomes.

(Kapitzke, 2003, p. 58)

Learning to teach critically

Lewison, M., Flint, A.S., & Van Sluys, K. (2002). Taking on critical literacy: The journey of newcomers and novices. Language Arts, 79(5), 382-392.

Four dimensions of critical literacy

1. Disrupting the commonplace

2. Interrogating multiple viewpoints

3. Focusing on sociopolitical issues

4. Taking action and promoting social justice. (p. 382)

“In moving toward enacting critical practices, most teachers are faced with a continuing examination and revision of long-held beliefs. Their initial efforts toward implementing a critical literacy curriculum are often shadowed by hesitations and uncertainties of what critical literacy looks like in classrooms.” (p. 390)

Additional references

Cooper, K., & White, R. E. (2012). Qualitative research in the post-modern era: Contexts of qualitative research. Dordrecht: Springer.

Kapitzke, C. (2003). Information literacy: A positivist epistemology and a politics of outformation. Educational Theory, 53(1), 37-53.

Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang.

Luke, A. (2000). Critical literacy in Australia: A matter of context and standpoint. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43(5), 448-461.