Ways of Experiencing Information Literacy (eBook)

Making the Case for a Relational Approach

Susie Andretta (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2012 | 1. Auflage
240 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
978-1-78063-324-4 (ISBN)

Infos

This book has two aims: firstly to present an investigation into information literacy by looking at how people engage with information to accomplish tasks or solve problems in personal, academic and professional contexts (also known as the relational approach). This view of information literacy illustrates a learner-centred perspective that will be of interest to educators who wish to go beyond the teaching of information skills. The second aim of this book is to illustrate how the relational approach can be used as an investigative framework. As a detailed account of a relational study, this book will appeal to researchers interested in using the relational framework to examine pedagogical experiences from the learner's perspective. - Offers an investigation of the relational approach to examine information literacy from the perspective of the learner and the educator within diverse pedagogical conditions, both academic and professional - Presents concrete examples of measuring the impact of the information literacy experience through the application of newly developed information literacy practices to unknown situations (described as Transfer), or through the changes in the learner's view of the world (described as Transformation) - Written by an internationally known scholar and practitioner of information literacy

Susie Andretta is based at the Department of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University. The author's expertise in IL originates from research on the implementation of user-education programmes in combination with student-centred learning strategies.

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2

The relational approach explained

Abstract:

The relational approach focuses on the relationship between people and information to investigate the phenomenon of information literacy from the perspective of people who experience it. This approach is based on the phenomenographic conceptual framework, and in order to establish the context of the book this chapter gives an account of the phenomenographic body of research and previous relational studies on information literacy, consisting of the work by Bruce (1997a), Lupton (2004) and Edwards (2006).

Key words

second-order perspective

structure of awareness

internal and external horizons

deep and surface learning

outcome space of learning

relational studies

As phenomenography provides the conceptual framework for the relational approach presented in this book, the first part of this chapter examines the main tenets of this perspective, while the rest of the chapter examines the work by the promoters of the relational approach. Phenomenography investigates what Marton and Booth describe as the ‘second-order’ perspective, which focuses on the ways of experiencing phenomena from the perspectives of the people experiencing them (1997: 117–18), and establishes variation in the collective ways these phenomena are experienced in practice.

The phenomenographic account of experiencing a phenomenon is based on the structure of awareness, and this consists of two dimensions. The first one is the referential aspect, or the ‘what’ of the experience, which provides the different conceptualisations of the phenomenon. The second dimension, known as the structural aspect, or the ‘how’ of the experience, provides the different practices of the phenomenon.

The aspects of the phenomenon that the subjects are aware of are located in the focal space of awareness or internal horizon, while the aspects of the phenomenon that the subjects have not experienced are located in the marginal space of awareness or external horizon. Åkerlind (2005) emphasises the collective nature of the experience. In other words, phenomenography investigates the range of meanings about a phenomenon within a sample group as a group, rather than focusing on the range of meanings for each individual within the group. These ‘takes’ are translated into categories that describe the collective experiences of the phenomenon, and variation between these categories is generated by the composite view of their referential and structural dimensions in order to distinguish ‘the empirically interpreted category from the hypothetical experience that it [the phenomenon] represents’ (2005: 322). The categories of description are related to each other through a hierarchical relationship encapsulated in an outcome space (Marton and Booth, 1997: 107) that shows a progression from simple to complex ways of experiencing the phenomenon.

The examination of the relational studies preceding mine starts with Bruce’s book The Seven Faces of Information Literacy (1997a), because this was the first study to adapt the phenomenographic person–phenomenon relation into a person-information relationship to examine the conceptualisation of information literacy by higher education academics. Bruce’s research, together with the relational studies by Lupton (2004) and Edwards (2006), are presented here for the purpose of contextualising my research by illustrating how these studies adopted phenomenography to research information literacy from the perspective of the user or learner. We explore these studies chronologically to demonstrate that the earlier research by Bruce influenced the way Lupton and Edwards applied the relational approach to examine the experience of information literacy from the perspective of diverse groups of students.

One of the major implications of the relational approach is that it describes information literacy from the perspective of the people who experience it and this generates complex dynamics between people, information use and learning. Bruce (1997a: 61) argues that seen from the phenomenographic perspective information literacy education focuses on the changes in the learners’ perceptions about being information literate, rather than emphasising the assessment of measurable knowledge and skills associated with specific information-seeking practices, which measure the impact of the learning outcome in terms of the content acquired and skills developed. It follows that the relational approach can be seen as a blueprint for a learner-centred provision, because the way the learners perceive the content to be learned becomes the key concern.

The deep and surface approach to learning

Phenomenography derives etymologically from the Greek noun ‘fainemonon’, which translates as the apparent, or that which manifests itself, and ‘grafia’, describing in words or pictures that which designates an aspect, or an experience of reality (Marton and Booth, 1997: 110). This perspective has evolved from the empirical studies at the Department of Education and Educational Research, Goteborg University in Sweden, which focused on the investigation of what and how people learn from their world in order to explore the process of learning and enhance the quality of this experience. Marton’s work in 1975 marked the starting point of phenomenography (Marton, 1994), which began with the observation that some students are more effective learners than others. This generated two questions: ‘what does it mean when we say that one person is a better learner than another?’ and ‘why is this the case?’ (1994). A group of students was asked to read an article, and later during individual interviews they were prompted to describe this experience to determine their level of understanding the text (the content learned) and ascertain the process they employed to accomplish the task (the act of learning). The initial analysis of the interviews produced a limited number of different ways of understanding the content of the text, and these developed into categories of description that defined each different way of understanding the text. These categories were also found to be logically related to one another, and this relationship could be displayed in a hierarchical order. Marton refers to these hierarchical categories as the outcome space, which gives an indication of the level of success of the learning task by looking at the different ways in which the text is understood. The qualitative differences in the learning outcome were initially assessed by the quality of the students’ understanding and remembering of the text. Further analysis of the students’ account of the learning process used to understand the text generated two contrasting approaches, deep and surface learning, and the identification of these two approaches helped to address the question of why some people are better learners than others. Students who tried to understand the content of the text were associated with a deep approach and the higher categories of the learning outcome, that is they achieved a better understanding of the text. By contrast, students who focused on the task of ‘moving the text into their heads’ (Marton, 1994) were associated with a surface approach, and their understanding of the text was shallow.

Pramling’s study (1994) adopts a similar phenomenographic approach to examine early childhood education by focusing on the act of learning in addition to the content learned. Through her research with young children she demonstrates that those children who were taught by focusing on the act of learning (the deep learning approach) developed an awareness of their own learning compared with the children in the control group, who were exposed to the same content, but delivered in the ‘usual way’. As a result, the children who experienced the phenomenographically oriented approach showed greater metacognitive development and also achieved a cognitive development that reflected a more advanced understanding of the stories and the lessons covered:

The overall results show a great difference in children’s understanding of their own learning depending on whether they have been involved in the phenomenographically oriented approach or not. Children did not only develop metacognitively, that is developed their awareness of their own learning, but also cognitively by understanding the message of the stories […] at a more advanced level. (1994)

Marton (1981) distinguishes between first and second-order perspectives. He claims that the first-order perspective aims to describe aspects of the world, such as asking ‘why do some children perform better than others in school?’ and through the answer to this question, for example ‘different performances reflect inherited differences in intelligence’, we make statements about the world. The second-order perspective, on the other hand, is concerned with how people experience the world, so that the question above would be expanded to ‘what do people think about why some children perform better than others in school?’ and the answer would need to be expanded to ‘some people think that different performances reflect inherited differences in...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.8.2012
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Buchhandel / Bibliothekswesen
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Wirtschaftsinformatik
• ISBN-10: 1-78063-324-6 / 1780633246
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78063-324-4 / 9781780633244