Knowledge Societies: Learning for a Diverse World

This chapter will build on the author's conceptual exploration of critical information literacy (CIL) in the foreign languages to examine what such a program could look like in reality. 1 Inspired by the au-thor's increasing dissatisfaction with information literacy (IL) models that are decontextualized from broader, multicultural information landscapes, this chapter will present an instructional approach that draws from the experience and assessment of a pilot Spanish IL program at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB). However, while the chapter will focus specifically on the study of foreign languages, it will be of interest to educators who work with global populations. Changing demographics as well as the evolution of communication technologies means that the capacity to act within multicultural information societies is more important than ever before, and learning for a diverse world is a core goal on many US campuses. The class was also driven by the author's recognition of the growing exclusion of cultural knowledge and worldview from our information landscapes. While IL has been credited with empowering people to " locate, evaluate, apply, and create information within cultural and social contexts, " traditional IL standards such as the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education often seem to promote a " single, fixed way of knowing and learning. " 2 In addition, the representation of different voices or cultures on the web is often muted, from Wikipedia to specialized systems of scholarly communication. Accessing culturally situated knowledge in information systems that tend to support traditional, global flows of information or established interests is a challenge. 3 While new technologies are often seen as a way to bridge cultural divides—for example, by allowing people to access a diversity of views or opinions—it is clear that in other ways, the Internet actually reinforces existing social biases or divisions. This can be seen most clearly in the design of tools, for example, algorithms that are weighted towards their designers' biases or search engine personalization trends that narrow our information experiences. More subtlety, it can also be seen in terms of access to information as the shape and reach of our personal networks mediates our information experiences. 4 These realities complicate our information landscapes and affect our expectations about the world. A critical approach to IL, however, moves beyond the narrow focus on dominant cultural information practices. A CIL framework questions the " structures, …