Information literacy in the tension between school's discursive practice and students' self-directed learning

Introduction. Self-guided learning has had a major impact on adult education, where information seeking and use are key aspects of learning. With their lack of experience in study contexts, the students are nevertheless assumed to develop information literacy. Method. The paper aims to create an understanding of how information literacy can be recognised in the tension between the schools' practice and the students' self-directed learning. This is done through a qualitative case study including fortythree interviews, thirty observations and seventeen documents, which gave in-depth knowledge of information activities in relation to a complex school assignment. Analysis. Using a socio-cultural perspective, the analysis led to the identification of several critical aspects of information literacy. Results. The aspects included the distinction between quantitative and qualitative information seeking, critical approaches towards information, knowledge of genres, the ability to identify and use various tools, and the ability to communicate conceptually about information seeking and use. Conclusions. The findings reveal an absence of interaction about information seeking and use in the educational context, as well as a lack of common references in the form of tools and support, leading to difficulties for the students in achieving the results that were expected according to learning objectives. Introduction and problem statement Self-directed learning in education is often emphasised as an ideal, as opposed to teacher-led instruction. Directing one's own learning is seen as an important ability in a knowledge and information society, with its constant demands for change and flexibility. This approach is reflected in official government reports, syllabi and grading criteria, as well as in practical school work. The approach has implications for various actors in education, such as students, teachers and librarians. Students at different educational levels are often expected to develop their ability to seek and select information, access, critically examine and understand different texts, their relations to other texts, and to produce their own texts in different contexts. Information seeking and use are key aspects of school work and learning, and students are assumed to develop information literacy during the course of their studies. Self-guided learning has had a major impact on adult education in Sweden and has reshaped conditions for learning. Curricula for municipal adult education provide several examples in which abilities that can be described as information literacy are stressed. Many of those who study in municipal adult education at upper secondary level in Sweden return to formal, organized learning after several years' absence from educational contexts. Students participating in municipal secondary adult education have experiences of elementary school, working life, family, hobbies and everyday learning, in Sweden or elsewhere, but in terms of information seeking and use in an educational context they could be described as novices. The tension between life experience and lack of experience in study contexts represents a starting point for this study. The paper is based on a doctoral thesis. Previous research concerning information literacy in educational contexts mostly concern children (e.g. Lundh, 2011; Spink, Danby, Mallan and Butler, 2010), young people, and college or university students (e.g. Francke, Sundin and Limberg, 2011; Gross and Latham, 2007, 2009; Head and Eisenberg, 2009, 2010; Julien and Barker, 2009; Limberg, 1999; Lupton, 2008). Research with adult novice learners seeking and using information in educational contexts, therefore emerges as an important area of investigation. This paper aims to create an analytical understanding of information literacy in students' work on a complex school assignment. The aim is met by exploring how adult students, teachers and librarians interact in terms of information seeking, the tools and support used, and how information is used by adult students to construct knowledge and make sense, in the practice of working with an assignment. Information literacy in school The research problem implies that it is imperative to explore information seeking and use, related to learning, to better understand what constitutes information literacy in a specific information practice. The paper uses a definition of information literacy as learning to communicate appropriately within a specific practice (Limberg, Sundin Talja, 2012), using abilities connected to different ways of seeking, finding, choosing, evaluating and compiling information for creating new knowledge. The understanding of information literacy as highly connected to specific contexts, and the perception that learning takes place through interaction, is connected to a socio-cultural perspective as described by Säljö (2000, 2005). Socio-culturally oriented researchers have shown that being information literate varies over different practices (e.g. Lloyd, 2006). From a Vygotskian perspective of learning as social, situated and tool-based (Vygotsky, 1978), information literacy is understood as something that is shaped in interaction in a social practice. The view of linking information literacy to specific contexts can be associated with a trend in user studies to move towards more communicative or socially oriented theoretical approaches (cf. Sundin and Johannisson, 2005; Tuominen, Talja and Savolainen, 2005), especially in Scandinavia (cf. Hedman and Lundh, 2009, p. 268). In recent years, sociocultural perspectives have been employed in several studies of information seeking and information literacies (e.g. Lloyd, 2012; Lundh, 2011; Rivano Eckerdal, 2012; Wang, Bruce and Hughes, 2011). Information literacy in this paper is understood in relation to a practice that is normative by nature. Schools are institutions characterised by certain norms, explicit and implicit, that students have to relate to (Limberg, 2007). Elementary school pupils, college students and students in municipal adult education all have in common that their actions, products and learning are assessed. Syllabi and grading criteria form the basis for assessment in the school's discursive practice. To be assessed is part of the practice of the school and what is understood as knowledge is in a way "given" in the sense that it is based on syllabi and the objectives of the assignment (cf. Rasmussen, Krange and Ludvigsen, 2004, p. 840). Also, the school context makes it impossible to stop seeking information as quickly as people often do in everyday life, since the assignments and curriculum make it obligatory (Shenton and Hay-Gibson, 2011, p. 65). Many of the questions are imposed (Gross 1995, 2001), but due to selfdirected learning approaches, assignments are also guided by the students' perceived information needs. Students working with complex research-based assignments are expected to work independently and are supposed to make choices of their own, while the results are graded according to specific criteria. It is therefore important to stress that there are special requirements for information seeking and use, and therefore for information literacy, in educational contexts. This means that when students learn to seek and use information in school, several dimensions are involved. They have to coordinate cognitive, material, and discursive actions in ways that make sense to them and are also sanctioned in the school context (see Lankshear and Knobel, 2011, p. 33-50). Empirical framework and material The empirical study was pursued as a qualitative, ethnographically oriented, case study. The research method provided in-depth knowledge about situated school activities. Qualitative case studies are typically empirical, concentrated on everyday settings, descriptive, extensive and aiming at improving the readers' understanding of the research object (Stake, 1994; Yin 2003). The selection of a school class that would be suitable for the study included setting up criteria such as self-directed schoolwork, a complex research assignment, enough students for providing a rich empirical material, an accessible library and, of course, students, a librarian and a teacher willing to participate in the study. The selection can be described as qualitative, strategic or purposeful (Bryman, 2008; Stake 1994). A class in a town in Sweden was approached via the school librarian and its members agreed to take part in the study. The study was conducted at a municipal school for adult education. Municipal adult education gives adults the chance to acquire formal educational qualifications at the upper secondary level. In the selected school there were classrooms, computer labs, a library, group activity rooms and a cafeteria available to the students. The school was open from morning until late at night. The library was staffed by a librarian and an assistant. The students that participated in the study were studying to become certified nursing assistants on the Health Care Programme at upper secondary level. They all took the same social studies course and were all given the same assignment. The assignment stretched over nearly three months, although the students took other courses at the same time. The assignment required students to show an understanding of society from historical and contemporary perspectives, understand how different values afford different ways of understanding society, see consequences of different options for individuals and society and, finally, be able to use different sources and methods in their work. They had to select a topic, write a statement of purpose, formulate research questions, seek, select and use different sources and analyse their materials. Their work was to be presented in a report which included an introduction and background, research questions and methods, results, conclusions and discussion, and a list of references. Titles of student reports included How to motivate a drug addict, Female immigrants and unemployment, Stress and children, Television in Sweden and Rehabilitation and animals. A major part of the student group regularly used the school library, mainly as a meeting place and for using course literature. The course participants had little experience from similar assignments. They found it hard to pick a topic, to delineate an area, to formulate questions and to understand what was expected of them. They had little previous experience from independent information seeking concerning questions that did not have a given answer. During their work they had one session of library instruction and the librarian urged them to contact her. Tutorials with the teacher were mandatory during the assignment. The case study included different kinds of data: interviews, observations and documents. In line with a socio-cultural perspective, the empirical focus of the study was on the mediated practices of the students. Fourteen students were interviewed on three separate occasions over a threemonth period, since it was pertinent to follow their information seeking and use activities throughout the process of the assignment. The first interview took place after the course introduction, in the initial stage of their work. The second interview was conducted a few weeks later, when they had had time to search for material and started writing. The third interview was performed after they had presented their reports to the teacher and the rest of the class. The students were asked to bring notes, books, text extracts and other artefacts to the interviews so that conversations about information seeking and use were easier to relate to their assignments. The teacher and the librarian were interviewed separately on two different occasions, before the course introduction and after the students' presentations. In all, the case study included forty-three interviews, which lasted between thirty minutes and two hours. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. (Due to illness, not all students were interviewed three times.) Observations were conducted during all five class sessions, as well as of twelve tutorials between the teacher and the students and during thirteen presentations. During the observations, I was not part of the conversations. Using a document with two columns, I was active in taking field notes and also writing down reflections. The students' written reports were added to the data collection to gain further knowledge about information seeking and use. Much of the time, I was present in the school to follow the interaction between students, the teacher and the librarian. I was given access to the school, to the lectures and to the tutorials by the principal, the teacher, the librarian and all the students in the study. They were all well informed of the purpose of my study and they generously shared their experiences with me. Due to my presence and questions about information seeking and use, it is likely that the participants paid more attention to this topic than they would have done otherwise. The study followed the research ethics principles in humanisticsocial scientific research developed by The Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences.When excerpts and citations from the data appear in the text, a translation has been made from Swedish into English. Students are referred to as fictive proper names, teacher or librarian and numbers (1-3) are used to mark which interview is referred to. The socio-cultural perspective guided the analysis, by focusing on interaction between teacher, librarian and students. The analysis was conducted in several stages, including a descriptive level where the students' progress was described chronologically and the material was thematically coded in relation to the theoretical framework as well to previous research (cf. Merriam 1988). Broad themes such as information seeking, information use, interaction, tools, and learning were generated. Through openness to, and careful, repeated readings of the empirical material, new facets and angles emerged. Following this a scheme was created with categories and sub categories, for example school library, sources, support, selection, credibility and text production, using Atlas.ti for administrating the large amount of material. Finally, the findings were interpreted using the theoretical framework and previous research. Findings: aspects of information literacy In this section findings are presented and discussed. By exploring how adult students, teachers and librarians interact around information seeking and use, what tools are used, and how information is used by adult students to construct knowledge and make sense in the practice of working with an assignment, several aspects of information literacy were identified in the tension between the school's practice and the students' self-directed learning. In this context self-directed learning meant that students to a great extent were responsible for their own learning, within the frame of a specific assignment. They had to take initiatives, set goals, formulate problems, identify relevant resources, choose appropriate methods, work with analysis and present their results in written form. The findings show that self-directed learning entails a number of critical aspects of information literacy in connection to students' opportunities for learning. Quantitative or qualitative information seeking Information seeking was generally perceived by the students as searching through Internet search engines. The study revealed that what may be called quantitatively oriented information seeking, to quickly search through large entities of information, preferably through a search engine, did not constitute a major problem for the students. Efficient search engines yield numerous pages of results, just through entering one or two keywords. Most of the students searched for information in this way at one or two occasions during first two weeks of the project period. The major part of the students found their material during the library instruction session in the computer lab, where the librarian demonstrated databases and presented different search techniques. The students did not repeat the search for information on further occasions, but were satisfied with the information they had found, and instead devoted much time considering how they could make use of found information. This information significantly influenced how the reports were finally designed. Much time was spent choosing extracts and examples from an extensive material and in different ways trying to get the information to be consistent with the chosen topic. Few examples were found of qualitatively oriented information seeking, i.e. searching for information in a more focused, critical way in order to obtain information of a certain quality, character or genre which is an important part of self-directed school work. This was related to the fact that few of the students were explicit concerning a conscious information strategy, and they did not analyse how they would go about seeking for