From informational reading to information literacy: Change and continuity in document work in Swedish schools
ISSN: 0022-0418
Article publication date: 6 June 2018
Issue publication date: 3 August 2018
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to historicise research conducted in the fields of Information Seeking and Learning and Information Literacy and thereby begin to outline a description of the history of information in the context of Swedish compulsory education.
Design/methodology/approach
Document work and documentary practices are used as alternatives to concepts such as information seeking or information behaviour. Four empirical examples of document work – more specifically informational reading – recorded in Swedish primary classrooms in the 1960s are presented.
Findings
In the recordings, the reading style students use is similar to informational reading in contemporary educational settings: it is fragmentary, facts-oriented, and procedure-oriented. The practice of finding correct answers, rather than analysing and discussing the contents of a text seems to continue from lessons organised around print textbooks in the 1960s to the inquiry-based and digital teaching of today.
Originality/value
The paper seeks to analyse document work and documentary practices by regarding “information” as a discursive construction in a particular era with material consequences in particular contexts, rather than as a theoretical and analytical concept. It also problematises the notion that new digital technologies for producing, organising, finding, using, and disseminating documents have drastically changed people’s behaviours and practices in educational and other contexts.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This study was conducted within the project Reading, traditions and negotiations: reading activities in Swedish classrooms 1967-1969, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2013-2015, ref 2012-4140. The project is part of the Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communication in Contemporary Society (LinCS) at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Borås, Sweden, funded by the Swedish Research Council, ref 349-2006-146. An early version of this paper, “Pre-digital information literacy: An historical perspective on information seeking in educational contexts” was presented at the 2016 Conference of the CILIP Library & Information History Group, Information History: Perspectives and Prospects, London, 6 May 2016. The authors would like to thank the DPA original researchers and participants; Jonas Emanuelsson, Oskar Lindwall, Elin Johansson, Charlotte Sellberg, and Erik Lundberg at Gothenburg University for all their efforts to preserve the data; Niclas Hardman and Jan Buse at the University of Borås for their technical assistance; and Frances Hultgren at Swedish School of Library and Information Science for her help with the English editing of the manuscript.
Citation
Lundh, A.H., Dolatkhah, M. and Limberg, L. (2018), "From informational reading to information literacy: Change and continuity in document work in Swedish schools", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 74 No. 5, pp. 1042-1052. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2017-0156
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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