Information, Mapping and Power: New methods for exploring the development and teaching of information literacy education and mapping

To understand how such an approach can be empowering, the book explores how we can draw on difference in productive ways in IL education with a theory-led, empirical investigation of how the way information literacy is taught – whether formally or informally, and whether in schools, universities or workplaces – influences the development of information practices at the micro-level.

The book also draws on original research to provide a detailed account of how information practices emerge from communities of learners in different settings and how discursive mapping can be taught to learners. It also covers how the capacity to engage in it emerges from educational environments in a more indirect way, and how learners respond to and resist institutionalised power by developing their own capacity to stewarding their information landscapes and digital habitats.

Readership: Information literacy educators, whether in libraries, other HE courses, high schools or the workplace, will benefit by learning about how mapping – implicitly and explicitly – can be used as a method of teaching IL. Also, how they can design learning environments that exploit the positive value of difference, and empower their learners accordingly. The book will also be useful reading for academics and researchers of information literacy and students of library and information science.