Towards a constructive unbalancing: the reflexive turn in information literacy

The last two decades have seen a shift in the most fundamental issues of our concern. This transformation can be traced in the thought patterns, concepts and metaphors through which we see our practice as teaching or instruction librarians, and which in turn structure it. Above all, it manifests in a relinquishment, however reluctant, of a monolithic or absolutist vision of information literacy as a singular, constant and stably definable state, in favour of a relational and embodied phenomenon in which the individual’s unique context and connections are of paramount importance. This white paper highlights both the multiplicity of those contexts and the global interconnections between our divergent experiences.