Presentation at the TRY Conference (Toronto, Ontario), May, 2012. My part only.

1. Can We Be Neutral?:
Librarianship and Social Justice in
the Digital Age
Blair Kuntz
Eveline Houtman
University of Toronto
TRY Conference
May 8, 2012

2. Can We Be Neutral?:
Librarianship and Social Justice in
the Digital Age
Part 2. In our day-to-day practice

3. Library instruction is often…
 How to find books
 What is peer review?
 How to find journal articles
 How to evaluate websites
 Accuracy
 Authority
 Bias
 Audience level
 Currency

4. Research paradigms

5. (Cooper &
White, 2012)

6. Critical pedagogy
Any viable vision of critical education
has to be based on larger social and
cognitive visions. In this context,
educators deal not only with
questions of schooling, curriculum,
and educational policy but also with
social justice and human possibility.
(Kincheloe, 2008, p. 7)

7. Critical literacy
Critical literacy education involves a
theoretical and practical attitude
towards texts and the social world,
and a commitment to the use of
textual practices for social analysis
and transformation.
(Luke, 2000, p. 454)

8. Critical information literacy
A useful starting point would be to recognise
that information literacy is a product of a
particular sociohistorical context — driven
largely by the profit motive of the information
technology and marketing industries — and not
a set of universal, internalised skills for ‘fact-
finding’…. Because information literacy
practices intersect with variables of gender,
class, religion, culture and ethnicity to generate
different learning outcomes in different
contexts, it cannot be viewed as an
autonomous, neutral framework generating
universal learning outcomes.
(Kapitzke, 2003, p. 58)

11. Learning to teach critically
Lewison, M., Flint, A.S., & Van Sluys,
K. (2002). Taking on critical
literacy: The journey of
newcomers and novices.
Language Arts, 79(5), 382-392.

12. Four dimensions of critical literacy
1. Disrupting the commonplace
2. Interrogating multiple viewpoints
3. Focusing on sociopolitical issues
4. Taking action and promoting social
justice. (p. 382)

13. “In moving toward enacting critical
practices, most teachers are faced
with a continuing examination and
revision of long-held beliefs. Their
initial efforts toward implementing a
critical literacy curriculum are often
shadowed by hesitations and
uncertainties of what critical literacy
looks like in classrooms.” (p. 390)

14. Additional references
Cooper, K., & White, R. E. (2012). Qualitative research
in the post-modern era: Contexts of qualitative
research. Dordrecht: Springer.
Kapitzke, C. (2003). Information literacy: A positivist
epistemology and a politics of outformation.
Educational Theory, 53(1), 37-53.
Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer (2nd
ed.). New York: Peter Lang.
Luke, A. (2000). Critical literacy in Australia: A matter
of context and standpoint. Journal of Adolescent &
Adult Literacy, 43(5), 448-461.