Reframing information literacy instruction through a lens of knowledge justice - Heather Campbell, Lea Sansom and Ashley McKeown

Editor's Notes

• #1 This session will introduce strategies for teaching nursing students to incorporate epistemic justice in their evidence-based practice. We will review an Open Educational Resource (OER) developed for this purpose, covering key concepts such as positionality, epistemic injustice, and epistemicide in nursing. We are going to share, case studies, and innovative assessments designed to evaluate students’ application of an epistemic justice lens and other resources that have supported us in our work. This four-part webinar series will provide nurse educators, researchers, and institutional leaders with practical strategies for integrating epistemic justice into nursing education, research, and institutional practices.
• #2 Ashley As we gather today, I would like to begin by acknowledging the land on which Heather and I live and work. Western University is located Baketigweyaang (pronounced Bet-tay-gay-way-yog), an Anishinaabe Ojibwa word meaning “at the side flow.” This name reflects the location now known as London, Ontario, Canada situated alongside Deshkan Ziibing — the Antler River, referred to by settlers as the Thames River. This waterway flows through the heart of Southwestern Ontario and connects Western University to many First Nation communities. Western University is located on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Chonnonton Nations, with connections also to the Huron-Wendat Nation. This area is governed by Treaty 6 (London Township), Treaty 7 (Sombra Township), and Treaty 21 (Longwoods). The treaties were not real estate transactions, though they have been misrepresented as such. Rather, they are living agreements of peace and shared stewardship, intended to guide sustainable coexistence between peoples and with the land itself. It is essential to recognize that much of what we now call Canada remains unceded territory, meaning that many Indigenous Nations never surrendered or legally agreements in relation to their lands to the Crown.
• #3 This colonial legacy is deeply tied to Western’s institutional history. Huron College, founded in 1863 as a theological college and one of Western University’s founding institutions, was established with an explicit mission to evangelize the Indigenous peoples of the lower Great Lakes. Its leaders were connected to several nearby residential schools, including the Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford, an hour from our London. These efforts sought to “civilize” and assimilate Indigenous children through Christian and Eurocentric education — a history that continues to shape Western, university education, and Canada today. This assimilation saw the forceable removal of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children from their homes to live for extended periods of time away from their families., forbidding them from using their languages, cultural practices, or ways of knowing, and forced to endure punishment and often horrendous abuse. In 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission OR TRC, was created as a result of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. Their mandate was to listen to over 6000 Residential School survivors and their families and inform all Canadians about the residential school system and its legacy. The final report, published in 2015, taught us that residential schools were a calculated collaborative effort by the Canadian government and churches to eradicate Indigenous language and culture with the intention of cultural genocide. It has been estimated approximately 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and forced to attend one of 139 residential schools across Canada. The legacy of the separation of Indigenous children and suppression of culture has had a profoundly negative impact on Indigenous communities, families and cultural connections through the generations. As part of their final report, the TRC detailed 94 Calls to Action, which seek to address the ongoing impact of residential schools on survivors and their families. These calls focus on a range of areas including child welfare, education, health, justice, language and culture. They also provide a path for government and Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities to create a joint vision of reconciliation. Universities are specifically named within the calls the action and so to are the disciplines in which we teach. Meaning we are each responsible to addressing the TRC calls to action. Examples of calls to action related to the academy include, call to action number 11 states, "Provide adequate funding for first nation students seeking post-secondary education." And call to action number 16 states, "Create university and college degree and diploma programs in Aboriginal languages. Three weeks after the TRC report, Universities Canada, which represents the leadership of 96 universities across Canada, published a set of thirteen principles on Indigenous post-secondary education to advance opportunities for Indigenous students in post secondary institutions and integrate Indigenous themes and topics throughout the academy. Two years later, about 70% were developing strategic plans for advancing reconciliation; and 60% were working to incorporate Indigenous knowledge and methods into research projects and classrooms on campus.
• #5 Heather: So that is what we will be discussing today, our shared practice of redefining information literacy through the lens of knowledge justice. While decolonization requires economic, political, environmental, and spiritual justice, the little academic corner of the world in which Ashley and I find ourselves is concerned with knowledge –because the university has claimed knowledge as its business. As Sofia Leung describes : “The university is the main conduit of research, polices knowledge production, organization, and preservation. And as an arm of the university, the library is the chief officer of that system.” Today, we’ll be exploring her questions: whose knowledge do we choose to collect and preserve on library shelves? What form does it take? How do we define authority when we’re teaching students? What is the relationship between our ‘information’ practices and Eurowestern epistemologies?
• #7 Heather Using this definition of knowledge justice to structure our time together Part 1: we’ll demonstrate how we teach others to challenge the dominance of Eurowestern knowledge systems, which is the focus of our new open educational resource that we’ll share with you in a moment Part 2 we’ll demonstrate how we approach our own work and ways of knowing with humility, as knowledge justice requires – including how we’re using this approach to reframe our work as librarians, nurses, and educators And then we’ll open things up for a discussion and questions with you, so that together we can reflect on our shared responsibilities to engage in meaningful dialogue across multiple and divers perspectives. What role do we have, as librarians and information professionals, to enable and encourage others to do this work? What insights do faculty like Ashley have to share about the role of librarians? Note that we aren’t going to teach about Indigenous knowledges, of course, which isn’t our place and encourage this group to continue your practice of professional development in that area Instead our focus is on making room within our own work for knowledge justice, and start ot identify our palce in helping others to do the same
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• #10 Heather
• #11 Ashley: - 1 minute I attended Heather presentation about the new library curriculum that was at Western's yearly CTL conference. At the time, I was re-developing a first year first term nursing foundations course, that included teaching students how to seek evidence to guide their nursing practice. I invited Western Libraries to the class to teach their new curriculum, and asked students to submit the traditional assignment, of developing a resource list, using an EJ lens, based on a case study. This led to me being the successful FHS teaching fellow at Western university, where I am now researching, how teaching student to use an EJ lens to guide their EBP in nursing supports their practice of culturally humility.
• #12 Heather Explain Creative Commons Campbell, H., McKeown, A., Holmes, K., Sansom, L., Dilkes, D., and Glasgow-Osment, B. (Eds.). (2025). Knowledge Justice in the Helping Professions: From Theory to Practice. eCampusOntario Open Library. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/epistemicjusticeoer/. Aimed at professional students, most of whom are undergraduate, so we’ll also share how we teach these concepts to graduate, faculty, and professional audiences. The curriculum / chunks are the same, we just level them up
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• #15 Heather Our exploration of positionality and power in Chapter 1 provides the foundation for Chapter 2, where we move into a discussion about recognizing epistemic injustice. To give a quick definition: Epistemic injustice, as defined by Dunne in 2020, is when people "undermine, undercut, disvalue, curtail, exclude, outright dismiss, or, in some cases, gaslight a person or persons in their capacity as potential knowers". So here, we're asking learners to consider the places that certain folks are denied the right to know, often because of their positionalities or identities. In the classroom, we often use the video we'll watch in just a moment as an example of how epistemic injustice plays out in our social media algorithms. As a quick note: You'll notice that we move between the terms "knowledge justice (or injustice)" and "epistemic justice (or injustice)". We do this intentionally because using terms centered on 'knowledge' can make the ideas more accessible and reduce the students' cognitive load when we're teaching undergrads.
• #16 Heather
• #17 Heather So that's how we introduce the conversation to students – by connecting it to something they're familiar with, which is their online environments and social media algorithms. We use TikTok for these examples (and we'll use TikTok for our examples again in just a moment) because it's a platform most students recognize, but also because it can shake up traditional notions of what constitutes knowledge in the classroom. This reinforces our broader considerations about whose voices are heard in academia, and whose are not. From there, we shift the discussion to how epistemic injustice shows up within education itself. [Pass things over to Ashley]
• #18 Heather
• #19 So who conducts academic research? In most fields, tenure-track university faculty are responsible for conducting research and writing academic journal articles. In some professional fields, like medicine or librarianship, clinicians and practitioners also publish studies. But in many disciplines, only tenure-track research faculty are allowed to submit research ethics applications or request grant funding. Who are these researchers? It is important to note that the positionalities of research faculty do not reflect the general population. In the table, I present demographic data of Tenured Faculty in Canada and Western Tenured Faculty as compared to the General population so you can see what I mean. There are many complex reasons for these disparities, and it is worth noting that universities like Western are making efforts to change. But students who have dependants or unstable housing may need to delay or leave their studies due to the associated costs graduate education. We just saw in the video how Black and Indigenous students report feeling unwelcome in university environments. There are also fewer opportunities to be hired as a tenure-track faculty member now than in the past due to ongoing funding cuts to education across the country.
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• #21 Heather Epistemology – how do you define knowledge? How does one come to know it? Epistemology in teaching focuses on how knowledge is acquired and what constitutes valid knowledge Ontology – The nature of reality. What is knowable? Ontology in teaching refers to an educator's beliefs about the nature of reality and what exists Axiology – The study of values. Axiology concerns the values that guide teaching and learning, including the importance of certain behaviors, attitudes, and moral principles. 
• #22 Heather Something I do when teaching faculty about knowledge justice is an interrogation exercise as shown on the screen. I’m still working on this one so I’ll just ask that you not share it broadly just yet, but the handout is in your folder for your personal reference. To help faculty define their epistemology, or theory of knowledge, and find it’s ‘edges’ as the definition of knowledge justice asks us to do, we answer questions like: What are the origins of our discipline? Who created it and why? Who is considered an ”authority” and how does one become an “expert”? Who are foundational scholars in our field: where and when do they come from? What knowledge counts as ‘evidence’ in our field? And then we’ll consider when and how other forms of knowledge relate, or don’t relate, to their cultural practices as well as their disciplinary traditions Think about Settia here: how and where do we talk about Eastern medicine in our classrooms?
• #23 Let’s start with knowledge
• #24 Heather
• #26 Heather From here, what we teach about knowledge depends on the type of work that we’re doing, our audience’s needs, etc. And a lot of knowledge justice work is being willing to stand alongside colleagues, students, each other and say “ we don’t know what we’re doing, but we’ll figure it out together.” We’ve come to recognize how much of our work as librarians and educators is in service to maintaining dominant systems and privileging western ways of knowing and being So for now, our focus has been on: where can we make room fordiverse knowledges? What harmful and outdated ideas must be rooted out? What are the edges of our discipline? And therefore, where does our understanding improve with diverse perspectives? We’re still learning how to do this work, of course, so we’ll just share a few examples of our approaches when teaching Undergraduate nursing students Graduate students engaged with knowledge synthesis Medical students
• #27 Heather Super fast review of the give things on the slide, just to say that we have five ways that we’re approaching our own work with humility. May not have time for all five A shout out to Katie Holmes here, who is the health librarian for Western but who is starting an 18-month leave today so we didn’t’ think it was fair to make her come do this talk with us today even though we probably should have
• #28 Ashley Heather: add assignment to folder and screenshot to slide
• #29 Ashley Have a case study for demonstration purposes in the OER Thank you to Master of Nursing student Keely Trudgeon for writing this case study based on her own experience [Read out loud] [Advance sections of slide as you read]
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• #31 Heather A tool we use in the OER with health sciences students is the voices flower framework shown on the screen, and we combine its use with a case study to make our exploration of knowledge justice practical and easy for students to understand This flower was adapted from the Marginalized Voices Honeycomb created by Jackie Stapleton, Liaison Librarian, University of Waterloo, and; Aneta Kwak, Mikayla Redden, Jeff Newman, Liaison Librarians, University of Toronto. But our focus and intention is to encourage students to think about whose VOICES they need, not which sources Who is an expert on their issue of health and well-being, whose perspectives must they consider? The focus here is on balancing and elevating persons with lived experience (clients) with academic research and ‘arms-length observers’ who, as we’ve learned, are often excluded from academic research Recognize intersectionality among voice types
• #32 Ashley (Or me if you want me to?) Using the case, we’ll work through each category to think about whose voices do we need to address our case And then discuss where, typically do we find those voices – both in what types of sources, but what search tools help us get there –and how, when we recognize that knowledge resides in living beings, asking people and knowledge-seeking through community requires a different approach More on that in a minute
• #33 Heather With undergraduate learners we’re often asked to teach about searching, and you can find our currently thinking in Chapter 4 of the OER. There are four major strategies covered in Chapter 4, which you can see on the slide. - Strategy 1 asks us to consider what search terms and language we’re using when seeking out diverse voices, thinking about the difference between community-generated language versus those terms created by power holders like government, libraries, biologists. We’ll come back to this in a moment when talking about our work with graduate students. In Strategy 2, we continue working with the Voices Flower to think about where might find the different voices and communities involved with our case study. If diverse voices are not included in clinical practical guidelines or academic research, for example, where else might we look?
• #34 Ashley One of the things we discuss in the book is that language, like epistemology, is shaped by culture. When we seek out diverse perspectives using a knowledge justice lens, it is important to ask: What language does the community use to describe themselves or their knowledge? This is because externally defined terms are usually "top down" - power holders or institutions decide how to refer to people and communities. These terms may be influenced by community voices, but they're not actually defined by them. By contrast, self-chosen or community driven terms often come about in a "bottom up" way. This means that the community or people involved will choose the language that best describes them. On social media, hashtags are one of the ways communities define themselves and reflect how they want to be seen and understood. As an example, the hashtag #ActuallyAutistic emerged from within the autistic community as a way to reclaim the conversation around autism.
• #35 Heather Chapter 4’s emphasis on seeking out lived experience particularly resonates with our undergraduate learners, many of whom tell us how they don’t see themselves as knowledge holders or that their lived experience ‘counts’ as knowledge or evidence. Both this section, and the brief section on Indigenous ways of knowing, emphasize the importance of approach knowledge as a living thing, requiring our nurture and care. When we ask individuals, especially those from equity-deserving communities, to speak about their personal experiences, for example, we risk perpetuating epistemic injustice and causing harm if we misunderstand that knowledge, take it out of context, or demand it in ways that require additional labour. Black and Indigenous scholars have written about the emotional labour they are constantly asked to perform in educating others about equity, diversity, and inclusion, anti-racism, decolonization, or Indigenous knowledges (Cooke & Colón-Aguirre, 2021; Brunette-Debassige, 2024). Requests to ‘share your story’ or ‘explain your oppression’ can be retraumatizing, especially when asked repeatedly or without reciprocity. One way to engage with lived experience responsibly is to begin with stories that have already been shared publicly. This approach reduces the risk of placing unexpected emotional or educational labour on individuals. It also ensures you’re engaging with knowledge that people have intentionally chosen to make available, in a form and context they are comfortable with. We have access to many sources of publicly shared lived experience, like scholarly work that draws on autoethnography, participatory action research, or community-based methodologies but also, in many other often overlooked places, like, autobiographies, blogs, personal essays, public testimony, speeches, or news interviews, YouTube, community-created documentaries, and social media.
• #36 Heather Often, after talking about using the Voices Flower or broadening out our definitions of "whose evidence counts", the first question we're asked is: Ok, but how do I know if this evidence is "good"?
• #38 Considering positionality of authorship
• #40 Student felt affirmed and that they had value as a knower themselves. They also found value in art within their own nursing epistemology.
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