Rethinking the teleological essence of information literacy: Academic abstraction or real-life action literacy?

Abstract

This think-piece critically examines (critical) information literacy ((C)IL) and its teleological essence. Despite substantial scholarly inquiry and progress, IL remains invisible and undervalued beyond academia. IL silos and CIL’s embeddedness within critical pedagogy and its focus on epistemological issues hinder its theoretical development, reduce it to an academic abstraction and undermine its salience and emancipatory goals. A multidisciplinary/multidomain approach is needed, leveraging insights from critical (social) theories and engaging with the ontological, to facilitate a novel understanding of IL and transform it into real-life action literacy for positive social change. The paper concludes by interrogating assumptions about (C)IL’s benefits, highlighting potential inadvertent disempowering effects, and issues a call to consider it a dynamic concept that evolves by accounting for sociopolitical realities.