Writing Information Literacy in the Classroom.

Abstract

This article explores the teaching implications of information literacy. To speak of information literacy is to conjure up a long history of literacy debates in which libraries and rhetoric and composition have themselves been implicated. The skill-based paradigm that surely continues to haunt information literacy has, in turn, its own analog in rhetoric and composition. Recent work in rhetoric and composition has challenged that paradigm by exploring what have been called new rhetorics. These approaches share an interest in writing as a tool for inquiry and as a process for making and mediating meaning. When information literacy is itself conceived of as a process-oriented literacy, it is likewise in a far better position to communicate its inherent intellectual vitality and larger social and ethical relevance. Current work in rhetoric and composition is reclaiming and updating for the 21st-first century the broader scope of classical rhetoric and with it rediscovering both the historical roots and fresh relevance of information literacy.