Learning to Put Out the Red Stuff: Becoming Information Literate through Discursive Practice

From recent doctoral research into information literacy and workplace learning, an understanding of information literacy as a complex constellation of experiences and relationships with a range of information modalities is emerging. It is constituted through the connections among people, artifacts, texts, and bodily experiences that draw a person into context and enable him or her to know the landscape. A three‐year qualitative study of firefighters in regional New South Wales, Australia, is described. It was framed by constructionist thinking about the nature and role of information literacy in learning about practice and profession and about the relationship between power and knowledge. The findings of the study support a new definition of information literacy that recognizes information literacy as a way of knowing, that is, as more than just the acquisition of skills and attributes. Becoming information literate in the workplace requires experience with social and physical modalities as well as with textual information.