19 Nov 2023

Alex Bell - Blended learning for all! A (mini) manifesto for critical pedagogy and critical information literacy

Alex Blog

Fig. 1 The Peoples Library

“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom...and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that's always” (Le Guin, 2004:22).

As a Librarian, I support students and their shifting information behaviours in blended learning environments. Part of my role includes supporting UCA’s Business School for Creative Industries which is largely made up of international students. The nature of their discipline means they access and learn from information in such different ways to creative arts students. In their curriculum, Business students are quickly plunged into navigating a blended learning environment and I’ve noticed they often rely heavily on using our digital library to access resources. So, this has got me thinking, what challenges do these students face?

As part of a blended learning approach, we commonly task our students to conduct their research in online spaces. Chen’s (2023) recent study highlights international student’s perspectives to blended and online learning; notably that students’ perception of the ease of using technology, the usefulness of technology, and access to device/connectivity has a major impact on their attitudes, acceptance, and success with online learning. There’s a common perception from students that the internet, search engines, and online learning environments can be more accessible for research, but I often see firsthand how exclusionary these systems can sometimes be for some of our Global Majority students. Many databases and search engines have biased design and ranking search results that prioritise European or Western knowledge. Several studies have been undertaken that outline barriers to access to information in online learning environments; including the under-representation of women, LGBTQ+, Global Majority authors, and concentration of research outputs from the Global North (Lor and Britz, 2007; Ragnedda and Gladkova, 2021; Lin et al, 2023). All these factors therefore shape how our students access and use information and conduct their research outside of the studio or classroom.

As a recent example, I was supporting a student from Bangladesh search for data and statistics about the fashion industry in their home country. We both found it frustrating because of how much harder we had to work to find relevant and up-to-date data/statistics – it required a lot deeper digging than would be comparable if searching for data from the Global North. I have a professional duty as both a librarian and educator to “make easily available the widest possible range of resources for learning” (Rogers, 1969:164-166). However, this can come into question, and I face a personal tension because the systems of information or knowledge needed for blended learning can be biased against the student. Ranganathan’s (1931) Five Laws of Library Science outline that:

  1. Books are for use
    2. Every reader his/her book
    3. Every book its reader
    4. Save the time of the reader
    5. The library is a growing organism

Today of course, these laws replace book with any aspect of information; book, article, image, moving image, audio etc; but ask any librarian and they will say that these user-centred statements still form a charter, philosophy, or big ‘why’ of what we do. Therefore, my desire to facilitate open access and freedom to information – a library for all – comes into conflict with the wider structural inequalities of how our blended and online educational and information environments are built.

AdvanceHE (2021:2-3) outline that one of the challenges to blended learning is interrogating the structural inequalities built into existing spaces or systems and re-creating these spaces for digital equity. One way we can start to explore these inequalities more explicitly in collaboration with our students could be by employing critical pedagogy in tandem with critical information literacy. Both Tewell (2016) and Stommel (2014) describe an educational and pedagogical practice that asks us as educators to work with our students to co-investigate political, social, and economic dimensions of information and knowledge, including its creation, access, and use in online environments. 

So what next? I’m at the tip of the iceberg of discovering critical pedagogies and how students navigate blended learning environments, but I feel it is important to have a mantra or a manifesto to outline how I plan to develop my own practice and start to challenge some of these inequalities. A mini manifesto is outlined below:

1) Foster a critical pedagogy that is student-centred, inclusive of individual differences, concerned more with open inquiry and comfort with ‘not-knowing’ – giving students the tools or confidence to question and scrutinise wider systems of information and knowledge without fear. 

2) Provide more flexibility and variation in access to information both in person and online.

3) Collaborate with students to encourage a collective development of resources and facilitate students input in how blended learning environments are built. 

To conclude with a vision to strive for - our blended learning environments, including the library, should open and growing organisms - community driven projects to create and share collective human knowledge.

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