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abstract: The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, since their publication in 2000, have drawn criticism for ignoring the social and political aspects of information literacy. The ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards Task Force responded with the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, which rethinks information literacy by acknowledging that it is a social phenomenon and by recognizing students as participatory learners. This article contrasts the constructions of information, information literacy, and students in the Framework and the Standards to show how the Framework addresses some of the critiques of the Standards.
Introduction
The concept of information literacy (IL) looms large in the literature of librarianship, and academic librarianship in particular.1 The question of what kind of learning is represented by information literacy, however, is a vexing one. Various writers describe IL as a set of skills, a way of thinking, or a social phenomenon. Each of these approaches has different pedagogical and philosophical implications.2 Documents describing information literacy proceed, implicitly or explicitly, from a set of assumptions about what IL is and what it can do.
This conversation exists not only as a theoretical debate in the scholarly literature but also as statements in more official and influential documents. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) produces a great number of guidelines and standards in all areas of academic librarianship, and in fact considers this work one of its most important contributions to the profession.3 The standards ACRL produces include the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (the Standards), originally published in 2000. In 2012, the ACRL Information Literacy Standards Committee, tasked with reapproving the Standards, instead called for extensive revisions. The committee cited "changes in technology, scholarly communication and the information life cycle" as reasons for a major revision, but also listed several pedagogical concerns.4 Ultimately, the panel created another document, the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education (the Framework). The Framework, which was "filed"-that is, placed among ACRL's official records-in early 2015, differs from the Standards in ways that go far beyond accommodating technological change. Indeed, I will argue that the two documents embrace competing theories of information literacy. While the Standards describe a skills-based IL, the Framework defines...