Who takes responsibility? A phenomenographical study of teachers’ views on information seeking in teaching

The aim of this master thesis is to study how teachers in adult education view the phenomenon of information seeking in education. We have interviewed adult education teachers, and the method used when working with the data was phenomenography. We found three categories in our material: 1. Information seeking is the student’s responsibility; 2. Information seeking is the responsibility of the library; 3. Information seeking is the teacher’s responsibility. Views expressed in the interviews were e.g. the importance of the librarian, and also that the information seeking was not important itself, but rather how the students used the information found. Since the students are adults, teachers expect them to be able to find information, i.e. the teachers did not find it necessary to teach about information seeking. This despite the fact that adult students often had little education, or had failed previous studies. The conclusion of our study is that the teachers want to work with the librarians, but they have a very limited view of how to do this. The lack of time is another aspect mentioned to why there is such poor interaction between the professions. We see a need to discuss who is responsible for information seeking in adult education; is it the student’s, teacher’s or the librarian’s responsibility? It is important as well, to discuss what is considered to be significant when it comes to information seeking, as well as what it means to be information competent.Uppsatsnivå: