Opening Up Information Literacy: Empowering Students through Open Pedagogy

Open pedagogy and critical information literacy are influenced by critical pedagogy, which advocates for a disruption of information authority and privilege in the classroom and the creation of an environment that empowers students to be equal participants in their own learning. With the open education movement and the affordances of networked technologies, open pedagogy has the potential to enable students to be active co-creators of knowledge, engaging in information literacy practices of finding, analyzing, and sharing knowledge. Moving beyond an individualistic skills-based approach to information literacy, open pedagogy provides students with opportunities to not only reflect on their understanding of the political, social, and cultural dimensions of information but also to authentically engage in enacting change in the information landscape. In this article, we provide an overview of open pedagogy and information literacy theory, outlining how they intersect and the ways in which open pedagogy might facilitate critical aspects of information literacy instruction in librarianship. To demonstrate this pedagogical theory in practice, we provide an example of open pedagogy enabled information literacy instruction through a Wikipedia-based classroom assignment