Refugee Youth Leverage Social, Physical, and Digital Information to Enact Information Literacy

Abstract

A Review of:
Lloyd, A., & Wilkinson, J. (2017). Tapping into the information landscape: Refugee youth enactment of information literacy in everyday spaces. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0961000617709058

Abstract

Objective – To describe the ways in which refugee youth use everyday information to support their learning.

Design – Photo voice technique, a process by which the population under consideration is provided with cameras and asked to visually document an aspect of their experience.

Setting – Social agency in New South Wales, Australia

Subjects – Fifteen 16-25 year old refugees resettled from South Sudan or Afghanistan

Methods – Three workshops were conducted. In the first, participants learned how to use the cameras and the protocols for participation. Between the first and second workshops, participants took several photographs of places, sources and types of information that were personally meaningful. In the second workshop, participants were first split into small groups to share and discuss the five images that they selected as their most important information sources and later reconvened as a large group in which participants again shared and discussed their images. In the third and final workshop, the authors shared their findings and analysis with the participants and invited discussion. The authors analyzed both photos and group transcripts from the workshops using Charmaz’s constant comparative method.

Main Results – Refugee youth use digital, vernacular, meditational, and visual literacies in everyday settings in to order to understand and create their new information landscapes. Information literacy enactment is agile and responsive to context.

Conclusion – Engaging with digital, vernacular, and visual information in a variety of contexts is central to how young refugees (re)form their information landscapes.