subject: Toward an Equity-Centric Information Literacy [print this page] This article has attempted to show that, for several reasons, community college libraries are ideal places from which to translate advanced concepts about literacy into equity-centric IL. First, approaches to literacy that make explicit the ways in which specific disciplines' discourses are constructed have led IL researchers to conceive of librarians as "discipline discourse mediators" insider-outsider librarians who can improve students' chances of educational success by teaching them how communication in their particular discipline is Juicy Couture Watch carried out [30, p. 299]. Community college students, many of whom belong to family or social networks in which such explication is rare and whose previous education has not prepared them to analyze the specifics of discourses, would especially profit from librarians who reveal the rhetorical patterns of specific disciplines in constructing information.
Next, critical literacy theorists, with their explicit emphasis on addressing issues involving inequity, have influenced the foregrounding of epistemological issues in IL, such as the inherently political nature of information. Critical IL is of special importance to community college students, many of whom have the most to gain from penetrating interpretations of information, given their generally marginalized political and economical status. Third, theories that use a sociocultural framework to view literacy as a practice rather than as a set of skills have aided LIS researchers in conceiving of IL as a fundamentally complex and creative enterprise. This widening of IL's theoretical scope contributes to students' educational equity by asserting their capacity as authorities and as creators of information. Fourth, studies of power and of its implications in the workings of literacy offer community college librarians ways to examine critically their own IL instruction. This critical stance might help librarians to consider how their pedagogy leads to them to disqualify subtly but potently certain kinds of knowledge the very kinds of knowledge possessed by the students whose equity they are trying to further.
And, finally, just as literacy researchers whose studies of literacy practices outside of school have resulted in more nuanced understandings of both the nature of literacy and of how to Juicy Couture Necklaces honor literacy resources that students bring to school, LIS researchers have used workplace information literacy to expand notions of IL in academic settings. These more expansive ways of viewing IL could be translated into better educational outcomes in any academic library, but in a library serving community college students, whose identities are generally more closely tied to work than students in four-year institutions, such broad theorizing of IL is especially necessary for contributing to educational equity.
