Information Literacy as Counter-Cultural: A Jesuit Perspective

The results of  the reports, "How Teens Do Research in the Digital World" and  "Children, Teens, and Entertainment Media: The View from the Classroom", raise some relevant issues concerning teens current use of technology.  In today's culture teens main use of technology is for entertainment and most will tell you they find it to be a pervasive distraction. For the majority of teens it is not viewed as a learning tool. They come by this view honestly since so few of them have seen technology and digital media meaningfully incorporated into learning and teaching.

The National Forum on Information Literacy defines information literacy as “...the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand.”  That sounds so simple yet it proves to be an incredibly hard literacy to teach because we have allowed the current digital media/entertainment culture to have a stranglehold over our children's time online.  It is time to make a change. 

Jesuit institutions pride themselves on being counter-cultural and rightly so.  We incorporate characteristics such as Religious, Loving, and Commitment to Social Justice into our curriculum because we strongly believe they will inspire young men and women to be agents of change in a complex, global world. 
We are counter-cultural because we raise awareness, have discussions, offer alternatives and encourage behavior modification to include new sets of habits.  We will be counter-cultural when we teach a new set of digital habits that apply to Intellectual Competency and  Information Literacy. Teens who can effectively manage the onslaught of information, find meaning and share new knowledge in a productive and efficient manner truly will be men for and with others. 

In order to form young men for the 21st century and beyond it is our duty to embrace the digital world and model positive online habits. To do otherwise is to fail in our responsibilities as educators.