A Kairos of the Critical - Teaching Critically in a Time of Compliance

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by jay

Critical pedagogy enables librarians to transform lives through teaching approaches that confront systems of power that privilege some while excluding others. Over the past decade, critical pedagogy has shifted from the margins to the center of higher education, shaped strongly by the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Yet higher education increasingly demands measurable, numeric outcomes. Exposing these tensions supports librarians in planning classroom responses grounded in critical information literacy.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Critical pedagogy in information literacy

Kairos as an analytic frame

Teaching in a time of compliance vs critical engagement

Tensions around the Framework for Information Literacy

A Kairos of the Critical: Teaching Critically in a Time of Compliance Emily Drabinski, Long Island University, Brooklyn Abstract The promise of critical pedagogy lies in its capacity to change lives as librarians try new ways of thinking and teaching that challenge systems of power that privilege some and not others. In the last ten years, critical pedagogy has moved from the margins to the center, most clearly in its influence on the new Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. Frames like Information has Value and Authority is Constructed have long been tenets of critical voices in the field, voices that can now be heard emanating from the center of our professional lives. And yet, critical approaches to teaching and learning face acute challenges from a higher education environment that increasingly values teaching and learning by the numbers, tying everything from accreditation to book budgets to quantifiable outcomes. Surfacing these tensions can inform the actions librarians take in the classroom. Keywords: Kairos; information literacy; Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education; critical pedagogy Drabinski, E. (2017) A kairos of the critical: Teaching critically in a time of compliance. Communications in Information Literacy, 11(1), 76-94. Copyright for articles published in Communications in Information Literacy is retained by the author(s). Author(s) also extend to Communications in Information Literacy the right to redistribute this article via other scholarly resources and bibliographic databases. This extension allows the authors'copyrighted content to be included in some databases that are distributed and maintained by for-profit companies. All other rights of redistribution are licensed by Communications in Information Literacy under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BYNC-SA 4 .0) . A Kairos of the Critical: Teaching Critically in a Time of Compliance The actions librarians take in their classrooms, at their reference desks, and in their institutions are informed by social, political, and economic contexts that influence the range of actions one can take—or even imagine possible to take—in any given moment (Drabinski, 2014). The Greek notion of kairos, or qualitative time, offers a lens that re-presents the moment from a useful analytic distance. Rather than interrogating whether a particular approach is right or wrong, a kairotic approach offers a way of analyzing the structures and claims that undergird particular decisions made at a range of scales, from individual classrooms to institutional statements of priority to professional associations and the stories they tell about the work that professionals do. Using kairos as an analytic frame enables a critique of the present as a time produced by structural forces, rather than as simply true or given. This article uses the idea of kairos, or time married to action and context, to articulate the challenge of the present moment for information literacy instruction. The usefulness of this heuristic for describing and discussion contemporary instruction practice is explored at length elsewhere (Drabinski, 2014). For the terms of this discussion, it is useful to revisit the meaning of the term. Chronos is ordinal time, or time that merely counts: 9:45am, Friday morning, June, or 2016. Kairos, a Greek idea of qualitative time, marries chronos time with social, political, and historical context to a sense of the present. Five o’clock in chronos is quitting time or happy hour in kairos. From the perspective of kairos, the question,“What time is it?” takes on a different valence. It asks us to consider and articulate the material conditions that produce a certain sort of present, and the decisions we feel called to make in that present. Five o’ clock understood from the perspective of kairos asks us to choose between a pint of beer, a glass of wine, or a seltzer in response to the

FAQs

Why is the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education important to this discussion?

It reflects the move of critical approaches from the margins toward the center and helps surface tensions in contemporary information literacy development and adoption.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by jay