1) The document analyzes information practices of teenagers across three spaces: the classroom, school library, and home. 2) It discusses the school library as a "heterotopic place," meaning it is a space that challenges the norms and power structures of the school institution by allowing more informal learning. 3) Using ethnographic research methods like observation and interviews, the document examines how the school library facilitates connections between students and documents in a more open environment compared to the disciplined classroom, making it a paradoxical space within the school.

1. School library as a heterotopic place
Béatrice Micheau
Laboratoire GERiiCO
Université de Lille 3

2. INTRODUCTION

PhD on information practices of teenagers
in the north of France

Three main different spaces of information
practices : classroom, school library, home

Teenager's day life

Informal and informal practices at the crossing
of these three spaces

3. INTRODUCTION

These three spaces influence pupil’s information practices without
determining them unequivocally and mechanistically

production, circulation and reception of documents and thus to the
building of an information culture, within an anthropological meaning
(Goody 1979, Olson 2010).

« Information Literacy » as « a set of knowledge and skills shared in a
community which allow to situate, to locate, to qualify, to treat and to
communicate relevant information”(Béguin-Verbrugge et Kovacs,
2011)

4. INTRODUCTION

understanding the links between information practices and
social spaces of document would make explicit the role of
the practice places (De Certeau, 1990) in the building of
information literacy (Maury, 2011)
− classroom, school library and home are the three main
spaces where are built pupil’s information literacy, by
different modes of production and circulation of documents.
− school library as a practice place whose location and
operation would make him a heterotopic place as defined
by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 2001)
− Ethnic-semiotic approach

5. INTRODUCTION

information literacy as the result of interbreeding and
contradictions between three cultures / info-documentary areas:
the disciplinary culture of the classroom, the library
heterogeneous culture and the family culture at home

school library is an in-between, a frontier

6. FRAMEWORK

informal info-documentary practices of students

forms of document authority

ethnographic method of observation and data
collection

The notion of informal practice overlaps with that of
the ordinary practice

Report to the rules, the standards

7. FRAMEWORK

Michel de Certeau

the concept of informal practice refers to ways
of doing things, to be effective, to escape/to
avoid power relations (symbolic or not), related
to a system or an order, and in particular by
using diversion practices

how pupils try to avoid or to play with the
disciplinary and / or documentary order in their
information practices

Destabilization on the Internet

8. FRAMEWORK

validate (affix a value to) documents or document
fragments on the Internet

a contradictory notion: the informal practices of
validation, prioritization of documents

the document as text registration and definition of text
genre

the relationship between prescription (standard) and
practices in the definition of information literacy

document is understood in a broad sense as any unit
of meaning, text fragment, multimedia registration,
recorded signification

9. FRAMEWORK

standardized signs of identification and separation of texts
as a source of qualification or disqualification of
documents (semiotic)

two scientific issues:
− the definition of document as text registration
− the links between information literacy standards and
formal and informal practices.
==> an anthropological notion: the notion of space.
==> how a document space is transformed into a document
place.

10. Documents as text spaces

Analyzing document spaces is questioning the
notion of document as
− text crystallization,
− deferred act of communication

Document organizes the elements of cognition
or re-cognition of the texts

the researcher-reader wants to collect, identify
signs of identity, classification, validation of
encountered documents or document
fragments.

11. Documents as text spaces

Document overflows normally the text by
formalizing signs of identity and authority of
texts

Author function : Michel Foucault and Roger
Chartier

«Author » as a text function is primarily a
function of separation which allows texts to
emerge and crystallize, formalize and
institutionalize discursive formations

12. Documents as text spaces

The document spatial arrangement of text and
knowledge spaces (class, school library), are in the
same time
− a mediation place of the texts,
− a material inscription of texts
− a formalization of signals and signs denoting or
connoting authorities of the text (author, publisher,
genre of discourse).

13. Document as text spaces

Collecting books in a library affixes their documentary
value.

Organizing documents in classification schemes, it is a
way to build a documentary landscape.

Bringing documents in the class room is a way to
legitimate their use in the academic discipline.

document legitimacy by their collection haven’t the
same meaning according to different places in the
school.

14. Documents as text sapces

Information literacy : not only good practices to use
information system

Information literacy : skills and knowledge necessary
to search, find, locate, classify the documents or
documentary fragments

anthropological construction of documentary value

Write culture :Jack Goody and David R. Olson

An anthropological approach requires understanding
the document’s circulation spaces as symbolic places
and co-constructing agents of info-documentary
culture

15. Information literacy between
standards and practices

Acquiring, manufacturing, grouping, prohibiting
documents and document practices contribute
to the building of an information culture/literacy.

Staging, putting into space, making visible
(mediating) and thus excluding, hiding,
forbidding documents and document practices
involve also the acquisition of an information
literacy/culture.

Consider spaces as implicit or explicit
document standards involve an info-
documentary learning.

16. Information literacy between
standards and practices

text separation practice embodied by a
dynamic between
− the document signs and forms (especially in
the physical space of the classroom and
library school) and
− document uses,
− adjustment practices,
− misuses of disciplinary and / or documentary
order.

17. Information literacy between
standards and practices

The building of informal information practices is
the result of the confrontation between
− the more or less explicit teacher’s or
librarian’s discourses,
− the demands of their discipline in information
quality and text authority
− family information practices of the pupils

18. Method and context

Ethnographic method

Observations of class rooms, courses, liibrary
school

Collecting data, texts, documents...

Semi-directive interviews with teachers,
librarian and pupils

Ethno-semiotic approach (Le Marec, Jeanneret)

Ecological approach (Bronfenbrenner, Bateson)

19. Proxemy of spaces in the secondary
school

Space as artefact

not only material but also symbolic, a human
being extension whose sense analyses has
been formulated in the concept of “proxemy” by
Stuart Hall (Hall, 1971)

A “proxemic” analysis of document spaces
− how school library, over-meaning space, strongly
organized, panoptic landscape of the document
collection (Jacob et Baratin 1996) could also be
paradoxically considered as a “semi-fixed” space: a
space where distance and link rules between
human beings and/or objects are less restrictive

20. Proxemy of spaces

Classroom = a disciplinary and “fixed” space
where material features and hidden structures
are very restrictive and that organizes individual
segregation (a “sociofugal” space)
− pedagogical simultaneity,
− magisterial authority,
− disciplinary overseeing
− school supervision
==> text and document production and circulation
are subjects to the constraints of the curriculum
and to the magisterial power

21. Proxemy of spaces

the strongly oriented and segregated space of classroom,
other documents than the 'purely' school documents have
a little place

Textbooks, incarnations of the program are the main
documents present even in the form of fragments
recomposed through teachers handouts.

the filter of the textbook or of the teacher.

Subject to the magisterial authority, the requirements of
the programs, documents and their visible aspects
disappear.

Lost of their editorial enunciation

22. Proxemy of spaces

In conflict with this space, library school promotes
connections between students themselves, between
students and the teacher-librarian, between students
and documentary objects

Fragmented into differentiated subspaces, school
library presents to students
− a paradoxical place
− where the power of the library is unfolded
− and the authority of scholarship is diluted, in the
same time

23. School library as a circulation space : a
heterotopia

School library is a circulation space, a place of
passages (Jeanneret 2008) where documents
and info-documentary practices,
heterogeneous and heterodox learning forms
are confronted

Semi-public space (Maury 2011°

Open space but also over-meaning and
hierarchical space
− Effective and real place of a post-modern school utopia of
pupil’s empowerment and culture sharing, school library
could be characterized as a heterotopic place as defined
by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 2001a): a deviation place
wished but rejected by school institution

24. School library as a circulation space : a
heterotopia

Foucault

two types of significant spaces : utopias and
heterotopias

Utopias are locations which have with society a report
of analogy, reversed or not reversed

Heterotopias are the real locations, the spaces which
become places, places shaped by the institution but
which have more or other symbolic significations than
the common significations of the institution, like
“utopias really effective”

principles

25. School library as a circulation space : a
heterotopia
principles

various heterotopias

each society uses heterotopias in different ways

the capacity of heterotopias of juxtaposing different sub-areas

heterotopias are also heterochronias

Heterotopias :places of different use

Heterotopias : places of normal use

26. Conclusion

School library is finally a place
− between formal and informal practices,
− between legitimated knowledge and ordinary
creativity,
− between teacher’s uttering and pupil’s tactics
(De Certeau 1990).

School library is a place which questions the
professional identity of the librarian-teacher