The “College Fluency in Context” blog post series situates the concept of college fluency within library science and the study of higher education, emphasizing the lens it provides for reimagining the student experience and institutional equity. In our research, college fluency is defined as students’ ability to navigate and advocate for themselves within campus administrative structures, especially regarding non-academic matters. While curricular challenges remain a major focus of retention efforts, students’ struggles with non-curricular obstacles and institutional bureaucracy are equally consequential. These navigational barriers, especially as they relate to essential needs (food, housing, etc.), are prior to and frequently underpin academic difficulties.
This entry in the series delves into how college fluency might evolve beyond a strictly competency-based framing, which is rooted in a basic information literacy approach. It does so by advancing a theoretical framework that repositions college fluency as an interplay of critical information literacy, metaliteracy, and radical hospitality. When incorporated into college fluency efforts, these concepts augur an environment where students are co-creators of institutional knowledge, not just passive recipients of campus services. As a result, college fluency’s understanding of student self-advocacy shifts from an individualized capacity and skillset to a more collective, participatory, and transformative framework.
The piece also considers the role of libraries and librarians themselves in facilitating this shift at an institutional level. Teaching different forms of information literacy to students is already familiar terrain for college librarians. What many librarians have not yet considered is the importance of cultivating non-academic or noncurricular information literacies, as well as students’ potential role in reshaping their informational environments. The perspective that all student needs are academic needs ultimately reorients and enlarges librarians’ conception of information stewardship. As this piece will argue, this constitutes a call to reimagine higher education’s information ecology. College fluency emerges as not just a checklist of skills, but a critical practice of institutional literacy, where students and librarians jointly interrogate (and potentially reconstruct) the systems that shape their academic lives.
The Information Literacy Perspective
To begin, it may be useful to clarify how our research thus far has articulated and observed college fluency. In our analysis of college fluency initiatives at various colleges, we found that efforts aimed at improving students’ navigational experiences largely emphasized students’ capacity to learn and internalize information about campus bureaucratic structures. It is therefore natural to position this capacity within a broader framework of information literacy: the ability to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and use that information effectively. We can look to the ACRL Framework, which defines it as:
the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.
This skillset is traditionally applied to academic tasks like finding and assessing the credibility of sources; however, it is not confined to the classroom. Any structured environment, including a college, requires the interpretation and navigation of information in order to fulfill one’s needs. College fluency can be understood as the application of this skillset to the “information ecosystem” of the college itself. For example, a student who pieces together deadline information from multiple sources, or locates a particular service on a labyrinthine website, is engaged in core information literacy practices. The institution is the primary text being read, understood, and utilized.
An information literacy framing of college fluency is rooted in establishing key competencies, which is undoubtedly useful for teaching navigation skills. After all, information has its proper places and specific information requests must generally be directed through the proper channels. Nevertheless, this framing treats the institution’s informational structures as static and neutral. By emphasizing student adaptation as the goal, a competency-based model of college fluency overlooks crucial questions of how these information systems were constructed, who they inherently privilege, and how they might even be challenged. And while functional familiarity with existing systems is certainly important, a competency-based model alone risks casting students as mere recipients of institutional knowledge, normalizing backward or ineffective structures. It is precisely this limitation that critical information literacy is designed to address, which is where the expertise of librarians comes into play.
College Fluency and Critical Information Literacy
A subset of information literacy, critical information literacy (CIL) shifts the focus from how to access information to why information systems are designed in certain ways, as well as who wields power within those systems and whom they privilege. As applied to college fluency, CIL provides the framework to move beyond mere adaptation or competency, repositioning students’ navigational challenges as incipient critical inquiry. In light of students’ holistic needs, it compels librarians to ask:
Who designs institutional policies?
Whose needs are prioritized in resource distribution?
How do bureaucratic processes replicate exclusion?
How might institutions redistribute power through more equitable design?
From this perspective, students’ struggles are recast as evidence of inequitable structures, not necessarily personal failure. And unlike traditional models of student support, which emphasize discrete competencies and proficiencies, a CIL-informed view of college fluency centers the process of navigation (including navigational failures). It recognizes that institutional systems are neither static nor neutral; they reflect historical inequities and power asymmetries that disproportionately burden students of marginalized backgrounds. For example, first-generation students may lack parental or familial knowledge to parse opaque financial aid requirements, while student-parents may struggle to reconcile in-person or hybrid class schedules with their childcare needs.
This directly challenges the institutional paradigm that silos “academic” and “non-academic” student needs. Such distinction constitutes a false binary that overlooks how navigation writ large (e.g., understanding deadlines, accessing mental health services, or decoding administrative policies) directly shapes academic success. By contrast, a process-based lens transforms college fluency from a neutral skill set into a tool for broader institutional literacy: a means of decoding and contesting hidden hierarchies.
At the same time, critical information literacy reframes the self-advocacy component of college fluency. Rather than reducing advocacy to individual perseverance—i.e., the classic refrain, “just ask for help”—CIL positions self-advocacy within systemic critique. When students are encouraged to articulate their personal needs, they often cannot do so without identifying structural flaws, advocating for extended deadlines, or highlighting how current policies may disadvantage working students or student-parents. College fluency, as a critical praxis, develops student agency to not just navigate but potentially reshape these systems.
College Fluency and Metaliteracy
The concept of metaliteracy, as articulated by Mackey and Jacobson (2011), expands the above framework to consider the socially embedded nature of critical literacies. Taking a meta-level approach to literacy, they argue for a “shift in emphasis from discrete skills to collaborative production and sharing of information using participatory interactive technologies,” further complicating the notion of literacy as an individualized, competency-based endeavor.
When applied to college fluency, metaliteracy reveals the inherently collective nature of institutional navigation and resource access. Institutional navigation emerges as collaborative, as students regularly share non-curricular insights through informal networks. They text their peers, crowdsource advice via group chats or Reddit, and reshare TikTok tutorials or Instagram infographics demystifying financial aid. These organic, peer-to-peer knowledge networks exemplify metaliteracy, where students relay and co-produce institutional knowledge.
Metaliteracy also underscores the role of new technologies in not just facilitating but also democratizing navigation. Whereas institutional websites and portals often prioritize administrative efficiency over user experience, students increasingly rely on open knowledge to bypass opaque systems. Students are already co-creating institutional knowledge informally and in a way that is both legitimate and valuable. These practices highlight a tension between institutional control and student agency, positioning metaliteracy as a subtle form of resistance.
Libraries, as student-facing hubs of information stewardship, are uniquely positioned to amplify these informal networks, rendering the subtle, less subtle. By providing venues and platforms for students to share their navigational strategies—such as “how-to college” zine events or hosting screen-recorded videos of campus portals from students’ perspective—libraries can transform isolated student insights into communal resources. For example, a library might host a digital repository of student-authored videos and guides to accessing non-curricular resources, both on- and off-campus. Such initiatives not only produce more relatable content, but they also validate students as experts in their own experiences, eroding traditional hierarchies of institutional expertise.
Critical information literacy and metaliteracy converge in their emphasis on self-advocacy. Yet self-advocacy in this framework transcends mere individual assertiveness: It becomes a collective praxis whereby students leverage shared knowledge to challenge inequitable systems. Self-advocacy draws upon direct collaboration (pooling peer experiences) and critical inquiry (exposing flawed institutional design). College fluency as a collective framework bridges personal agency and structural critique.
However, self-advocacy is not without barriers; it is ultimately mediated by power. Marginalized students face institutional gaslighting or cultural stigma when asserting their needs, often dismissed as “anecdotal,” particularly when navigating systems that were not designed with their identities in mind. Fostering self-advocacy requires more than encouraging students to “speak up” or “offer feedback” in narrowly circumscribed spaces or through sanctioned channels such as student government. While student services ought to create and expand formal channels for student feedback, they should also acknowledge moments in which student concerns are not “properly” voiced—for example, through angry and exasperated requests to library staff, or graffiti on the walls—recognizing the human experiences behind these frustrations.
Radical Hospitality
To fully realize college fluency, institutions must embrace radical hospitality, a concept that reimagines support services as mutual partnerships rather than transactional exchanges. Radical hospitality demands that libraries, advising centers, and other service hubs relinquish their roles as gatekeepers of institutional knowledge and recognize students as potential co-designers of navigational systems. Radical hospitality’s guiding philosophy rejects transactional models of student support; instead, it calls for institutions to cede control over knowledge production and embrace students as genuine partners. Rooted in feminist standpoint theory, such practices acknowledge that those most impacted by bureaucratic barriers are also the best equipped to diagnose and dismantle them.
This participatory approach requires a degree of institutional vulnerability, namely acknowledging that navigational barriers stem from flawed policies rather than student inadequacy. To involve students in both identifying needs and designing solutions models a commitment to distributed governance. To support this vision, librarians would also have to reimagine their role as facilitators of student-led knowledge ecosystems. This might involve:
- Platforming student expertise: Hosting open knowledge initiatives where students can contribute to institutional repositories.
- Demystifying technology: Paying students to create screen-recorded tutorials of campus webpages and portals, emphasizing in a relatable way how to troubleshoot common issues, or how to identify resources like less costly zero-textbook course sections.
- Building peer networks: Designing informal tabling events or digital forums where students exchange strategies for accessing resources, fostering organic mentorship and solidarity.
All these efforts align with metaliteracy’s emphasis on participatory learning, while also embodying critical information literacy. By centering vernacular, student-generated knowledge, libraries can model radical hospitality that redefines institutional spaces as co-owned and co-created environments.
Conceptual Integration: Toward a College Fluency-Centered Campus
The interplay of critical information literacy, metaliteracy, self-advocacy, and radical hospitality forms a cohesive theoretical framework underpinning college fluency:
- Critical information literacy exposes power structures in institutional systems, prompting the questions, who benefits from this policy? And who does this policy exclude?
- Metaliteracy enables collaborative knowledge production through participatory technologies, transforming students into co-creators of navigational resources.
- Self-advocacy empowers students to act on their needs and voice their critiques.
- Radical hospitality creates the conditions for these elements to thrive by redefining institutional spaces (especially libraries) as co-owned environments.
Taken as a whole, this framework challenges institutions to center marginalized expertise.
Some may protest this reframing as “yet another responsibility” for already overstretched library staff, particularly in under-resourced community colleges. But college fluency is not an external or novel obligation; it is embedded in the information work that librarians already perform. When students seek support navigating bureaucratic systems, they are engaged in information-seeking behaviors, just as much as when they request help finding sources for a paper. Recognizing this continuum requires validating all student questions as “academic,” to the extent that every barrier to navigation ultimately conditions academic persistence.
Integrating this vision into existing library roles does not require wholesale reinvention. For instance, an outreach librarian might collaborate with student affairs to co-host “How to College” workshops that demystify institutional portals and deadlines. Instruction librarians can scaffold discussions of “non-academic” information into first-year experience programs, emphasizing that food security, housing stability, and scheduling logistics are inseparable from scholarly success. By coordinating with student affairs divisions, libraries need not bear the responsibility alone, but can bring their expertise in organizing, contextualizing, and disseminating information to collective efforts that address student needs holistically.
These practices do not fall outside the purview of academic librarianship, to the extent that it has long defined its mission as ensuring equitable access to information. If we expand our conception of “information” to include the institutional knowledge that conditions academic survival, then supporting students in decoding financial aid forms or locating childcare services is not a departure from our mission, but its logical continuation.
Conclusion: College Fluency as Democratic Practice
This piece has aimed to articulate a vision of college fluency grounded in critical inquiry. To borrow Paolo Freire’s concept from critical pedagogy, conscientização (critical consciousness), students are not passive recipients of institutional knowledge but agents who regularly question the social contradictions structuring their environments. For example, a first-generation student who questions why academic protocols assume familiarity with university hierarchies, and remarks upon it to her peers, is automatically engaged in critical praxis. This aligns with bell hooks’ (1994) vision of education as “the practice of freedom,” where education becomes a tool to dismantle barriers rather than merely adapt to them.
For libraries, this requires situating college fluency within their existing commitments, rather than treating it as an add-on. By embedding critical fluency practices into outreach, first-year instruction, and student affairs partnerships, libraries can both honor their information stewardship mission and avoid overextending staff through duplication of services. The goal is not to take on “more,” but to reconceptualize what libraries already do as central to fostering equity in higher education.
This framework invites policymakers within higher education to view students not as users of services, or even token contributors to design philosophy, but as potential architects of institutional change. Embedding principles of critical inquiry and collective self-advocacy into campus culture emphasizes equity as a lived practice and honors students as partners in the ongoing project of institutional accountability. College fluency is about students not merely surviving institutions, but fundamentally reshaping them.
