I have been a primary school teacher for 17 years and have taught all grades from Kindergarten to Year 6. In those years I have worked and taught at various Catholic and Independent schools with students from a variety of social, ethnic and academic backgrounds. Over the years I have had the opportunity and pleasure to work with some brilliant teacher librarians who have inspired me to develop my competencies as a classroom teacher and become a teacher librarian.

One teacher librarian that stands out as an inspiration was from the first school at which I taught. She was very passionate and created an inviting space that reflected her love for books and reading. Many weeks throughout the year the library would be themed and lessons would be centred on the theme. Even the librarian herself would dress up! As a result, the students were always engaged and excited to attend their library lesson each week.  Part of her role was to manage the library’s collection of resources.  She was often very helpful and knowledgeable and would encourage teachers to give her a list of their requirements at the beginning of the term of which was then promptly completed.  Frequently, she would go above and beyond to find additional resources that she thought teachers may need or would offer further suggestions to consider. One thing I was surprised to learn was that much of the time that it took for her to collect and find the resources was after school hours. As a one stream school she felt over stretched as there was very limited relief from face to face teaching to do the many duties her role required.

As teacher librarians I feel we need to draw upon education policies to provide inquiry-based learning using an information skills model (Brock, 2010, p.9). In the ASLA submission Federal Parliamentary Inquiry into school libraries and teacher librarians in Australian schools (Brock, 2010, p.15) it outlines that ‘teacher librarians are needed more than ever to take on a leadership role to assist teachers and students to engage with digital technologies to seek meaning not information. Assisting and instructing students and teachers to ‘use digital technology, communication tools, and/or networks to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge society (Serim, 2002 pp.1-5). Developing digital literacy competencies is a key role of teacher librarians.

The teacher librarian needs to manage a budget and select reading material that contributes to student appreciation of literature and that appeal to the differing interests, abilities and changing tastes of young readers. Further collection development in the school library requires the selection of resources in a variety of formats to cater for individual differences (Stripling 1996, p.5). They need to create a library that is comfortable, well lit and appealing to students. Signage and labelling should be clear and instructive. There should be places to display all aspects of student work. The library is for students and they should have a sense of ownership (Brock, 2010, p. 9).

References

http://asla.org.au

A Response to Digital Transformation: A Framework for Information Communication Technologies (ICT) Literacy. Retrieved from:  http://www.big6.com/showarticle.php?id=157

focus on learning. In Library Trends 44(3) 631-657. Retrieved from: http://libsnap.dom.edu/Reserves/Removed%20Reserves/Lis764Cason_Quality.htm.