Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and Australian School Library Association (ASLA) policy to ensure resource provision (ALIA-ASLA, 2016) provides a framework from which TLs may align best practice. However, in order for school libraries to remain crucial to the achievements of the school community, standards of information management and retrieval must be more than culturally responsive, fulfilling national standards while connecting to informational environments that are borderless.
Much of the policy is concerned with enabling access to information. While “access is determined by school policies and local reality so with technology,
access to digital resources can be provided throughout the school and
beyond ” it remains critical that TLs as information professionals are aware of the topography of informational landscapes beyond the library (ALIA-ASLA, 2016). Equitable access to information resources requires both organization and skill development which in the 21st Century should consider the diversity of the everyday information needs of an increasingly globalized society.
While organization of collections should be based on a collection management policy developed by the school community led by the teacher librarian and school leaders, the mission of the school library, statements of freedom of information, the purpose for maintaining and developing the collection and long and short term goals regarding the provision of resources can only truly be said to be democratic in nature if they are inclusive of the learners who use them. As such, TLs should first ensure that national commitments to curriculum design are met in order to fulfil the egalitarian intent behind them.
I believe responsibilities for collaborative decision making when selecting high quality resources that support curriculum delivery
collections should be balanced with print and digital resources that are
diverse and informed by the everyday information needs of the user. However, this becomes challenging when faced with entrenched pedagogies that in fact discourage innovation in the relentless pursuit of evidence based practice.
Melbourne, where I reside, would appear to be one such seat of pedagogical orthodoxy where an unwavering allegiance to the theory of John Hattie has had irreversible impacts on the way young people approach learning and by extension, library collections.
Thomas Aastrup Rømer has been an outspoken critic of Hattie’s for some time (Rømer, 2005), and I am in agreement with many of the arguments he makes, warning of the potential consequences of Neoliberal policies like Visible Thinking and Learning. In particular, the following criticism of “Radical Constructivism” problematizes such interventions in ways that are immediately of concern for the TL as leader and community advocate, which I would like to unpack.
Rømer (2019) believes “First, the outside world is completely taken out of Hattie’s universe. Everything takes place in closed systems. There are no references to social, scientific, political or economic aspects of educational life.” This kind of negligent and presumptive position is one that erases the difference and cosmopolitan nature of pluralist societies. He then criticizes how “constructivism appears in a mutual reinforcement between two philosophical movements. One the one hand, radical constructivism was launched as an attack on ontological and normative theories of teaching, and its philosophical outlook corresponded very well with the emerging Luhmann-inspired system theory whose proponents are usually very excited about Hattie’s work. On the other hand, there is no room in Visible Learning for the current interest in the concept of Bildung and schooling and the accompanying discussions of educational critique and ontology.” Again, the blindness towards the individuation inherent in Bildung concepts of schooling may do much to in fact alienate learners from their own experience through cultural imposition. Rømer’s (2019) final criticism is that “constructivism can be identified in the fact that more traditional pedagogy, if mentioned at all, is put into the very simple and square categories”. I believe it is significant to acknowledge that an over simplification of existing cultural forms, in particular those connected with knowledge has implications for cultural erasure in globalised societies.
Lars Qvortrup’s criticism of Hattie’s school of Visible Thinking is much more pointed:
“Hattie’s theory is one of evaluation colonizing education. First, the overall goal of learning is that learners should be able to be ‘self-monitoring, self-evaluative, self-assessing and self-learning’ (Hattie, 2009, pp. 22, 37). The learner should even become a teacher: that is, an evaluative teacher who forces learners to set themselves through clear and measurable goals, goals that the learner will need to assess, evaluate and monitor in a maximizing and spiraling effect. Thus, the term ‘evaluation’ dominates even the most intimate pedagogical processes and relationships (Hattie, 2009, e.g. pp. 22, 24, 25 and 239). Evaluation is not something that happens after education; rather, education is simply defined by evaluation as such.” (Qvortrup, 2019)
Here the loaded designation of colonization is warranted. By focusing transferring accountability solely on to the learner, the intervention does just that, rupturing the connection between teacher, as mentor, and student. By constantly measuring themselves against set evaluative goals, students and to an even greater extent educators, limit their personal exploration and reflexivity in order to achieve prescribed outcomes. Most significantly, these interventions set up a hierarchy which tacitly promotes culturally biased measurements as universal.
I believe that TLs who wish to fulfil the moral obligations at the heart of a profession that is about serving the information needs of the others consider the implications of “transformational” educational agendas which seek to evaluation-based education. What are the implications for relationships of knowledge sharing where utility comes first? What room is there for the very meaningful conversations that allow for the exchange of intercultural understanding in a distributed and Democratic way?
In my opinion, TLs must lead from the middle in the sense that they should advocate for the inclusion, cultivation and promotion of existing and emerging intercultural knowledge in the development of collections, in order to protect the communities they serve from the pressures of conforming to an evaluative culture that is ultimately outside of us all.
References
Australian Library and Information Association & Australian School Library Association [ALIA-ASLA]. (2016). ALIA-ASLA policy on school library resource provision. https://read.alia.org.au/file/644/download?token=y9IlqYHE
Rømer, T.A. (2005). Learning and assessment in postmodern education. Educational Theory, 53(3), 313 – 327. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2003.00313.x
Rømer, T.A. (2019) A critique of John Hattie’s theory of visible learning, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(6), 587-598. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1488216
Qvortrup, L. (2019). Visible learning and its enemies – the missing link. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 5(1), 1-5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2019.1595386