The role of the Teacher Librarian (TL) within an educational setting is as varied and complex as the definition of what is “information”.  My career has seen me evolve from teaching in a Primary School setting to, being a parent relying on the Library services, to now working within a secondary school.  Through my experience with Teacher Librarians across those three aspects I have seen Teacher Librarians who are seen as critical to the operation of the school and those whose skills are underutilized and undervalued.

As a teacher, I used my Teacher Librarian as my collaborator in educating my students.  She assisted me in resourcing my elaborate ideas of units and seemed to instantly know what resource would be just perfect to help me convey my idea to my students.  We planned together and during the library lesson that I was allocated for my “non-contact time” my TL provided my class with lessons that were crucial to the development of their skills required for the unit of work we were completing at the time.   This was the teacher librarian exhibiting all three of the main roles of a Teach Librarian:  information specialist; information service manager and a Curriculum leader (Australian School Library Association, 2014).  I remember being quite shocked when I discovered that this was not how all the teachers used their time.  Many saw the library lessons as “baby sitting and borrowing”, as they had no idea what the teacher Librarian was doing with their class.  To me this was an absolute disrespect to the professional nature of the Teacher Librarian role.

Further insight into how Teacher Librarians are perceived by their colleagues and in particular administration was gained when I was a parent.  The enormity of the role of information management is often underrated and undervalued by the administration.  The extra hours and time that Library staff often has to put into to their libraries to manage their collection goes unseen.  As a parent, I would volunteer to assist in some of the menial, but crucial, tasks of covering books, sorting and culling the collection.  The continual flow of ‘hard’ resources that goes through a Primary School Library is hard to comprehend, that is until the aide gets sick and it piles up around the desk!  The only way for many Teacher Librarians to cope with this is to use volunteers to supplement the often meagerly staffed department they are in charge of, even though what is really necessary is more time and money to allow for the Teacher Librarian to embed themselves within each year levels planning meetings.

Currently I work within the secondary system, and in a world where many schools are underfunding their libraries and specialist teacher librarians running these libraries are in decline, we are endeavouring to make ourselves indispensable within the school community (Matthews,n.d.).  Despite what many schools thought when individual computers became the norm in Australian classrooms, both teachers and students needed someone to help them gain access to quality information and programs through these devices.  The overcrowded curriculum has certainly made it difficult for individual teachers to be on the cusp of all things digital, so many are turning to their Teacher Librarian for support and guidance.  This is where I currently see the role of the Teacher Librarian – acting as a conduit between the “information” the teachers, the students and the curriculum.

Works Cited

Australian School Library Association. (2014, March 2). What is a teacher librarian? Retrieved March 8, 2017, from ASLA – Australian School Library Association: http://www.asla.org.au/advocacy/what-is-a-teacher-librarian.aspx

Matthews, K. (n.d.). So where have all our school teacher librarians gone? Retrieved March 8, 2017, from Kidspot: http://www.kidspot.com.au/school/primary/real-life/so-where-have-all-our-school-teacher-librarians-gone