While preparing for my second assessment I have been overwhelmed with the repeated statements from educational researchers that teacher librarians need to be an integral part of the digital literacy environment.
At the same time I have attend the National Education Summit, 2023, where we were told about the systematic downgrading of librarian jobs even in the case of sophisticated and resource-rich schools like Riverview and then through the course we have discovered that there are hardly any teacher-librarians in Western Australia. In my own context there are about 46 schools in my Diocese, and only four teacher-librarians. I am currently training to be the fifth although the most experienced and proactive teacher librarian is about the retire.
It is an ironic situation that the more students need to navigate a difficult, biased, commercially influenced and ethically ambivalent web on a daily basis for their educational, social and entertainment purposes, yet they have less guidance than ever before.
As a former journalist, and an English and History teacher I am actively aware about the need to discuss bias within our sources. Conversely as a teacher I am also aware that it is important to manage students’ searches because there is a lot of garbage out there. As teachers we try not to ‘trick’ the students because we know how easy it is for them to be ‘tricked’ and believe an axiomatic biased source which will actually limit their understanding of the world. For example, in a recent history assignment a student had to find a ‘for’ and ‘against’ media source about a controversial figure, one student found an article on the Betoota Advocate, the satirical news site, and was unable to discern the unreliability of the site because it looked ‘real’.
While professionals and academics within the TL sphere are telling us that we must become advocates within our school, it has occurred to me that we need to be far more than that.
Advocacy needs to be addressed at the op end so that ACARA can ensure the roles and responsibilities of TL as specialists in multiple literacies, information literacies, literacy as well as the key resource for guided inquiry.
Small scale interventions will remain just that, small gains will be addressed by well-meaning principals who have to balance their school needs against other needs of limited time and resources.
Our governments need to ensure that all school libraries can support students and staff in gaining better literacy outcoms for everyone.
