Ever since I started acting in the position of TL at a small Sydney primary school, I have been wondering, what is the right way to resource research? The non-fiction section contains no reference type books apart from some dictionaries and a couple of old “Guiness Book of Records”. Teachers do not borrow any non-fiction for their HSIE, Science and PDHPE topics. The school has no subscriptions or libguides/pathfinders of any kind and I still don’t even fully understand what those things are. No one I know has ever used a webquest or a pathfinder. I organised a trial subscription of the online Encyclopedia Britannica. The teachers loved it but when I included the reasonable price in the budget, the boss said “No. They can learn to Google it like everyone else.”
I feel that there is a need but I wanted to come back to her with hard evidence. I am yet to find it.
Farmer (2014) was a complete let down. Chapter 4 just assumes a need for reference texts – actual purchased texts or subscriptions – and discusses types, definitions and how to evaluate these collections. I want to evaluate if and when we need these collections in a 21st century primary school library at all.
I went back and read Farmer’s first chapter, What Does Reference and Information Service in Today’s School Look Like? (p.9) and this was the best he could do:
In most cases, the best “bang for your buck” is probably the library, and the school librarian is the most likely person to help you become an information expert for yourself. (p.11)
Probably? Not very convincing and still doesn’t mention which resources the teacher librarian will use to teach you to become an information expert. There is also an assumption here that students/people want to become an information expert. I don’t think they do. They want an answer and they want it fast so they will happily Google away and take the first answer. My first role as a TL is to teach students to be more critical. I also had to teach them that a TL is an information specialist and a library is the place to learn information literacy.
I also think it’s worth noting that my own high school aged children have never visited their school library once. They have never received a lesson on how to research and they did not know, I found out through ETL503, that their library has Learnpath.
So my search on what is best for research when it comes to primary school students continues. Feel free to help me please. Maybe I’ll know by the end of ETL501. Stay tuned…
References
Farmer, Lesley S.J.. Introduction to Reference and Information Services in Today’s School Library, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=1664627.
Created from csuau on 2021-08-07 07:10:21.
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