Category: ETL401

Part C

Throughout the ETL401 unit I have deepened my understanding of the contextual and discipline specific nature of information literacy. The transformation of data, through processing, into information and the analysis of information into knowledge occurs in different ways in different situations. Not all information is transmitted through the written word as intangible culture incorporating movement, sound, and art each have their own practitioner norms of transmission and thresholds of fluency. I enjoyed the early discussions on the nature of information in the discussion forum where I had discovered modern librarianship as an “amalgamation of Librarianship and Information Science and the latters origin in electrical engineering combined with mathematical treatments of logic”. The library model is not limited to just texts even if that is what most libraries focus on but on information; and providing access to it for its target audience. In my very first blog post for the course on March 15 reflected from my more naive understanding of the teacher librarian role I felt it involved maintaining a multifunctional space and broad resources. This is true as far as it stands but the role in promulgating information literacy was unknown to me. Visitors who want more than to pull random books off a shelf can be empowered to navigate the catalog with boolean logic, to uncover shelves of content they never knew they missed by understanding the Dewey taxonomy, and to research without fear or feeling overwhelmed through metacognitive perspective of how they will continue their process through to conclusion.

I also posited a couple of theories that were not supported by the literature of the course. Firstly on May 5 that information literacy has a fractal nature due to the granular nature of the information landscape and each individual’s unique experiences “of how you define, search, process, store, and retrieve the components of information you choose to engage with” and secondly on May 6 that “digital literacy of the navigation of hardware, software, and connectivity” was a part of information literacy once moved from the abstracted world of theory and into the classroom.

 

Having an understanding of the academic models of information literacy contextualises both my past and future practice as an educator. On May 4 I blogged of my circus teaching framework “teaching individual skills with props as ‘words’ and developing sequences of tricks as ‘sentences’ with the goal of students being empowered to rearrange and reconfigure” to self express. This self-created metaphorical framework aligns with classical definitions of literacy but in future working in school libraries I feel Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process especially as enacted through the Guided Inquiry model has a more evidence based appeal. I noticed when meeting my peers for a study session that each was very keen to continue with whichever information literacy model they were already using in their school as the cognitive cost of translating their practice into another form was prohibitive. Our course materials in describing information literacy models stated there are “multiple skills for a range of evolving formats and delivery modes [and that] IL is more a way of knowing and thinking. IL is about being able to solve problems, access and use the right information and then re-purpose this information to meet a specific need” and so the model either needs to be highly abstracted and generalised or highly specific to a particular discipline or outcome.

 

The teacher librarians role in inquiry learning comes from the ability to “establish preeminence in our domain of information literacy, and to lift students and teachers towards excellence with our expertise” as I reflected in my March 23 blog post the words of Karen Bonannaro’s 2011 Keynote I realise that teacher training will always have gaps where specialists have a role to support and the teacher librarian training in navigating information collections and role in teaching others to gain competency and then fluency in the same. Part of the teacher librarians ethical obligations in this role is to critically illuminate for students “the imperial origins of our information institutions constructed in the Western ideological ideal of taxonomic breadth, hierarchical control, and limited accessibility”, which I mention in my May 22 blog post, and how this affects the presentation, organisation, and navigation of libraries. Well supported inquiry learning over time will allow students to understand and question these invisible boundaries and unspoken rules that surround them and allow them to eventually engage in active informed citizenry which is the goal of our current education system.

Information Literacy is a mildly amorphous concept given that it is dependent on the context and purpose that the term is being deployed in.

The assumptions of what it involves will differ whether you are a teacher, librarian, researcher, apprentice, artist, or tenured professor.

There is also  a fractal aspect to the quest for information literacy as the deeper you go the further you can venture into your individual experience of how you define, search, process, store, and retrieve the components of information you choose to engage with.

I have become fascinated with the criticisms of anthropologist Jean Lave and her ethnographic work demonstrating that competency is socially mediated. She showed that mathematical applications that are fluently possessed in the grocery store can be diminished in other contexts such as formal testing. This presumably also applies to information literacy and the uphill battle in getting students to engage and practice in contexts where they feel they do not or can not excel due to the social context.

Information literacy beyond the surface level is also discipline dependent and personality dependent so the cultural norms that shape the pathways we take will also structure the selection of tools and practices we use along our journey.

The concept of students learning to be literate and this consisting of reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and understanding as mediated and enabled by by the written word is an anachronistic model of how learners need to function in the contemporary world.

The New London Group (2000) redefined the nature of literacy teaching as multiliteracies that function within any semiotic activity embedded within a design framework of available designs, designing, and redesigning. This theoretical framework and pedagogical approach has the benefit of being generally applicable within any learning discourse or subject area. It focuses on communication as the nature of what literacy is applied to and empowering the learner to know what is possible, how they can interact with that, and turning it to their own purpose.

The false dichotomy of behaviorism and constructivism figures into this as well. Our students are not merely vessels to be filled and yet without a foundation to engage from they will not be able to aim their engagement particularly high.

Even before I was qualified as a teacher and worked teaching circus skills to students I had my own framework of teaching individual skills with props as “words” and developing sequences of tricks as “sentences” with the goal of students being empowered to rearrange and reconfigure the work to make their own sentance sequence which reflected their own identity and passion.

This model uses the older version of literacy as a metaphor to enable progress in a physical discipline. The same metaphor can work in digital disciplines or even more disparate ones. Learn the components, learn how they fit together, empower yourself to rearrange them and create meanings that are meaningful to yourself.

References

The New London Group (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. In B. Cope & Kalantiz, (Eds.), Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures 9-37. London: Routledge.

How do the dimensions of quality teaching relate to inquiry learning and project-based learning approaches?

Inquiry is central to modern pedagogy. How else to engage the affective domain, involve students to have skin in the game, or make learning meaningful to the learner.

The approaches of Guided Inquiry, in which collaboration between Teacher Librarians and Classroom Teachers guide students through curriculum based inquiry units, or the Project Based Learning that allows longer engagement with multiple areas of the curriculum and various ways of working can both be linked to the Quality Teaching Framework. This framework seeks to position classroom teaching, assessment practices, critical reflection, and analysis of contemporary teaching practices within 3 dimensions and 6 elements within each of these dimensions. These 18 components are then so broad that it would be difficult not to be able to connect any other educative practice with them.

It seems with the standards of AITSL for teachers, the standards of ALIA for teacher librarians, and the Quality Teaching Framework’s 18 dimensions there is not going to be much room for teaching or library work that does not revolve around justifying oneself continually.

Reflection is an essential component of self improvement but the extent of the growth of managerialism with its flowcharts and grids, distrust of the individual teacher’s agency and intent, as well as the neoliberal empasis on creating the next model different from the others and selling it as the answer to all of the education systems issues leads to a cacophony of administrative obligations that will not all be fufilled and shortcuts will be sought in order to make time for actual teaching.

The positives of a coherent approach across a whole school are multifaceted. The careful leadership of a principal may guide an education community into effective pathways. But the mess left by Australia’s federalism and the impacts on education from multiple reforms and schema from different levels emphasise the issues facing a country with more government officials per capita than any other in the world.

Given that the first assignment for ETL401 – Introduction to Teacher Librarianship was starting this blog I always knew I would get more out of assignment 2. Essay writing is the force majeure of university learning and I did enjoy getting to pick my own topic though was disheartened to hear that it was the one that “everyone picks” according to a recent online meeting.

I chose makerspaces for my discussion essay and corralled my research into makerspaces within school libraries though my interest is much broader. When I was an Education Officer at the National Museum of Australia and “A History of the World in 100 Objects” toured to our temporary exhibition gallery one of the displays that affected me was “Durer’s Rhinoceros Print”. The curation of this  work was done through a holographic plate, as well as the original, and as part of our offerings we also offered a downloadable CAD file for a 3D statue based on the work. Seeing my role as the connector of all things I started advising people that the ACT public library Civic branch had a makerspace with a 3D printer and that if they wanted to engage this way then that would be awesome. I never heard if anyone actually went ahead and did it. Another exposure that peaked my interest was when I visited a startup hub in NZ and one of the projects they had going on was to visit schools and get kids to design and redesign rockets in an iterative process which would get them not only excited but also engaged in making practical decisions with outcomes resourced by the business’s makerspace.  None of these educational makerspace engagements have involved any school libraries that I am aware of. But the projects I discussed in my discussion essay of ways of memorialising and physicallising the process of grief through badge making, of iterating transmedia storytelling all the way through to an automatic animatronic outcome, and exposure to the fields that students would have to select to focus on in secondary school using the creative, playful, and powerful potential of a school library makerspace all resonated as successful projects also.  I theorise that whether a project is internally driven or externally driven is more about where the personal and resources are located within a community. As to what drives that location it is a matter of socioeconomics, norms, and the sustained passions of the participants of those communities.

Upon reflection of Karen Bonannaro’s Keynote the question of whether school librarians are an endangered species is a resounding no.

The issues of economic rationalisation, job convergence, and people with business focused qualification being put in positions of overall decision making leads to a general invisibility of the importance of any particular role in the education system.

Karen suggests the pathway for school librarians through this contemporary cultural milieu is to progress through AITSL’s standards towards highly accomplished or lead , to establish preeminence in our domain of information literacy, and to lift students and teachers towards excellence with our expertise.

My formal experience as a teacher is limited to the two terms and two weeks that I taught two classes a circus elective in a secondary school in Canberra. During my Graduate Diploma of Education I was inducted into the library system used by the Ngaanyatjarra Lands School, I observed library lessons at The Southport School, and utilised the hardware resources during my practicum at the school that eventually employed me.

During my education studies I saw the library was the schools hub of technology. Whether accessing trolleys of Ipads, seeing lessons utilising sharing across multiple google apps, or being the site of the most effectively functioning Interactive Whiteboard. The library is not only the repository of information but of interfaces in software and hardware.

The school librarian I worked with was managing cloud based systems of resource booking as well as traditional literacy promotion through the coordination of parent volunteers doing co-reading and the posting of physical book reviews by teachers on the library walls.

The library space was utilised by a wide range of school needs, and this was facilitated by the teacher librarian, including whole staff professional development, parent teacher interview nights, and the live streaming of performances from other states for my circus elective classes.

My understanding is that a teacher librarian must facilitate a flexible space in which multiple uses can occur simultaneously. This includes the breadth, medium, and conservation of resources for learning suitable across the entire age range using the library. Due to the inevitable limits of capital expenditure it also involves understanding the compromises that a library faces and being able to coherently argue for the best outcomes for your community based on your perceptions of the various opportunity costs involved.

One of the most exciting roles I perceive for teacher librarians is that they are not merely reactive to technology, though they are willing to take direction and requests from the community they serve, but also predictive; of what tools and skills will need to be accessed by their students in the future. This leads to opportunities to involve Makerlabs, programming, robotics, and the tools that do not exist yet and will not have been developed till I finish my own Masters qualifying me in librarianship.

My experiences in being a formally qualified educator has seen me spend more time in museums than schools and every museum I have worked in has had a library to support its wide variety of staff. These libraries and their enthusiastic staff have aided me in researching for programs I have devised, facilitating my self directed professional development, and in diving deep into new domains of knowledge when changing institutions. I believe that a teacher librarian is well suited to this context and it is where I would like to make my contribution to the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector as an experienced museum worker, qualified teacher, and ALIA (Australian Library and Information Association) registered librarian.