The beginning: The role of a teacher librarian

As a busy teacher, concerned with my own curriculum planning and day-to-day workings of the school, I didn’t give much thought to the role of a teacher librarian. They were always lovely people, with a calming presence and sense of quiet contentment in their role, but I didn’t consider how their role intersected with mine.

This is potentially because the teacher librarians often weren’t visible in the school. This ‘invisibility’ of the school librarian may stem from the fact that many schools have librarians who are not qualified for the dual role of teacher and librarian, and therefore cannot deliver a true teacher librarian service. I can’t recall a time when I was encouraged to collaborate with the teacher librarian to resource the curriculum.

I have taught at three schools in my teaching career, and only one school had a designated teacher librarian who took my class for a 45-minute lesson each week. I don’t know what she did with my class during that time. All I knew was that my students would come back to class armed with beautifully illustrated picture books or thick fantasy novels, pop them into their bags, and then we’d move on to the next lesson.

At another school, although there was a large library stocked to the brim with material, unless I purposefully booked in a time slot to borrow books, my class didn’t spend any time interacting with the librarian. For me, quite ignorant of the role a librarian could play in the school, it was just the norm. Indeed, it was the norm for my fellow teacher colleagues too.

So, upon reflection, my understanding of the role of a teacher librarian was limited to a belief that they were there to create a nice environment that encouraged a love of reading in children – which I fully supported. I felt the library’s goal was to do just that: foster a love of books, make books accessible to children of all demographics, and to uphold the value of literacy in the school community. The annual Book Week parade was a rare moment of librarian visibility, and for that specific day you’d see the librarian outside their usual environment.

Further to that, I have always felt the role of a librarian was to inject a sense of fun around literacy by creating a lovely library atmosphere, peppered with colourful posters and comfy sofas, or organising the Scholastic Book Club forms.

These are all amiable and valuable roles, and ones that I felt, and still feel, would be enjoyable to fulfil. My prior understandings about the role of a teacher librarian may have been romanticised, but they made me slightly envious of the librarians, going about their work in an environment that I have always loved.

I know that my journey into teacher librarianship will take me much further beyond these roles and into an infinitely more complex and varied world.