Tag: Roleoftheteacherlibrarian

e-Literature and e-Trends – How will technology impact the TL?

Monica CoddingtonLeave a comment

Libraries are changing – this is no secret for those of us who are patrons to and managers of libraries. They are adapting and growing and developing – changes that are being made in light of, most significantly, Web 2.0 technologies. The school library I work in, and the libraries I visit, look vastly different from the libraries I had access to as a teenager even 8 years ago. There is a growing movement towards eBooks, where students can access the library collection online from any device. What a world to live in…

On the rise is the newer trend, one that appeals to young students’ love not only of engaging with stories, but also with technology – a source of much contention and yet such potential as a learning device (Stasiak, 2011). Since iPads have risen in popularity, producers have worked to create interactive eBooks for younger audiences – some as young as 18 months old (Stasiak, 2011). In these apps, children can direct the story themselves. They see the effect of their actions as they make decisions to drive the story along a path of their own choosing, listening to and watching their “character” interact with the space they inhabit. Children and students can now be more immersed in a story than ever before.

However, consider this: in a world where library patrons can access the books they require and desire using a tablet whenever they please, and when young children can (and might prefer) interacting physically with a story that they guide themselves on a tablet device, working independently and at their own pace, what role does the TL now play in schools?

Haughton (2015) provides a comprehensive list of quality interactive eBooks for young children, highlighting the educational benefits of each. Some have explicit links to STEM, some inspire curiosity and wonder. Others re-create classic texts with more interactivity (seemingly for the sake of it). Here the TLs role shifts. Now, there is opportunities for TLs to introduce worlds to students through print-based books, and then guide deeper exploration in such worlds through interactive apps. The possibilities of integrating STEM into library lessons also becomes more possible and engaging with interactive digital books such as “TinyBop: The Human Body” for primary school aged children. The TL can move towards fostering curiosity and wonder-driven immersion in books where students can immediately explore cause and effect and learn in a more interactive manner than ever before. Still, then, in this sense is the TL a facilitator of student-driven learning.

However, Haughton also makes clear that there is an abundance of such texts in the digital world. It is important, now more than ever, that the TL acts as collection manager of a collection of quality, and conducts thorough research into these programs and books prior to adding them to the collection. If students are to explore digital story-telling in a meaningful fashion, with meaningful results, then they should be exposed to quality literature and literature programs.

Even with the changes heralded by this e-trend, the TL must still stand as the expert selector of quality educational resources for their students.

 

References

Haughton, C. (2015, January 4). Top 10 book and bookish apps for young children. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2015/jan/04/top-10-book-and-bookish-apps-for-children-chris-haughton

Stasiak, K. (2011). iTots: True Digital Natives. https://www.slideshare.net/KatStasiak/itots-true-digital-natives

Transliteracy Reflection

Monica CoddingtonLeave a comment

Think about ‘your’ library – as teacher librarian. What evidence is there that the library supports transliteracy practices? What do you think could be done better?

Currently, I am working as the TL at a small central school in NW NSW, and am at the beginning of my TL education. Perhaps it is for this reason that, as I reflect on what evidence exists for the support of transliteracy at the library I manage at the school, I am coming up short. We have a bank of 8 computers, and I have recently been in discussions with the Principal and the Technical Support Officer to obtain a bank of laptops for the library space. Our Oliver site provides access to a range of digital resources, but these were added to the collection by the previous TL. I had a casual conversation once last year with another member of staff about the possibility of adding eBooks to the collection in the future, but have not progressed any further with this.

Clearly, my library space does not support transliteracy as well as it could. This is due, I believe, to a lack of knowledge on my part, a gap that I am eagerly seeking to address now. Transliteracy needs to be supported more in our school library, as these are the skills that students will need to develop to become informed and literate 21st century citizens. To be able to navigate society and the workplace, our students will need these skills, and the lack of updated digital and multimodal texts in our collection is therefore very concerning, to say the least.

Steps and Learning for the Future

Work needs to be done to add to the digital collection on a regular basis – not just webpages and videos, but digital literature, augmented and virtual reality and interactive literature too. This is but one method to support the development of transliteracy in our students, but it is, I believe, a crucial step in the process. Reflecting on my own practice, it is clear I will need to engage in more thorough research about digital literary texts and transliteracy, so that I may offer more support for the development of this vital skill.

Challenges in the TL’s Role

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The Teacher Librarian could potentially face a number of challenges as they attempt to fulfil their role in the school. The push to implement and integrate GID to the curriculum across faculties and key learning areas in order to build the information literacy skills of students across grades, for example, could face a number of challenges to overcome.

For large schools with a high student population and a diverse and extensive staff, implementing one inquiry learning model would be difficult, to say the least. Each teacher has their own pedagogical approach to teaching and learning, and requesting changes on a school-wide scale would require support from executive staff, and a wide-spread understanding of the roles of teachers and teacher librarians in the inquiry learning process.

Garrison & FitzGerald reported on some challenges to collaboration in their 2019 research, which found, amongst other noteworthy results, that almost 41% of respondents only “sometimes” had collaboration between teachers and staff when planning and delivering inquiry learning units in their workplace (p. 6). Some of the biggest barriers identified were new colleagues (for both teacher librarians and teachers) or workplace environments, and concerns about time constraints and the perceived increases or changes in workload (p. 7). This wasn’t just reported by teachers. Teacher librarians reported that their library class time was more frequently being taken up by relief from face-to-face teaching for primary teachers – an organisation of time that does not facilitate collaboration between staff, and therefore does not facilitate the development and implementation of inquiry learning units.

Evidently, then, the support of executive staff, who are often those in charge of workloads and timetabling, and their understanding of the role of the teacher librarian is crucial to the successful implementation of inquiry learning to build information literacy skills in students.

It is not a process that could happen instantaneously, however, and TLs would be sure to face reluctance from other staff members. However, TL’s could support this process through informing staff, from SLSOs to those in executive positions, of the benefits, the most compelling of which is the transferrence of skills. The GID as a process teaches students to recognise how they learn, and teaches them a process for learning that is transferable across KLAs (other benefits can be found here). A TL should aim, therefore, to offer professional learning sessions where teachers are informed of the GID – how it works, how to implement it, and the support offered to them by the TL.

 

Reference List

Garrison, K., & FitzGerald, L. (2019). “One interested teacher at a time”: Australian Teacher Librarian Perspectives on Collaboration and Inquriy. International Association of School Librarianship. 1-10. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/docview/2343152998?fbclid=IwAR01RLBXOmJJDjO7XLEM2fGguCT4_gnHeKDpo8DNPGIDaTpuYVk6nEZkwdE&rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo

Information Literacy and Inquiry Learning

Monica CoddingtonLeave a comment

Every year, with students from years 7 to 12, I find myself reteaching the same information literacy skills over and over again in my English and History classes – sometimes to the same students, sometimes to students who were demonstrating excellence in these skills in year prior, all of whom had “forgotten” what they had been taught. The ability to understand how to navigate the world through finding, identifying, accessing, evaluating, and creating, using a range of skills and processes to satisfy cognitive, physical and socio-cultural goals (Hepworth & Walton, 2009) is crucial for student success in learning – both in school and in the wider macro environments they will enter after their formal education. It’s embedded in the curriculum, and reflected in the emphasis on General Capabilities.

More and more frequently, however, students struggle, or even fail, to transfer these skills across learning contexts. Inquiry learning – and, more specifically, Guided Inquiry Process Design learning – offers a platform for teacher librarians to build transferable information literacy skills. By supporting student learning and movement through the information search process, it guides students to reflect not only on their learning, but also on how they have learned. Perhaps most prominently, however, is what Fitzgerald & Garrison’s research found (2017) – that the students became meta-cognitively aware as they learned how they learn, and that they transferred this knowledge into a range of learning contexts.

This has implications for the teacher librarian and their role as curriculum designer. If students are to successfully learn information literacy skills, implementing and integrating an information literacy model across the curriculum would only serve to benefit their skill development. Implementation across KLAs and faculties would, of course, be ideal, however there would be some challenges that the TL would need to take into consideration when seeking to implement an information literacy model in such a fashion.

 

 

Reference List

Fitzgerald, L. & Garrison, K. (2017) It Trains Your Brain: Student Reflections on Using the Guided Inquriy Design Process. Synergy, 15(2).

Hepworth, M., & Walton, G. (2009). Teaching information literacy for inquiry-based learning. Chandos Publishing.

Dissecting Literacy

Monica CoddingtonLeave a comment

“Literacy has been dissected and put on display in glass cabinets in the rooms of whichever discipline has taken a knife to it since its conception.”

Definitions for literacy abound in the multitudes in textbooks across disciplines and websites throughout the infosphere. The term, to put it bluntly, has been dissected and put on display in glass cabinets in the rooms of whichever discipline has taken a knife to it since its conception. The result is not a deeper understanding of the concept – instead, this dissection has only served to make it smaller, and smaller, and smaller, removing one definition from the next and establishing one “literacy” as separate from another. There is what is called the “traditional” literacies – the ability to read and write – and a whole host of niche literacies branching off it. There is visual, oral and aural literacy, critical, cultural and workplace literacy, and now with the development of the infosphere and the digital world, even sub-branches of ICT, media, digital and information literacies.

My English teaching background tends to shudder in horror at this dismantling of a concept that, really, can be summed up and applied so simply across a range of disciplines:

to understand.

Evidently, the concept of literacy is far more complicated that can be communicated in two words – I’ve no misconceptions about its complex nature, rest assured. But I feel no matter which direction you take when you look at it whether as a concept, process or skill – for all three is certainly is – the dissecting of literacy into smaller and smaller niche literacies is counterproductive, to say the least.

To be able to read is to comprehend – to understand. To be able to write is to understand how to communicate using the written word. To be visually literate is to understand how meaning is created and conveyed through images, and to communicate with them. To be orally literate is to understand how to communicate using the spoken word. To be aurally literature is to understand the spoken word. To be critically literate is to understand how to critique what we see, hear and read – and know why we must do so. To be culturally literate is to understand how cultures operate on macro and micro levels, to understand what cultures consist of – and therefore how to navigate them. To be workplace literate is to understand how to successfully enter the workforce, and navigate it (and learn how to do so with specific skills) once you get there. To be ICT, media and digitally literate is to understand how they work, to understand how to access them, to understand how to navigate them, and to understand how to use them.

And to be information literate is to understand information. To understand how to find it, and where to find it. To understand how to assess it, and why we need to do so. To understand what to do once we find it, and what to do with it once we’ve got it. To understand what to do if we can’t find it, and must rethink how to do so.

In this sense, then, literacy in all its complexity as a concept, a process and a skill can indeed be defined most succinctly in two words:

to understand.

Evidently what one tags on the end of this “to understand” will be discipline-specific, but to understand is an inherent feature of literacy as a concept, a process and a skill. Literacy cannot therefore be “new”, but is rather a concept, process and skill that has been developed over time. As the means of communication have changed, the requirements of our understandings have changed too. As a result, what students are required to know and be able to do – what skills they must understand how to use, what processes they must understand how to engage in – have changed over time.

This is what is central to the concept of information literacy, and the diverse perspectives presented in Module 5 reflect the changing demands on what it means “to understand”, and indeed what it entails. As an information specialist, then, these discussions and the multitude of definitions and dissected sub-definitions will guide me in my planning as information literacy and inquiry learning specialist. To know what students need to know, from processes to skills, I need to understand the requirements of what the English curriculum has so aptly termed this plethora of literacies: multi-literacies.

 

“A wholistic (or multi-literacies) approach to information literacy is imperative”

 

The technologies will continue to change, and so the ways of “understanding” will continue to morph with them, but to separate literacies into separate entities suggest a separate approach to each. This can lead only to confusion and a surface-level understanding of each. A wholistic (or a multi-literacies) approach to information literacy is imperative, just as an awareness of how these changes will impact how students will navigate the world is therefore crucial to teaching the processes and skills they will require to understand, and therefore access and navigate it. Staying on top of educational developments, research and pedagogy has never been (or seemed) so important.

Who comes first – the teacher or the librarian?

Monica CoddingtonLeave a comment

Purcell (2010) in her article “All Librarians Do Is Check Out Books, Right? A Look at the Roles of a School Library Media Specialist” discusses the varying roles of the teacher librarian. Included are the roles of program administrator, instructional partner, leader, information specialist, and nestled amongst them in last place is that of “teacher”. This distinction of “teacher” as a separate role entirely from the rest of the badges held by the TL is not something I would endorse. Nor would I endorse a prioritising of the role of “teacher” over the other roles Purcell identifies. To do so would offer a reductive view of the role of the TL as the myriad of positions and functions that they hold in the school means that teaching is an integral part of the role. The teacher role is not an aspect of it that can be identified as separate, and therefore as something needing classification via perceived value.

You cannot separate one from the other, and so you cannot put either “teacher” or “librarian” first.

This is first clear when we consider the official title of TLs in NSW schools: “Teacher Librarian” – not “Teacher who sometimes works in the library and loans out books”, or “Librarian who sometimes teaches students and staff Important Stuff“. The Teacher Librarian encompasses all.

If they are an instructional partner who engages in curriculum design and assessment, and works collaboratively with staff to do so – then are they not a teacher? If they select, order and process materials for circulation as program administrator, are they not also fulfilling the function of the English faculty, who do the same when they select, order and process novels for use in close study units of work? If they provide assistance in the use of ICT, are they not like the official technical support officer who solves all our Sentral and Google Forms problems? In this sense, are they not also like the students who leap to the occassion to help when the PowerPoint won’t load properly in class? Are not all teachers and teacher librarians similarly alike in that they are leaders who attend community and school events to promote the school and the profession?

Purcell’s work is helpful in identifying some of the core roles of the TL. As a checklist for all we must do, it might be a touch idealistic – can one person truly plan programs, AND collaborate to plan programs AND effectively manage a learning environment, AND lead committees, AND train the school staff, AND cater for the curriculum, AND teach classes (which often include regular classes like English and History in secondary schools) as a run of the mill teacher? Perhaps not. Perhaps some of these need to be prioritised. Perhaps library assistants – and even teachers – could share the roles of collection evaluation and management and planning for staff and curriculum needs.

But perhaps they can. Because Teacher Librarians are not all of one thing on one day and only another on the next. They don’t stop being teachers just because they’re evaluating the collection. Indeed, I would argue that every action made is done so in light of the following lenses: is it good for the students? How will it help them? Will it meet their needs?

Be the whole cupcake, not just the flour. Image from Thomas, M., Unsplash

At the end of the day, a separation or prioritising of the roles is counterproductive, and will only serve to cause confusion. It is not about placing the “teacher” before the “librarian”, or the “librarian” before the “teacher”, because they are one and the same. Attempting to do so is like trying to serve and eat a poorly deconstructed cupcake at a birthday party – it’s a dismal and desiccated experience. Having the complete package results in a much sweeter and richer outcome for all.

Reference list:

Purcell, M. (2010). All librarians do is check out books, right? A look at the roles of the school library media specialist. Library Media Collection, 29(3). p.30-34. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=5e6e4f39-5f69-4e14-9637-6ca4993253a3%40sdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=55822153&db=iih