In this episode the focus is on breaking open the concept of information literacy and highlighting the reality of what this looks like in an information literate school community. We will discuss strategies for promoting the value of information literacy across all learning areas, and consider how TLs work can collaboratively with teachers to ensure that information literacy skills are developed within the context of the school’s curriculum and beyond.
27/10/2022
Download the transcript in PDF format here.
Our guest
Our guest for this episode is Rebecca Murray.
Rebecca Murray has been a teacher librarian for 25 years across primary and secondary education systems in NSW and WA. She is currently the President of the Western Australian School Library Association (WASLA) and during her 11 years on the committee has held a number of roles including Vice President, WASLANet listserv moderator, website manager and awards sub-committee member. She also represents WA school libraries as a WASLA representative on the School Libraries Coalition, a cooperative working group of the school library associations in Australia. The coalition proudly founded and funds the Students Need School Libraries campaign as one of its primary focus areas.
Rebecca currently teaches in a high school in the Perth Hills which is an International Baccalaureate school offering the Middle Years Programme. She teaches information literacy to Year 6 each year and a ‘Connections’ class to the Year 9 students as they begin their Community Project journey.
Podcast highlights
What drew Rebecca to Teacher Librarianship. Rebecca shares her history in teacher librarianship from 3:50.
Rebecca’s current working context. From 5:59 Rebecca highlights the TL situation in Perth, and her current school context.
Defining information literacy. Rebecca explains how she views information literacy from 10:48.
Rebecca’s experience of how an information literate school community looks and feels. At 16:01 Rebecca explains her perspective of what to expect in an information literate school community.
Strategies to embed information literacy across the curriculum. Strategies are shared by Rebecca from 20:21.
Ideas to engage teachers in collaborative planning. Rebecca shares advice on building connection and relationships with teachers from 27:11.
Further resources:
During this podcast, Rebecca mentioned how she uses Libguides as part of supporting information literacy development.
You can learn more about Libguides here, and also check out Learnpath, which is another platform similar to Libguides, but developed by Softlink, the creators of popular library management system Oliver.