ETL507 personal reflection

The following reflection outlines key learning moments experienced as a result of undertaking a Masters of Education in Teacher Librarianship. The précis will outline four such moments of learning including: that astute leadership and a deep knowledge of the learning environment is reflected in a school’s library collection policies, that the role of the Teacher Librarian is indeed dynamic and multifaceted, that school libraries need good leadership, not just good management, and finally that the critical role information literacy plays in the 21st century information landscape should not be underestimated.

Collection policy

 

Given that until this year I worked full time as an English teacher and had no previous experience working as a TL, I wanted to start by reflecting on what has been a learning highlight for me. Clearly every aspect of the course has set me on a steep learning trajectory, but I have particularly relished the opportunity to exhibit my learning in a practical way. This opportunity arose when I was asked to write a library collection policy. To the outsider, collection practices can appear ad hoc and reactive to demand but to the TL, I have learned, a well thought-out collection policy is an integral part of its strategic plan and vision for the future. For example, school libraries seeking to develop their online collection may include a condition in their policy that if a print book exists in the form of an e-book, then preference is given to the digital version over its print counterpart. A shrewd collection policy will also demand that the TL appreciate key elements of its learning environment such as the profile of its user population, the broader educational philosophies of the school, and its curriculum needs (Kennedy, 2006).

For me, one of the most manifestly satisfying outcomes of completing this course has been producing something of practical value as a result of new knowledge and understandings gained. ETL503 granted me this opportunity when I realised, after scrutinizing my own library’s collection policy, that it did not cater for one of its own distributed collections. My school library is comprised of two main buildings, both located at the school site and both of which fall under the same collection policy. The school’s distributed collection however is more unique, due both to its remote location and because it is underpinned by a distinct educational philosophy characterised chiefly by its off-line learning environment. So, whilst much of this course has been dedicated to promulgating a greater online presence and exploiting the potential for Web 2.0 as a sharing and collaborating tool etc.., the unique nature of this remote campus demanded a completely fresh approach to resourcing and supporting the curriculum. When the responsibility fell to me, much of my theoretical knowledge had to be put into practice and this remains a high point of this course; applying the theory and watching it deliver.

 

The ‘application’ involved an appraisal of the format and content of its current collection. As illustrated by the pie-chart below, none of the collection included e-books or other e-resources, a deliberate manifestation of its preference for print.  

The challenge was a question of balance; resourcing the teaching collection which serviced the needs of teachers and an avant-guard and progressive curriculum on sustainability and environmentalism, all of which demanded currency and up-to-date material in print, alongside the promotion of reading literature, also exclusively in print. All this had to be balanced upon a pedagogical philosophy which both revered technology for its ability to deliver the latest information but which also considered it an impediment to its overall educational aims in that particular environment. It was essentially a love-hate relationship with technology, something the collection policy had to negotiate and ultimately resolve.

Whilst this was challenging, it remains for me a highlight in terms of the way I was able to apply my knowledge of collection management practice. Until recently, the collection had not been sizable enough to warrant its own policy, and the collection had been managed in an ad hoc manner. Whilst both the collection and the curriculum demands had grown, a policy or vision for the collection had not yet been established and it stood out to me, even as a learner, as startling omission that the remote site collection should have escaped attention in this way.

The role of the Teacher Librarian

 

The learning in all other respects during this course has been just as acute; I had no practical experience working in a school library prior to undertaking the course and, like many of my fellow teachers, my preconceived notions of the role of the TL included, but was also limited to, fostering reading, teaching information literacy, building the resource collection and undertaking the usual nominal library duties that keep every library functioning.

 

Whilst these are important, I can see now that I had underestimated the enormity of the scope of the TL’s role, an ignorance quickly remedied in ETL401 via various readings debating the key aspects and extent of the role, the most salient of which were extensively ruminated upon, discussed with colleagues, and documented in my six November 2011 blogposts. These blogposts vividly recollect just how steep the learning curve was in those early weeks, with each required reading shedding more and more light on my hitherto pretty superficial understanding of the role. It was more complex for starters. Herring’s (2007) paper Teacher Librarians in the school library stressed this point exactly, while his diagrammatic representation of the TL (below) impressed upon me the idea that the TL’s role was much more manifold than singular and perfunctory.

Purcell’s (2010) appraisal of the TL’s role (also below) had a similar impact, highlighting the multifaceted nature of the role and stressing the idea that the TL had to be many things to many people, but always working towards that one goal of empowering students to become critical thinkers, enthusiastic readers, skillful researchers and ethical users of information (ASLA, 2009 p.5).

A recent opportunity to work as a Teacher Librarian in my own school library has brought to light just how challenging it is on a practical level to address each aspect of this role democratically. For example, whilst only one eleventh of Herring’s (2007) diagram addresses web development, an inordinate proportion of my time has been spent building our digital library (essentially a library website, or libguide, of resources dedicated to each and every curriculum area of the school from Years 7 to 12); this in practical accordance with our vision to become a library of the 21st century. Though Purcell’s (2010) key aspects coincide on the most part with Herring’s (2007), even fewer descriptors seem to coincide with the project occupying most of my time in my current role, highlighting both the realities and challenges the TL must address in today’s school libraries.

Another pertinent question raised in the readings was whether the TL deserved nomenclature more closely aligned to its changing 21st century role, introducing the notion that changes in technology had impacted the role so fundamentally that a name change was warranted; Purcell’s (2010) School Library Information Specialist (SLIS) and Lamb & Johnson’s (2008) School Library Media Specialist (SLMS) are good examples of this. Currently, my role seems more closely akin with Lamb & Johnston’s (2008) term technologist which highlights the critical role that the TL plays in embracing new and emerging learning technologies in meeting the needs of its users. Whatever the nomer, few disagree that the role of the TL today bears little resemblance to its 20th century counterpart and that technology has been the game-changer.

In an unusual point of convergence between public perception and academic appraisal, I reflect in my blog The Mule and the Piano  on the shared understanding of the collaborative nature of the TL. When I interviewed teachers about the role, they used language like "they assist" and "they help find information". Professional readings by Haycock, (2007) Purcell (2010), Lamb & Johnson (2008), Herring (2007) and works by Kuhlthau (1995) all reiterate the importance of working with teachers to assist in the information search process and in developing inquiry based research tasks. However my experience as a TL, albeit limited, has shown that endeavors to put this excellent theoretical ideal into practice often yields mixed results as much depends on the preparedness of teachers to operate as a team where working independently has long since been the norm. Here, collaboration reads as interference. 

Resistance to collaborate appears to be largely influenced by the culture of the school. I found that whilst many teachers were open to the idea, others resisted even where benefits to their teaching and to student learning were evident and potentially profound. Hence for me, a key learning moment regarding the role of the TL occurred when I tried to put my ETL401 learning into practice and encountered resistance. TLs are uniquely placed to have a holistic knowledge of the curriculum and of the resources available that support it; this means they are ideally positioned to offer pedagogical support across all areas. However, as is so pointedly emphasised by Haycock (2007), successful collaboration depends on cultivating strong and trusted relationships with teachers, nurtured at every stratum of the school from the principal down.

Leadership

This brings us to leadership and the critical role it evidently plays in enabling the TL to really take flight. Being a good manager was a characteristic I might have considered essential to the role of the TL prior to ETL504 but I did not necessarily equate this with good leadership. This was my first learning; leadership is not management. My new-found appreciation of the vital role leadership plays in school libraries was informed by professional readings such as Fullan (1997), Avolio, Walumbwa & Weber (2009), Hargreaves (2007) among others whose focus was on the transformational outcomes of good leadership; I comment extensively on this in my blogpost on April 2013. Leaders are not just managers. Leaders transform and inspire. Leaders even take risks. Most importantly, I learned that good leaders have vision. I could footnote this assertion with a long list of references to support this claim but I’ll include just a few in the understanding that the literature is vast and I offer just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. Brocker (2012), Crowley (2011), Hargreaves (2007), Hay & Todd (2010), LaMarca (2007) and Marzano, Walters & McNulty (2006) to name a few, explicate and reiterate how critical leadership is in planning for and managing an innovative school library ready to embrace the onslaught of the 21st century. Without vision there is no plan. Without a plan there is no future, no progress, and certainly no innovation. In the current educational landscape with its exciting new and emerging technologies, its powerfully ground-breaking pedagogies, and its ability to repurpose and reutilise learning spaces to bring out the best in student outcomes, where would the school library be without good leadership?

I was curious as to how the best tenets of such leadership would manifest themselves in my own school library environment. The answer became apparent when my school library was asked by management to account for itself and its future by way of a visioning document. Having already considered the role new technologies and innovative educational practices would play in my own strategic plan for a future library, the preparation for our visioning document was made manifestly easier and importantly, was built upon the sturdy tenets of academic research. Assignment 2 in ETL504 became all at once uncannily prophetic and very useful.

 

As such, I have learned that good leadership is less about being someone great and more about doing something greater (Marzano, Waters, & McNulty, 2006). It’s about being able to re-evaluate school library practices and anticipate future needs of students. In the spirit of Herring’s diagrammatical representation of the role of the TL, I tried to capture the essence of good leadership according to the literature in a diagram of my own. The final result concurs nicely with the notion that leadership does, not is, as every descriptor of good leadership is linked to the role of the TL via an action.

Information Literacy

 

Like many other prospective Teacher Librarians entering the world of the school library, I confess to a preconceived idea regarding information literacy that was limited, rather naively, to acquiring of a set of skills called upon during research to help you ‘find the right book’ and that’s about it. Clearly, I had not yet read Kuhlthau. Or Herring. And I had certainly not taken into serious consideration the savage impact technology and the web would have on a student’s ability to differentiate credible information from its dubious counterparts. Today, students are presented with a multifarious information landscape; a confusing research environment that pretends to offer accurate outcomes at the behest of a google search but which often misleads, resulting in a loss of confidence on behalf of the researcher. Kuhlthau’s (1995) visionary work on the Information Search Process (ISP) extrapolates on the dangers of becoming anxious and pessimistic when information seeking misses the mark and students lose confidence in the search process. Astoundingly, Kuhlthau’s work is possibly more profoundly relevant in today’s information landscape than it was when the work was published in 1995. Sadly, in my experience, teachers often mistaken a loss of confidence as inattentiveness or a poor attitude and become punitive rather than addressing the core issue. This, I realised, was one of the biggest threats to experiencing success as a learner, and the TL was beautifully placed to circumvent this by guiding the student through the information search process. One of my most profound learning moments on this course was understanding that experiences such as this could make the difference between a student enjoying school or hating it; between seeing themselves as capable of learning or seeing learning as futile. Most critically, it is students with learning issues who benefit most from information literacy skills, the very students who are often the first to drop out of school.

 

Herring (2011) took idea this further, demanding evidence of the transference of skills to demonstrate that the learning was deeply embedded. The call to define information literacy in ETL401 was enormously challenging but helped immensely in bringing together the most salient points from each of the academic readings in the subject including Herring (2011), Kauhlthau, (1995 & 2004), Haycock (2007) Langford (1998), and Moore (2002). I wanted to demonstrate that information literacy was not simply the acquisition of a stagnant set of skills but a lifelong process that included various stages of maturation. Another diagrammatic representation attempted to exemplify this:

Successfully implementing an information literacy model is another story altogether and not for a lack of IL models to choose from. A favorite of mine has become Einsberg & Berkowitz’s (2011) Big6 for its simplicity and its explicit call for students to evaluate the search process. However, while Langford (1998) confirms that it is the TL who is best placed to foster information literacy in students, its successful implementation seems to be predicated on the premise that the school as a whole will adopt it so that it can be developed sequentially and reinforced every year, developing what Herring (2011) refers to as transference. While the impact of information literacy on positive learning outcomes is indisputable, many teachers don’t even know that information literacy models exist (as I myself didn’t). Hence the ongoing challenge for the TL is to elucidate its merits not just to students, but also to teachers, facilitating a whole school information literacy continuum embedded into each area of the curriculum and in doing so, developing the information literate mind sequentially and in contexts pertinent to the learning taking place.

A new and relatively distinctive form of information literacy that significantly deepened my understanding of the research habits of 21st century learner was the Web Evaluation Criteria for assessing websites, the need for which has arisen from the explosion of website based information sites and students’ propensity to research this way. Students ‘google’ things. We all do. I was, however, surprised to learn that despite their ‘digital natives’ nomer, proficiency in evaluating websites for the credibility of their content is an assumed rather than a real skill in students, a deficiency that proves to be yet another stumbling block in the information search process (Combs, 2011). In my foray into ETL501, I learned that there are a good many Web Evaluation Criteria models have been developed indicating that whilst the phenomena is widespread, it can be addressed as part of the information literacy program.

I also experimented with various meta-search engines in order to counter a growing learning culture that defaulted to google and promulgated instead those designed to cater for students and researchers. I am hoping that these become the ‘new normal’ in the online information search process. Search engines whose content has been pre-evaluated by experts such as Sweet Search, and which capture only credible and worthwhile content have been enormously successful with both students and teachers at my school since its introduction. 

Sweet Search also teaches website research skills using online tutorials accessed from their homepage, which concur once again, with Carol Kuhlthau’s theory that guiding the inquiry and pre-empting and eliminating unnecessary anxiety in the search process can be enormously empowering for the student and teacher alike.

A great part of my current responsibility as a new Teacher Librarian has involved designing resource webpages for the school’s Digital Library, all a part of its mission to become increasingly accessible to students and teachers beyond traditional opening times and to transform it services to suit a more 21st century e-learning environment, all while ensuring that its services meet the Australian Curriculum’s General Capabilities. Kuhlthau’s (1995) ISP model has greatly influenced my thinking in how each of these libguides (formally functioning as pathfinders) is assembled and the role they play in circumventing a loss of confidence in the research process while balancing this with actively encouraging students in becoming independent learners. I liked Kuntz’s (2003) appraisal of such guides as a ‘launching pad’ for students, with ‘street signs’ and helpful hints along the way but not doing the work for them. I have learned that in becoming information literate, students understand that research is a not one-stop-shop where one or two resources will address all their questions. Rather, good research is characterised by working through a number of sources and being able to apply information literacy skills to resources in order to ascertain what is relevant. I have therefore tried to design my libguides in line with the idea of ‘berry picking’ rather than spoon-feeding, so referred to by Kuhlthau, Maniotes and Caspari (2007) as it involves selecting information form a range of resources provided, and learning to ascertain which are the most relevant by applying information literacy criteria to them, striking that all important balance between supporting the research process and facilitating independent learning practices.

 

Conclusion

 

It is incomprehensible to me that the teacher librarian could ever be made redundant, such is the vital nature of the role in the 21st century learning environment. The TL is integral in helping students acquire critical thinking skills in order to become effective and discerning seekers of information and to use the information they find meaningfully - lifelong skills that will surely remain pertinent their lives through. 

 

References

 

Australian School Library Association and Australian Library and Information Association. (2005). Learning for the Future: developing informaiton services in schools (2nd ed.). Victoria: Curriculum Corporation.

Avolio, B., Walumbwa, F., & Weber, T. (2009). Leadership: Current Theories, Research, and Future Directions. Lincoln: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=managementfacpub

Brocker, B. (2012, March 22). Leadership Theory and Critical Skills. Bellevue University. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzAzhiEsZtY&feature=player_embedded

Combs, B. (2011). Digital natives or digital refugees: Why we have failed Gen Y. West Australia: ECU Publications.


Eisenberg, M., & Berkowitz, R. (2011). The Big 6. Retrieved from http://www.big6.com/
Fullan, M. (1997). Leadership for Change. In M. Fullan (Ed.), The Challenge of School Change (pp. 97-114). Australia: Hawker Brownlow Education.

Hargreaves, A. (2007). Sustainable Leadership and Development in Education: creating the future, conserving the past. European Journal of Education, 42(2), 223-233.

Hay, L & Todd, R. (2010, February). School Libraries 21C: the conversation begins. SCAN, 29(1), 30-42.

Haycock, K. (2007, January). Collaboration: Critical Success Factors for Student Learning. School Libraries Worldwide, 13(1), 25-35.

Herring, J. (2007). Teacher librarians and the school library. In S. Ferguson (Ed), Libraries in the Twenty First Century: charting new directions in information (pp. pp. 27-42). Wagga Wagga NSW: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University.

Herring, J. (2011). Improving students' web use and information literacy: A guide for teachers amd teacher librarians. London: Facet Publishing.

Kennedy, J. (2006). Collection Management: A concise Introduction. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt University Centre of Information Studies.

Kuhlthau, C. (1995). The Process of Learning from Information. School Libraries Worldwide, 1(1), 1-12.

Kuhlthau, C. (2004). Seeking Meaning (2 ed.). Westport, Connecticut, USA: Libraries Unlimited.

Kulhthau, C., Maniotis, L. & Kaspari, A. (2007). Introduction to Guided Inquiry: what is it, what's new, why now? In Guided Inquiry - Learning in the 21st Century. Westport: Libraries Unlimited.

Kuntz, K. (2003). Pathfinders: Helping Students Find Paths to Infprmation. Information today: Internet Librarian 2012, 10(3). Retrieved from MultiMedia Schools: http://www.infotoday.com/mmschools/may03/kuntz.shtml

LaMarca, S. (2007). RETHINK: Ideas for inspiring school library design. Victoria: School Library Association of Victoria Inv.

Lamb, Annette and Johnson, Larry. (2008, December). School Library Media Specialist 2.0: A Dynamic Collaborator, Teacher, and Technologist. Teacher Librarian, 36(2), pp. 74-78.

Lamb, Annette and Johnson, Larry. (2010). The School library Media Specialist. In Overview. http://eduscapes.com/sms/overview/collaboration.html.

Langford, L. (1998). Information Literacy: A Clarification. FNO.org From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal.

Marzano, R. Waters, T & McNulty, B. (2006). School Leadership that Works. Victoria, Australia: Hawker Brownlow.

Moore, P. (2002). An Analysis of Information Literacy Worldwide. White Paper prepared for UNESCO. Retrieved January 18, 2012, from http://portal.unesco.org/ci/fr/file_download.php/33e3dd652a107b3be6d64fd67ae898f5Information+Literacy+Education+(Moore).pdf

Purcell, M. (2010, November/December). All Librarians Do Is Check Out Books, Right? A Look at the Roles of a School Llibrary Media Specialist. Library Media Connection, 29(3), pp. 30-33.