Week Four Reading

Speaking of the boundaries of librarianship, this week's reading focused on various perspectives of our roles within schools.  The article by Ballard featured a thorough job description, which included the responsibilities of librarians within their various roles-- leaders, information partners, information specialists, teachers, and program administrators.  I agree with all of these, but this seems very assertive on the part of librarians to say, "We know that you think that we only check out book to kids, but now we think we are administrators."  When did this change occur within the world of librarianship?  We have been through the history of outside support for libraries, but how has our view of our own profession changed over time?

The article by Zmuda & Harrada was written in a similar vein, except I found this article to be a bit pushier.  There are actions that are lower on my own priority list that I will absolutely have to deal with (Bad Business), but I will still do it.  I want to work with traditionally underserved populations, so I know that, wherever I am, school resources will be tight.  I will not get a paraprofessional to take on any of the Bad Business from this article.  I will end up doing both Good and Bad practices (according to the authors), but I don't think that this will reduce the impact that I can have on my school nor will it disrupt the progress of my profession as a whole.

Speaking of priorities, The Bill of Responsibilities for School Librarians really reflected the priorities of our class from discussion last week.  Ideas highlighted the importance of inquiry-based learning, collaboration, and curiosity.  I think that it did a good job of proclaiming what we are, instead of saying what we are not.  Maybe that's what is so difficult to determine in school librarianship.  Our profession represents too many different situations and too many different personalities to say what we aren't.

Final thought: why are ethics always mentioned last, almost as an afterthought?  It's like, "We do ____, _____, and _____.  Oh yeah, and ethics (whatever that means)."  It sounds really nice to say that we are in charge of teaching information ethics, but what does that really mean in this day and age?  Citing sources, yes.  What about trolling?  Using pirated material?  Philosophy behind open-source material vs. traditionally commercial material?  The responsibility of creation and participation?  Seriously, what do we mean when we say ethics?

Week Three Class

The most telling conversation that we had in class, in my opinion, centered around a project that a fellow classmate had to teach in her concurrent field practicum.  We all tried to come up with ways to make the project more about inquiry and developing knowledge and less about reporting some irrelevant facts.  It was a really difficult task to discern.  There were limitations based on cooperating teachers' future lesson plans, and the specific desired skills that brought about this project in the first place.  To me, it said a lot about the realities that school librarians face-- acting as regular teachers with often more limitations.

Which brings about another point that interests me: when does a librarian stop being a librarian?  What are the boundaries of our profession?  I think that we did a good job of highlighting some serious concerns when we discussed our personal priorities for school librarianship.  We more or less agreed on a core set of practices that were important to our profession and a core set of practices that really don't belong on our job description.  However, we all agreed that the opposite is true for those outside the field of librarianship-- they often see those tasks we "disowned" as being the bulk of our work, so no wonder we are often discounted.

Check out a tagxedo of my personal priorities for librarianship.

Mission Statement

My Hypothetical School Library: Facilitating meaningful experiences with digital and print materials, supporting independent inquiry, and developing habits of lifelong learning.

Week Three Reading

School librarians are busy people.  Really busy people.  The textbook reading this week went over all of the managerial concerns of running a school library-- from budgets to advisory committees to creating complicated flow charts.

On the topic of scheduling: I have always been a fan of sticking it to the man, so the School Library Journal article by Doug Johnson about the positive aspects of fixed scheduling was a great read for me. Which is better: fixed scheduling or flexible scheduling? My answer to this question is yes-- you can create a successful library program with either. AASL has their opinion (which is absolutely in favor of flexible scheduling), but I agree with the author that both have their own pros and cons. I was a bit taken aback by the Johnson's assertion that librarians in fixed scheduling situations use this as an excuse for a lousy library program, and I would like to hear more about this stance and how it has been articulated in the past.  The textbook seemed to imply that a fixed schedule reflects an educational climate that does not take into account the true worth of a school library. However, as we move toward librarians taking on more necessary instructional roles within their learning communities, we need to have a better understanding within our profession of best practices for fixed schedule librarians.

Another article we read was a school librarian's take on the Standards for 21^st Century Learning, and the ways in which they have transformed her practice. Reading the standards myself was interesting, in terms of identifying what has become important for learners of this generation, but it all seemed too hypothetical. This article translated the standards into actual practices. While I usually get all bent out of shape about library literature not being as researchy as I like, I found Kathy Hribar's perspective to be very helpful in shaping my thinking on implementation. This gave a practical account of the process of transforming a traditional practice into inquiry-based study through inquiry-based study! Plus she cited Carol Kuhlthau, and that will always get you points in my book.

Week Two Class

During this week's class, we finished our history lesson on the support of school libraries-- carrying on from the advent of No Child Left Behind to today's Race to the Top.  During these last few years, we see a trend towards viewing the role of school librarianship/media specialization seek to enable a more holistic understanding of our own profession.  We also see a trend toward standards-based education and evaluation which the AASL jumped on to create the Standards for the 21st Century Learner. 

During class, we reorganized the standards in to different categories in order to observe relationships between different standards.  My classmate and I created a chart with two axes-- the perceived level of importance and the measurability of each standard.  We then ranked them all accordingly.  I was most fascinated by the trend in the most measurable and least important category.  Each standard within this sector dealt with reflection after a task.  It seems like a relatively easy standard to meet, however we rarely incorporate self-evaluation and reflection after a work is complete.  We move on to the next without much thought.  This activity, overall, gave me a better sense of how to actively incorporate the standards into my future professional practices. 

Week Two Reading Continued

Another piece of our reading this week involved a pretty sweet e-book featuring contributions from school librarians and other stakeholders on the state of school libraries.  My fave essays are as follows:

• "Game-Based Learning, Literacy, Engagement, and Motivation" by Dan Bowen.  I am really fascinated by the opportunities afforded by digital media in the learning process, and this author did a great job of articulating the specific reasons for integrating what some might consider ridiculous as learning tools.  I look forward to the day when schools and learning environments are more collaborative with tech/video game developers, so that we can use games that are appropriate for our environment to impart the specific skills we would like to engage.
• "I Want to be an App"  by Joyce Kazman Valenza.  The phrase that stuck out to me, and I will probably be using in almost every library conversation I have for the rest of my profession is migrating practice.  "We are not," states the author of this essay, "migrating our practice quickly enough."  We are sticking around in North Dakota, and we are being frozen out.  Last semester, in SI 647, one of my fellow classmates wrote an impressive paper on the inclusion of mobile technology into library services, and as I recall, heralded this as the "biggest, little idea" for libraries.  The ALA guidelines for how future librarians should be trained in technology are vague and completely underwhelming, so not only do most librarians not understand how to use this technology, but they would not know the first step in how to create it.  The issue of creating apps is not just about relevance, the issue is one of scalable or translatable experiences.  I believe that students need real world connections to their online world and online connections to their real lives, and libraries need to have a stake in this process.  I too want to be an app.

Week Two Reading

The reading this week focused on the importance of articulating shared goals throughout an educational community.  The first step is creating a mission statement that accurately depicts what educators want their students to be like and how they want to accomplish it.  Our first reading warned of the ambiguous nature of poorly worded mission statements.  When people don't have a realistic and specific goal to rally around, that leaves too much up to interpretation.

Our second reading heralded the importance of mission statements in facilitating collaboration in schools, particularly in regards to the role that a library can play in making those goals a reality.  In this day and age, librarians are not usually seen as movers and shakers in their schools-- whether due to antiquated practices or due to fear of losing staff support.  However, I agree with Zmuda when she writes that a mission statement can become the point from which school librarians can encourage the implementation of new and exciting techniques.  She writes, "The authority and leadership for this type of collegial coaching does not come from the job title or hierarchy of employees but rather from the systems internal accountability to accomplish the mission of the organization. The good news is that library media centers are increasingly being looked to as an untapped source of potential learning, a place where students can engage in work that is purposeful, powerful, and personalized."  I couldn't agree more!

Week One Class

This week in class, we reviewed the syllabus, class expectations, and calendar and discussed the history of libraries in schools.  This discussion focused on the trends that have supported and deterred the mission of school libraries, beginning in the 1950's post-Sputnik push for greater educational resources to the funding and testing crises that resulted from No Child Left Behind.

One of the most interesting conversations we had focused on the following question: why is it that some school librarians get away with only reading stories to kids?  It is true that getting to read awesome books to kids is part of what makes youth librarianship the sweetest gig on the planet but to think that is the bulk of our profession is completely wrong.  We discussed the lack of education among school administrators and educational professionals about our capabilities, both as instructors for students and resources for teachers, and how those largely effect budget decisions regarding whether or not schools will have a librarian.  We also touched on the idea that the advocacy of our profession needs to happen everyday on the job-- that we will prove our worth by actually being worthwhile in our respective communities.

Week One

In the readings for this week, I was struck by a few things:

1.We have a choice between viewing literacy as a skill or as an experience, and our thoughts on this matter will have a marked impact on the way that librarians/ media specialists are viewed going forward in the information age. Pappas noted that schools are hiring reading coaches to develop students' decoding and comprehension skills and instituting classroom libraries in order for students to be in closer proximity to print materials. Libraries, and the librarians that manage them, operate from a very different perspective. We create quality experiences with media and serve as training grounds for independent, lifelong learning. From our perspective, literacy is much more than a skill that requires drilling; it is a habit of mind and a mode of experiencing the world that leads to meaningful participation in society. What needs to happen in order for the educational paradigm to shift towards a more holistic and contextual perspective?

2. In order to demonstrate the worth of our profession, we have had to justify ourselves within the current standards-based vernacular. However, we are creating standards (and thereby assessments) for inherently subjective processes such as interpretation, understanding, ethical values, responsibility, and one's ability to assess themselves. I agree that these are attitudes and values that we must cultivate with regards to 21^st century literacies, but how viable/measurable are these standards?

3. Ethics seemed to play a large role in the AASL Standards, but I think there needs to be a sincere and thoughtful reevaluation of our informational ethics. We are in the process of creating completely new ways of relating to one another and to our digital objects, and I think that will create new codes of conduct and ideas about we should behave, especially with regards to property, ownership, censorship, and social responsibility.

4. When discussing issues of access, the AASL Standards are remarkably straight-forward: “All children deserve equitable access to books and reading, to information, and to information technology in an environment that is safe and conducive to learning.” This struck me for a number of reasons. First of all, access is a much more subjective issue than just providing resources. Mark Warschauer, in discussing issues regarding the digital divide, provides a poignant insight when he writes, “access to online information has very little to do with the Internet per se, but has everything to do with political, economic, institutional, cultural, and linguistic contexts which shape the meaning of the Internet in people’s lives.” Access has less to do with availability and more to do with students' attitudes and experiences with what is available. Additionally, accessibility also alludes to the quality of information/materials provided, and regrettably there is no way to ensure equitable access in that regard.

As librarians and educators, we do what we do to promote social inclusion and provide meaningful opportunities for lifelong personal growth, not to make sure that taxpayers get their money's worth from our nation's students. This week's reading came as a sobering realization that the future of my profession hinges on our ability to prove this to a world bent on figures and efficiency, but I suppose that's a fight we will just have to keep up.