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.