Transitions to Digital Media | District Administration Magazine via kwout

I was a little nervous when I read the subtitle of the recent article in District Administration magazine, “Transitions to Digital Media: Are School Libraries on the Way Out?”  And when I saw the phrase, “if your school librarians are feeling beleaguered . . ” I wondered if I was about to read about how librarians are less necessary with all the tools and apps and technologies of today’s world.

But I started to relax when I noticed comments from advocates and leaders within our profession, including AASL President Susan Ballard, a mention of David Loertscher’s coining of the term, “learning commons,” and these school library leaders and their dynamic advocacy efforts with and for students, teachers, and community:

• Connie Williams, teacher librarian at Petaluma High School in the Petaluma (Calif.) City Schools
• Anna Koval from Casa Grande High School, also of Petaluma (Calif.) City Schools
• Shannon Miller, librarian and technology specialist at Van Meter (Iowa) Community Schools

The tasks and responsibilities of 21st-century school librarians are portrayed as critical to student learning.  Instructional technology is presented as a dimension of the school librarian’s role, possibly one to continue building as an information and education professional but not something in the purview of some other job entirely, which sometimes worries me when I read about technology coaches and instructional technologists.

There’s even a new phrase to add to your advocacy repertoire, from Marcie Post, executive director of the International Reading Association (IRA), who (in the article) calls school librarians,

“’digital age lynchpin[s],’ more important than ever to maintaining the integrity of information so integral to teaching and learning.”

Here’s the link to the article, by Susan McLester: http://www.districtadministration.com/article/transitions-digital-media

Hat tip to Mary Braney, for sharing this article on the MSLA Listserv!

–Rebecca Morris

A new graduate school semester is underway, and this semester I’m working with school library licensure candidates in the course, Curriculum and the School Library Teacher.  (Note that I’ll refer here to the individuals who are earning their state licensure as “candidates” and the K-12 students as “students.”)

So we’ve spent time during the first two weeks talking and reading about the influences that shape curriculum (what determines curriculum and what perhaps should), school librarians’ roles in curriculum-related processes (including instructional design, teaching, assessment, and curriculum development, among others), and what curriculum looks like in practice – beyond the “document” that is curriculum – in the library, classrooms, and in student learning.

In the class last evening, we considered the goals of education, asking “what is it for?”  What are we trying to accomplish when we teach?  What do we want students to know and do, and why?  What learning and skills are considered valuable- and who or what sets the standards of “value”?

Standardized testing, the Common Core State Standards, global communities, 21st century skills, space and time to think, and the varied demands of school were a few of the many topics that raised robust dialog, and the candidates’ insightful questions and reflections still have me thinking in lots of directions today.

One conversation stemmed from an exercise from the Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel book, 21^st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times. A quick synopsis of the task is this: first, envision a kindergartner starting school “today,” and the world, career, and requisite skills for this child when he or she enters the job market in about 20 years.  Then consider what makes learning powerful and lasting.  Finally, think about the kinds of learning experiences that will effectively prepare this child for the world in 20 years and how the ideal aligns with the realities of education today.

Now, I sometimes take problems like these and point out that it’s not just “tomorrow” that we’re worried about, but learning for today – but that disclaimer aside, I thought it was interesting that in order to think through this scenario, some of the candidates refocused the question on themselves.  What skills did they learn as K-12 students that they still use now?  Communication, problem solving, conflict resolution, and cultural and political understanding were a few that they mentioned.  No matter the specifics of the contexts, this was the learning that they depended upon time and again.  They explored the old “when am I ever going to use this” question and identified skills that indeed, they still use, and as it turns out, even teach as school librarians: information literacy, reading, and a disposition for lifelong learning.

They also talked about a child’s perspective on the content we’re trying to (or required to) teach, and how sometimes peppering students with questions might inhibit the questions that kids are constructing and pondering themselves.

I think that these questions, these genuine inquiry processes that are inspired by the curriculum but maybe not mandated verbatim, are the ones that open up space for meaningful learning.  So the challenge becomes opening up space in the day, in the delivery and evolution of curriculum, in the interactions between students and teachers and students and one another, to acknowledge, encourage, and support this kind of inquiry and learning.  Trilling and Fadel emphasize the idea that teachers should teach less, and learn more.  How can school librarians teach less, and learn more?  What does teaching look like and feel like if we “teach less”?  What are the risks, and what might we learn?  And what might our students learn?

–Rebecca Morris

References: Trilling, Bernie and Charles Fadel. 21^st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times. San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2009.

Image: Kindergarten Counting Bears, by shawncampbell on Flickr. Used with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

This weekend I received in the mail my new issue of School Library Monthly (Vol. 29, Nov. 2012), and I opened it right up to Kathy Fredrick’s “Choosing the Right App.”  I had the pleasure of sitting next to Kathy, who is Director of Libraries and Instructional Technology for Shaker Heights City Schools in Ohio, at the AASL Fall Forum satellite site in Pittsburgh.  I’ve shared several of her SLM Library 2.0+ columns with students in my curriculum course this fall, including last month’s “Online Election Resources for Students and Colleagues.”

This column caught my eye because just last week, pre-service school librarians in the same course (Curriculum & the School Library Teacher) shared in class tablet apps that they evaluated for alignment to state curriculum frameworks and Common Core State Standards, as well as for features, functionality, and learning opportunities.  As the students shared apps that included Shakespeare in Bits, 270 to Win, iPoe, and 3D  Cell Stain and Simulation, we checked them against Pam Berger’s “Inquiry and Web 2.0 Tools Integration Guide” from a 2010 SLM article (cited below) for the phases of Stripling’s Inquiry Model afforded by the apps.  For example, Solar Walk might support the Connect and Wonder phases (setting background context for new learning and developing questions), while Visual Poet allows students to Express (express new ideas to share learning with others).

The chance to demonstrate and discuss the apps as a group proved fruitful (pun intended!) but at the core (yes, again), our goal extended beyond the curricular alignment piece and into the realm of equipping school librarians to propose and participate in curricular collaborations with teachers.  More than one app provoked comments like, “my teachers will love this” – and in Kathy’s article, she mentions the potential for teachers to become overwhelmed with options that technology avails.  As I have written about in this space before, school library advocacy isn’t about librarians saying how great we are; it’s about giving others a reason to say this.  Providing teachers ideas for relevant, quality curriculum resources and ways for students to engage with them sounds like the seeds of advocacy to me.  And that’s really a-peeling.  (Last one – ok, two. I’ll stop falling over the apple puns now.)

References:

Berger, Pam. Student Inquiry and Web 2.0. School Library Monthly 26, no. 5 (January 2010): 14-17.

Fredrick, Kathy. Choosing the Just-Right App. School Library Monthly 29, no. 2 (November 2012): 24-25.

Image: Image: Have Your Had Yours Today, by Micky** on Flickr. Used with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

–Rebecca Morris