FNO on TLs and School Libraries: Yay, Jamie!

When district management and trustees consider the projected impact of cuts to non-enrolling staffing, including teacher-librarians, for the upcoming 2010/11 school year here in Vancouver and other BC school districts, we need to ask that they please consider this article by Jamie McKenzie: Why We Still Need [School] Libraries and [Teacher-] Librarians (FNO 19:4, March 2010) and the changing role TLs have in the new equations for learning. The article describes the role of the TL in relation to staff and students, with so many new tools, sources of information and resources.

The tech-savvy, highly engaging and engaged school-library supporter McKenzie writes,

Those school librarians who hold stubbornly to a 1950s definition of the job are likely to pass and be forgotten - extinct before their time. While many of the tasks that were important back then remain important in this decade, new challenges must be firmly placed at the core of any survival strategies. By embracing these new challenges and offering expertise not held by any staff members, teacher librarians can make themselves indispensable.

It is a terrible irony that, at the very time that what they do is so very important in this district and in relation to learning, there will be fewer who are enabled to:

• support adult learning about using new tools and resources to learn how to how to engage in and teach about finding good information and making good new ideas; to beyond the tools and information to deep understanding and knowledge; build inquiry skills and connect literacy development to authentic research; and lead teachers in creating resource-based learning opportunities
  
  
• support colleagues in building new approaches to curriculum, both by modelling and by providing quality resources and support
  
  
• partner with teachers and work alongside them as peer coaches to integrate new tools, resources, and ideas that make learning more engaging for students
  
  
• guide colleagues and give them the skills, support, and knowledge to become independent users of technology and digital resources, to connect with others about the best use of these resources, and to sift the information for what is best
  
  
• play a lead role in selecting, organizing, and developing technology and information applications, structures, and systems that work in classrooms with kids at appropriate times and levels and maintain congruence between digital and print collections of resources
  
• collect and display appealing and appropriate resources that have been collected
  for the particular purpose, including heritage
  
  
• lead teachers in collaborative communities of learning to shared understandings about purpose and direction
  
  
• share in the development and communication of the organizational account of a school as it develops its sense of itself in a rapidly changing world
  
  
• lead by "cooking stone soup" and moving beyond the tools and information to places of critical thinking and creativity, despite constraints of time and money
  
  
• continue the traditional roles such as encouraging the love of literature and reading, broadening interests, offering great resources in a variety of formats, staying current in new resource formats, making questioning and inquiry important, and working cooperatively with teacher colleagues
  
  
• lead the inventive effort in trying times
  
  
• be the best reading teacher in the school
  
  
• augment student performance and achievement where comprehension is important
  

McKenzie concludes that TLs must also be politicians and, by extension, engage in the politics of school libraries by supporting others in the promotion of school library programs as a key factor in the new learning equation that includes both teachers and students); he raps TLs on the knuckles for being polite in their advocacy and gives an example of powerful community support:

As a group, teacher librarians have been a bit too polite and reserved while their jobs and positions crumbled under the onslaught of school leaders intent on reducing force and programs. In many districts facing tough budget restrictions with the disappearance of stimulus funds, TLs and their programs are very much at risk. In many cases, administrators hand over the tough choices to staff members, forcing them into cannibalizing.

McKenzie writes that TLs:

• cannot afford to be silent
• cannot wait until administrators ask
• must be tireless advocates for smart, balanced, well-funded information literacy and reading programs as well as adequate and qualified school library staffing
• must build partnerships within broader community with a focus on those who mold, move and shake opinions and direction at the highest levels
  

A success story worth emulating, McKenzie continues, is the two year effort by Moms in Washington to convince the state legislature to formalize a commitment to school library staffing and funding. For the full story go to the article in the School Library Journal describing their campaign.

But then we TLs know all this. We are the converted. Share this with others.

AND be sure to share Jamie McKenzie's FNO.org with colleagues. This month's issue (May 2010) looks at teaching complex concepts like beauty and at teaching that integrates meaningful understanding of history with skills in the literacies and the best use of technology for the educational goals.

Jamie is the keynote speaker at the Fall BCTLA KelownaFresh Conference . See Al Smith's Comment for more details.

More on Jamie McKenzie

I did want to highlight for you the item in the blog below about being invited to go to Nootka to talk with Dr Jamie McKenzie, the former superintendent of Bellingham, now retired and working as a global consultant on technology and learning. His work underpinned a lot of what we were doing in the two-year district technology planning process for the 2006 Tech Plan. He works with several school districts here in BC which is why he was passing through Vancouver. All of our ICT Task Force committee members were familiar with his work.

Nootka VP Andrea had made an independent connection with McKenzie through her search for ways to enhance the school's capacity to build strong technological foundations for teaching and learning and her own course work, so he had asked if he could drop by as he was in the area. I was lucky enough to be invited by TL GS who is taking technology workshops I have been offering.

Nootka's Thrive program students made a lovely presentation -- twice, in fact, because I came in later, where they demonstrated and discussed online tools and programs that work well for learning. These students amply demonstrate that learning abilities are enhanced and activated by technology. Funding from outside sources also enables this group's learning. Amazing stuff, and McKenzie was the first to say so. Here's their webpage: http://nootka.vsb.bc.ca/thrive.

As we consider the future directions for building for technology in Vancouver schools, I would love to find ways to have more input from McKenzie, and he has an engaging presence too. It would be great to find a context to connect more formally with him ... as you can imagine from my position as disciple, McKenzie is also a very big supporter of the notion of school libraries as "hubs" for learning and TLs as support for technology integration in schools. McKenzie is a name that my merely mentioning brought on paroxysms of TL envy!

One interesting aspect of the discussions was on the recent trend amongst those who promote technology, a trend which casts students as "digital natives," by virtue of their having been born into the tech-rich world, and many educators and adults in general as the "digital immigrants." He has no time for this notion. Students may navigate with ease but they lack the capacity, without the guidance of educators, to apply the skills and understandings of the many literacies -- visual, critical, media, cultural, even traditional, to begin the multiliteracies list -- and need to have ongoing support for their learning. Anyone can learn technology -- but with the right support and investment in their learning, it becomes a tool for thinking, constructing knowledge, working collaboratively and more globally, and creating meaningful products.

Not one to mince words, he writes:

Those leading the digital surge are quick to exile older folks to a dust bin of irrelevancy simply because they were born before the iPod. Their point of view is harsh and ill informed. Their stance is unsubstantiated by evidence and is little more than digital delusion. They are guilty of "arcade scholarship" - analysis that is superficial and cartoonish.

This recent (Nov 2007) article in its entirety can be found here: http://www.fno.org/nov07/cov.html