ISCI 794: School Librarian Interview #1

 My first school librarian interview was with a high school librarian in Greenville, S.C. who has been at her current school for four years. Previously, she worked at the middle school level for 10 years. The school where she works has about 1800 students, and is connected to the Fine Arts Center (FAC), a public high school for the arts. 

We focused on the Shared Foundation Curate and discussed how she integrates the standards into her work by talking about a specific collaborative lesson she was working on with a teacher of Environmental Studies. A few of the questions I asked, besides ones specific to the standards, included: 

  • When you received the new standards, did you feel they were giving you additional work to complete, or did you feel they were integrated pretty well into your work already? 
  • Could you tell me about a collaborative project that was either very successful or rather unsuccessful? 
  • How do you typically work with teachers? Is it usually a sit-down planning meeting, or more on the fly? 
  • Do you ever work with teachers at the Fine Arts Center? 

We started by discussing a collaborative lesson that she was currently working on. It started when an environmental science teacher reached out to the librarian saying she was looking for books or materials on the national parks for a project she wanted to create. The librarian did not have many specific materials on national parks, so she and the teacher worked together to create a project that was more focused in scope and utilized only the South Carolina state parks website as a resource. This resource was easily accessible through students' Chromebooks both at school and at home, making it an equitable option. As she told me, "In this class, for this project, it was more important to hand them good information and have them work on creating their product, rather than focus on teaching information literacy."

The "Curate" aspect of the standards applied to finding the correct resource for this project, as well as determining what the most important learning tasks were for the students right now. The librarian also helped the teacher determine the scope and rubric for the project, which was to plan a camping trip at one of the state parks. This included meal planning, creating a packing list, and other real-world activities that would have to be completed in order to plan an actual trip. 

I appreciated the practical nature of this project - it was a good example of just how practical library lessons can be, and made me think about how one could create something similarly practical and useful at the elementary and middle school levels.

The final product, which students had not yet completed, would be a presentation of their work which would be shared with their classmates. This project fits well into three of the domains of the "Curate" Shared Foundation: 

  • Think: Students use a single information resource, however that resource has information on many different topics. They needed to search the site for information that was relevant to their needs. 
  • Create: They choose relevant information and organize it into the categories they need to cover (food, reservations, packing, etc.). 
  • Share: They will be sharing their findings as presentations with each other.
This librarian felt that the standards are really what she's been doing all along, not something extra that she has to think about. That was helpful to hear, as I can see that they should be used as a helpful framework to check yourself with - not an overwhelming document to check off with every project or goal. Despite the proximity of the FAC to her school, she does not work with those teachers. The FAC seems to be very self-contained.

I also enjoyed hearing her talk about how she collaborates with teachers. Rather than sit down and plan in a focused session, she said that often it's on the fly or spontaneous. "Someone will send me a text and say, 'Can you help me with this?'" she said. "Most teachers don't even have their full planning periods, so they are very very busy." 

References:

American Association of School Librarians. (2018). National school library standards. ALA Editions. 

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