A critical synthesis of my reflection on how my view of the role of the teacher librarian may have changed during the subject
I am not Australian. I do not come from an Anglo-American background. Until eight month ago I had never even heard of the profession, teacher librarian.
Now I do have an ongoing position as a teacher librarian at a public high school, studying to gain a Masters in Teacher Librarianship.
When I began studying I did exactly what the cliché says: I checked books in and out and catalogued them. I began to realize many different expectations colleagues, the principal team, staff members and students have of a teacher librarian. My role has since expanded significantly.
For these reasons I felt very motivated, curious and relieved to start this course (Moreno, 2011a). The readings from Herring (2007), Purcell (2010) the AASL (2009) and Boyd (2006) were the experiences I had made every day were expressed in words helped me to clarify my multifaceted role.
While reading in preparation for the first assignment I was able to explore the various roles of a teacher librarian. I was critical when I wrote that I could see many challenges and role dilemmas (Moreno, 2011b). It is one task to recognize the different roles and to describe them, quite another to adequately apply them to everyday librarian life (Moreno, 2011b).
I would like to highlight two roles of the teacher librarian which are most important to me: The role of the teacher and the role of the information specialist (Herring, 2007 and Purcell, 2010). I very much believe that these roles build the foundation for a successful implementation or cultivation, development and extension of information literacy throughout the school.
I admit that I completely underestimated the role of the information and media specialist. The use of Web tools such as Web 2.0 is a true challenge, but I am proud of every achievement I make towards developing my own 21st century technological literacy skills. I know that effective technological integration is not only critical in school libraries but also for learning (Lamb and Johnson, 2008).
My view of the teacher librarian as a leader is developing every day. I did not recognize a teacher librarian as a leader, but after reading through topic 6 and works from Gruden ( 2001), Hartzell (2002) and Hainstock (2010), I realized how important it will be for me to develop leadership skills (Moreno, 2011c).
Another challenge for a teacher librarian is collaboration with teaching colleagues throughout the school. The importance of collaboration is a matter of fact for most teacher librarians. Supported through the works from Boyd (2006), Lamb and Johnson (2008) or Haycock (2007) and others, I mentioned in my blog (Moreno, 2011b) and on the forum (Moreno, 2011d), that I hope to see more of me being a teacher. Even though my colleagues start requiring my help more and more I feel that for many of them the idea of collaboration is unfamiliar. It is certainly something that I will have to, and will heavily invest in.
One way to integrate the teacher librarian more into teaching and learning develops from a knowledge of the curriculum. It is crucial that the teacher librarian knows the curriculum. From this the learning needs of the students and needs of the teachers can be established. Reviewing the Australian curriculum connect website (2011) helped me to understand the Australian curriculum more thoroughly. I found Kuhltau’s works (2004, 2007) as well as Boss and Krauss (2007) very helpful when trying to understand the move towards constructivist learning, such as Inquiry based learning and Project-based learning.
When I started reading for topic 4, and this assignment, I became overwhelmed by the plethora of definitions and models, as stated in my blog (Moreno, 2011e). Especially the diversity of definitions was confusing. I decided that Herrings definition (Herring, 2011a) was the one that I could best work with. The definition includes his extension to “Information literacy practice” where students are expected to be “reflectively engaged in information related activities both in school and outside school” (Herring, 2011b, p.19).
I would like to rephrase the obstacle (transfer of information literacy) I mentioned in my assignment into a challenge: It is my future challenge to find ways to diminish this obstacle and to ensure a successful transfer of information literacy throughout school.
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