Australian School Library Association > Publications > Commentary Volume 15 Issue 4 2001

Commentary, Volume 15 Issue 4, 2001

(Note: The views expressed in articles are those of the author concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of ASLA.)

Teacher librarians ... who are you?

Professor Ross Harvey

What is a teacher librarian? How does a teacher librarian differ from any other kind of librarian? Is there, in fact any difference?

It is important that we know the answers to these questions. There is, I perceive, much misunderstanding about the role of the teacher librarian. I admit to confusion myself, even despite the attempts made to educate me by my teacher librarian colleagues and students at Charles Sturt University. Perhaps I'm a slow learner - but I'm still unclear about the teacher librarian's role and, in particular, why this role needs to be different. Perhaps teacher librarians have been too focussed on developing their own practice, without looking carefully and frequently at the similarities between what they do and what their librarian colleagues do? Teacher librarians have not explained sufficiently to their non-teacher librarian colleagues why they are different. And are they, in fact, that very different?

At Charles Sturt University I'm in the position of supervising many of the research students in library and information studies. By default, I've become the supervisor of teacher librarianship PhD students. Why? - because we do not have on the staff any teacher librarians who hold a doctorate, which is a pre-requisite to supervising research students at this level. I think this is a significant point. Where are the Australian research-qualified teacher librarians? I can name one or two - Dr Ross Todd is the name probably best known to Access readers - but after that I'm left scratching my head. So why is this worth noting? Because one measure of the health of a profession is active research into that profession. (It isn't, of course, the only measure.) I'm not seeing a lot of high-level research into teacher librarianship happening in Australia.

In my time so far at Charles Sturt University I've been fortunate to meet some impressive teacher librarians. They would rate, I think, as some of the most dedicated and effective librarians I've met. They are highly focussed on their job, and have established their libraries as central parts of the school, essential in supporting the school's primary role. They are taking a lead in information literacy in their schools. They have dual qualifications, as teachers and as librarians.

However, I can ascribe these same attributes to effective librarians who are not teacher librarians. These librarians are also highly focussed. They have established themselves as central to the parent organisation. They are taking a leading role in introducing and implementing information literacy in their organisation. Many examples come to mind, particularly from special libraries; and, in relation to information literacy, also from academic libraries. And while there is unlikely to be a requirement for these librarians to hold dual qualifications in order to practise (unlike teacher librarians), a high number of librarians do hold dual qualifications - as managers, as subject specialists, as records managers.

Teacher librarians would, I think, argue that they are different because of their dual roles as teachers and as librarians. They would contend that their teaching role is more central to what they do than is their role as librarian. While this is undoubtedly the case for many teacher librarians, I wonder if there aren't some who are content to be much more librarian than teacher. Their libraries are the ones which are a store for books and other media, probably a well-organised store, but nonetheless a passive one. Their libraries are not central to the teaching and learning activities carried out in the schools, because these teacher librarians have remained in their libraries, rather than actively seeking to make it and themselves central to these core activities in their schools. Their vision is centred on the library, not on the whole school, and certainly not on the wider community of which the school is a part.

There may, in fact, be very little difference between effective teacher librarians and their effective non-teacher librarian colleagues. I don't believe that the differences are all that significant. All effective librarians share the same characteristics. To me, the only real difference between teacher librarians and other librarians is that teacher librarians work in a school environment.

To back up this assertion I refer to a recently-published article by Carol Tilley and Daniel Callison titled Preparing school library media specialists for the new century. Although there's always a danger in uncritically transferring U.S. research findings to the Australian situation, the general trends in library education noted in this article ring true. Table 3 in Tilley and Callison's article, Shifts in course content for prospective SLMS since 1995, is particularly interesting. The shifts have been away from 'audiovisual, library skills, selection of materials, isolated skill sets, resource input, general resources' before 1995, towards 'multimedia and telecommunications, information literacy and inquiry, learner needs analysis, collaboration and curriculum integration and learner performance diversification to target unique needs'. These trends seem to me to be very positive, for they indicate that librarians in schools are now being educated to become an intrinsic part of the teaching and learning team, rather than primarily library managers.

Tilley and Callison's trends may appear to weaken my contention that libraries in schools are often not central to the school's core teaching and learning functions. However, in the same issue of the same journal is another article by Stuart Sutton which describes trends in professional education for library and information science (LIS). The six trends identified and articulated include these two:

Trend 1 LIS curricula are addressing broad-based information environments and information problems.

Trend 2 a distinct core is taking shape that is predominantly user-centred.

The way I read it, these are remarkably similar to Tilley and Callison's 'information literacy and inquiry, learner needs analysis' and so on. The authors of both of these articles indicate that LIS education (whether specifically for librarians in schools, or more generally for librarians in a wide range of information environments) is becoming less focussed on place - the library and its specific practices - and more focussed on users and their needs. (The references in Sutton's article provide further evidence if the reader wants to pursue this idea.)

This leads me to wonder whether there is a need for a separate teacher librarianship discipline. By insisting that there is, are teacher librarians in effect shutting themselves out of the wider discipline, becoming less and less powerful, eventually to wither and die?

These are, of course, my opinions. I'm deliberately being a devil's advocate. However, unless teacher librarians can better explain to their non-teacher librarian colleagues why they are different, it seems likely that there will continue to be misunderstanding, perhaps even mistrust. This might even lead eventually to a more fragmented profession at a time when none of us can afford it. I hope I'm wrong - but I fear that I'm not. So, an invitation to teacher librarians: let the rest of us know why you are different. Talk to us. Publish. Don't be separate. To coin a phrase: united we stand, divided we fall.

Reference

Sutton S. (2001). Trends, trend projections, and crystal ball gazing. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 42(3): 241-247.

Tilley C. & Callison D. (2001). Preparing school library media specialists for the new century. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 42(3): 220-227.

Ross Harvey is Professor of Library and Information Management at Charles Sturt University. He held academic positions at Curtin University of Technology and Monash University in Australia, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and the New Zealand Library School before joining Charles Sturt University in 1999. His teaching interests include preservation of information media, organising bibliographic information, and research methods. Current research is in the areas of preservation of library and archival materials, organisation of information in libraries and archives, and newspaper history. Recent publications include Organising knowledge in Australia (Wagga Wagga: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 1999) and Book & print in New Zealand: a guide to print culture in Aotearoa, edited by Penny Griffith, Ross Harvey and Keith Maslen (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997).

Professor Ross Harvey can be contacted at rossharvey@csu.edu.au