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ASLA National Journal - Access - President's message

Executive Reports - Leading edge

Where true love lies

ACCESS, Vol. 22, issue 2 2008, p.3.

By ASLA President, Mr Rob Moore

Why did you become a teacher librarian? Was it the money? The power? Is this job just a key part of your overall strategy en route to world domination?

Could it be that a love of books played some part in your motivation to take the significant career move from classroom teacher to teacher librarian? I’m not suggesting for one second that you took this job on so that you could find a cosy corner for a good read, but a teacher librarian without a love of literature and reading is like choc-chip ice-cream without the choc-chips … it’s still ice-cream but the nuances of flavour and texture are reduced to a bland vanilla.

Since taking on the role of ASLA President, my two girls have started introducing me (sometimes to complete strangers) as ‘The President of Books’. As much as I believe my role as president and as a proactive teacher librarian is to make the educational and wider community fully aware that our profession is about so much more than books, I confess there is a part of me that would be pretty happy to be the President of Books.

Contemporary teacher librarians embrace ICTs and there is no doubt that one of the core elements of our advocacy in schools is demonstrating that, as information professionals, our role is essential to help staff and students alike access and navigate their way around the ocean of information that ICTs have made available. Yet while this aspect of our role is highly significant and arguably the dominant currency of advocacy, we all know that the teacher librarian is a multi-faceted creature and foremost among these facets is an unashamed love of literature, matched with the desire and skills to put the right book into the right hands.

Is there a better feeling in your job than knowing that you’ve played a role in helping a reluctant reader lose themselves in a good book? As a high school teacher librarian, I really enjoy the journey of my keen readers too: they start year 8 so little and enthusiastic, with their back catalogue of Harry Potter, Saddle Club and Deltora Quest well and truly sorted. During their years here, they journey through the likes of Eoin Colfer, Archie Fusillo, Maureen McCarthy and so on until they end up in my English Extension class in year 12 undertaking complex transformations of Baba Yaga and Marxist readings of Dickens. Truly, literature is empowering in so many ways on so many levels.

Ezra Pound said: ‘If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.’ <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199105/gioia-poetry/5, accessed 7 May 2008>. I firmly believe that as teacher librarians, we play a vital role in avoiding that atrophy and decay.

While a perennial slow-news-day-story in the press during the past decade has been the concept of the bookless library, this is proving to be as likely as the paperless office. Literature itself may be reinvented, reread, rediscovered and revealed through emergent technologies – but try as I might, I cannot conceive of the day I take my laptop or PDA to bed loaded with a copy of the latest Alex Rider outing.

Information may well be our stock and trade as teacher librarians, but as crucial as our role in managing the selection, storage, accessibility and distribution of this is, my true love will always be faithful to literature.

Last updated 1 July 2008