The New Literacy and the Teacher Librarian

One thing about the Internet. There’s information available. Plenty of it. The time worn domestic drama of panic as the news is broken that there’s a “project” due tomorrow on fruitbats - “What about fruitbats?” “Everything!” only to find that the public library has closed for the night is surely no more. After all, there’s the Internet. How did you go on your last project, Mum and Dad? Got to be easier now there’s the Internet, right? Well, maybe not.

When asked at a recent conference in Hobart if he had concerns about current literacy standards, Paul Jennings, gave a telling response. Claims about lower literacy rates, he asserted on ABC Radio News, were being made by the very people who were cutting teacher-librarian numbers and hours. I doubt if the decision makers were listening, any more than they were attending a recent series of workshops run in most States by educational technology consultant Jamie McKenzie. If McKenzie’s visit was noted in the media, I must have missed it, but what he has to say deserves as wide an audience as possible.

For the new literacy is information literacy, and the people best positioned in our schools to develop the skills our students will need for the new millenium are the information specialists - teacher-librarians. McKenzie asks the tough questions. His electronic journal From Now On, has a recent article called The New Plagiarism : Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age. This should be discussion material in every primary and secondary staffroom across Australia.

McKenzie is particularly sceptical of technology for technology’s sake and the worldwide misapprehension that throwing dollars at our schools, wiring up our classrooms and installing expensive hardware will in itself confer information literacy upon our students. Computer literacy is not information literacy. Faced with a tidal wave of information, students will need to become more discriminating than ever. Simply put, the information literate person needs to know what it is they need to know, where to find it, and once found, what to do with it. Upon this simple framework a whole range of skills are assumed - asking the right questions; locating the information using sophisticated search strategies; selecting information by sorting out the good from the bad, the fact from the opinion, the relevant from the irrelevant, the valid from the invalid; critical thinking; notemaking; analysis and synthesis.

Too many students have a Roy & H G attitude to information - where too much is barely enough. Hitting the print button, overworking the photocopy card, surrounding themselves with small forests, they somehow hope that the project on fruitbats or the assignment wanted by the science teacher on the ethical issues surrounding the IVF debate will mysteriously write itself. Or worse, that by some judicious cutting and pasting, and no original thought whatsoever, a passable piece of work can be cobbled together - McKenzie’s Highway Robbery.

You can hardly blame students - after all, in the past, the dreaded “project” has often been rewarded with high grades if it looked good and used information from just one encyclopaedia. We need to understand that students of today are the decision makers of tomorrow, and will base these decisions upon how well they have selected and interpreted the information available to them.

Teacher-librarians are not just keepers of a tidy library. We are certainly trained to manage and utilise a wide range of print and digital resources which is the librarian side of the title, but we also have the skills to identify, develop, implement and assess information outcomes across the curriculum. We are in the unique position of having an overview of the curriculum and an opportunity to work with every teacher and every student in the school. Working with the classroom or subject teacher, assignments can be designed to focus on particular skills, and a profile of information handling competence developed for each student - to avoid the “everything about fruitbats” syndrome. That’s the teaching side. Two professionals for the price of one, yet in too many schools teacher librarians are fighting to retain their position.

At Fahan, as in other schools which value the contribution of the teacher-librarian, we are in the process of developing an information skills policy, working closely with classroom and subject teachers to identify the skills our students will need at the end of their secondary schooling, and setting programs in place to ensure that competencies are met. We have embraced technology in the school program when the learning outcomes are clear. For example, it is a joy to watch our ESL students use the picture books in the library to gain the inspiration to create their own bilingual digital picture book, using paint and hyperstack programs and which are preserved as CDROMs. This is but one example of a range of technology applications from K-12.

A school which supports its teacher-librarian, which understands the uniqueness of the role, is more likely to produce students with the skills necessary for lifelong learning, comfortable and competent with information handling as they hurtle down that superhighway. After all, they will have their driver’s licence.

Visit Fahan at : http://anfi.pacit.tas.gov.au/fahan/

      Jamie McKenzie’s educational technology e-journal From Now On can be found at http://www.fromnowon.org/

Judi Jagger (Teacher-Librarian, Fahan School)
(Most of this article was published in The Australian on 6 July 1998. Ed.)