Assignment+Six

=Assignment Six=

Final Reflection
At the beginning of this course, I facetiously posted a picture of me in Red Rock Canyon on my Wiki, with the caption, “This is me climbing to the summit of knowledge.” What started as a joke ended up being a pretty accurate description of my journey through this course.

I am currently working as a classroom teacher. I had three LIBE course under my belt when I started this one, but very little in the way of practical knowledge about how a library runs, or how I would go about actually working as a TL. This course challenged me, and took me out of my comfort zone. Once I got started, however, my learning gathered momentum, and I started finding connections to the course in many aspects of my professional life. Now, as the course draws to a close, I actually have a pretty good idea of how I would approach managing my collection. If becoming a capable, skilled TL is the goal at the “summit of knowledge,” I am a lot closer to the top than I was in January.

One thing that this course has helped me learn is the role my own personality plays in managing a collection and selecting learning resources. I come into the position with 30 years of experience that have shaped my biases, preferences, and beliefs. In order to build and maintain a library collection that is balanced and meets the needs of a range of people, I need to be aware of my own personal tendencies when making professional decisions. Kay Bishop discusses this issue in Chapter 13 of //The Collection Program in Schools// (Libraries Unlimited, 2007) She suggests that teacher librarians should have a “commitment to intellectual freedom” (page 170) and that only by being aware of their personal biases can TLs attain this commitment. By lining my own library’s collection up next to my curricular needs as a classroom teacher, I was made aware of the ways in which my current TL’s personal and political beliefs have impacted our collection. The next step for me was to figure out what my own biases are. Bishop’s exploration of the issue of literary merit versus popularity on page 171 of the text helped to make this clear to me. I am a bit of a literature snob, and would like to see all of my students reading works that //I// consider to be worthwhile. But even I like to read Cosmo once in a while... People read for many different reasons, and people use libraries only if they can find material that is appealing and accessible to them. My sister, who now has a degree in English Literature, read nothing but Archie magazines all through high school. She must have driven her teachers nuts, but at least she was reading. Sometimes just bringing a student into the library can be the start of a connection and a relationship, and that is something that is worth building with any student. When I become a teacher librarian, I will do my best to be aware of what students want to read, and use that as a door into their trust. From there I can work on convincing them to expand their repertoire.

Part of what I enjoyed about this course was the way it was structured. There was some discussion of theoretical issues and practical concerns. This discussion, as well as our assignments, allowed us to make connections to other parts of our practice. I learn best when I can connect new learning to already extant knowledge. I found that many of the issues that arose in this course connected to opportunities and experiences I was having outside of this course. My professional growth plan this year focused on using curricular outcomes as the basis for assessment, so the assignment that required me to break down and reflect on one area of curriculum was very useful. When I told my principal about my weeding assignment and then my selection report, she told me to go ahead and actually do them in our underused library. When we were reading about student diversity and Aboriginal representation in texts, I was participating in a district project to develop cross-curricular units based on Aboriginal stories. The readings and discussion on bias and a balanced approach to selection of resources coincided with the start of a project in my school to evaluate online learning resources for Scholastic through ERAC. This course was an excellent mix of theoretical content and hands-on assignments, all of which connected to my professional life.

As well as encouraging me to reflect on some intellectual issues, this course enabled me to take a hands-on approach to managing a library collection. I was forced to sit down in my dusty library and really dig into the books that we had, and to really examine the reasons that we were keeping them on the shelves. I learned to take into account the specific needs of my particular school and community when making decisions about library resources. The text gave some helpful theory in Chapter 3, but nothing had an impact like actually getting out there and doing the research. As well as learning to make the decisions about what our school library needed compared to what it had, I began to learn how to use our library’s computer system to learn about and manage the collection. I also learned the importance of communicating with your administrator. I have kept my administrator up to date with all of my assignments, and she has worked to enable and support me.

This course has challenged my thinking and my actions. I have learned about the curriculum in the grade I teach, about the school and community in which I work, and about myself as a biased but idealistic professional. I feel much more confident in my ability to one day be an effective teacher librarian. I know that the content covered in this course is only one part of the job, but it seems to me like an integral part. I now have the confidence to create clear selection and deselection policies, and to follow them as I build the collection that I know will best serve the needs of my colleagues, my students, and my community. I am not yet working in a library, and I know that I still have a lot to learn, but after this course, I feel that I have a solid place from which to start when I do get my own library.