Have we met the enemy?

"We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us" – Pogo (Walt Kelly)

In last Thursday’s post “Not your grandma's librarian,” I complimented the work of the tech integration specialists at the International School on Bangkok, Justin Medved and Dennis Harter, for their postings on Dangerously Irrelevant about the approach they are taking in teaching 21st century skills in their school. But I also asked, what’s taken you so long and "where has your school's librarian been in your lives that you are just now figuring this out?!”

Both Dennis and Justin left comments on the post which are well-worth reading in their entirety, but they also left me with a compelling question. Dennis writes: “While I am glad to hear that librarians have "understood this for at least the past decade", I do wonder why it remains largely un-integrated into classroom teaching and in the way that schools do business.” He asks if “librarians [are] holding on to ownership of these ideas?”

Justin observes: .

I have had the opportunity to work with some fantastic librarians in my time but I would argue that their success in embedding these "new literacies" was closely tied to "who" they were as people and the soft skills they possessed with dealing with teachers not their status as "librarian". You take this away and suddenly that part of the school and the skills that were taught from it fall to the wayside.”

Before I get to the business at a hand, I apologize for calling Justin and Dennis “techs” when, as they point out, they are “tech and learning coordinators” – teachers, not technicians. I knew this and my shorthand for this sort of position is sloppy, but not meant derogatorily. Like we've shorted “library media specialist” to LMS, could one refer to the “technology and learning coordinators” as TLCs? (What a nice acronym!)

I have fussed before about the quality of the library program being too dependent on the interpersonal skills and personality of the individual librarian. I have to reject the idea that librarians are trying to “own” the idea of an integration of technology and information literacy skills – I believe our frustration lies in not being able to effectively share these ideas and have them accepted by others. But I do agree that we as a profession have not done a good job in the past decade in getting a truly integrated, effective, and universally taught technology and information literacy in place in most schools.

If we take an honest look at what we as librarians have done since technology has come into our buildings, as painful as it is to say, we have dropped the ball – big time. Why?

Why have school librarians not had a bigger impact on information and tech literacy integration?

1. Sexism.
Ok, let’s just start out with the one reason that will get me in the most trouble. Our profession is comprised of over 90% women. Brilliant, dedicate, hardworking women, but women subject to the same subtle (or not so subtle) sexism that pervades education (and U.S. society as a whole.) I cannot help but think that ideas coming from the field of librarianship are not given the same attention and seriousness because the majority of its practitioners are women. Guys rule school administration, and as technology came into schools, its implementation was turned over to the guy math teacher, not the female librarian. I look at our district even today, 6 out of 6 of our secondary principals are male; 4 out 4 of our secondary librarians are female. At the elementary level we are slightly better, only 5 of 10 elementary principals are male and 7 out of 8 of our librarians are female. Who gets heard?

Even our own profession often seems to have a gender-bias. When AASL closed a recent conference with ““a panel of leading figures in the school library media field,” all five were men. What has the ratio of keynote speakers at your library and tech conferences looked like over the last decade? What gender are instructional technology's most influential writers? Speakers? Consultants? There are noteworthy exceptions, of course, but really…

Has the subtext in education, been “don’t you librarians worry your pretty little heads about technology and such, just leave it to the guys?”

(Just remember "Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical, unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.")

2. Schitzophrenia
The school library field divides itself pretty cleanly and clearly between the childrens/young adult lit people and the research people. Sorry, but it is true. And to a very large extent, the lit people are very much those who lead it.

The Nov/Dec 2007 issue of Knowledge Quest is a telling example. I was very excited to learn that the theme was “Intellectual Freedom 101.” But I was very disappointed in reading it to find that the majority of the issue was devoted to book challenges – not Internet censorship and filtering problems. What does this say about the librarian’s role in technology integration when we still seem to be more concerned about a few cranks wanting to strike a couple fiction books from our shelves than we are about an entire generation of children losing access to a broad range of online information sources and tools? One of the things I have always been most proud of about the library profession is its anti-censorship stance. But the world has moved on in this area and we have not. The teachers I talk to don't worry about kids getting access to Harry Potter, but to Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs and wikis.

Until our profession sees its primary instructional focus as teaching information and technology literacy skills, we will lack both credibility and voice in technology implementation efforts.

3. Strategy
Dennis’s question are “librarians [are] holding on to ownership of these [integration of technology and information literacy ideas?” illustrates how we as a profession have used the wrong strategy when it comes to collaboration, planning and leadership.

If librarians had a coat of arms, collaboration would have to be one of the biggest symbols on it. Our profession has books, articles, standards, workshops, and probably t-shirts and coffee mugs all devoted to collaboration with teachers (and to a lesser degree, principals) in designing and implementing good information literacy and technology experiences into the curriculum.

But the emphasis has always been one-to-one, never the kind of systematic, whole-school collaborative approach that Justin and Dennis describe:

We had to create a shared understanding of what 21st century learning is and why it's important.  We had to allow them [teaching staff] to help frame the context in which this could work at ISB.  With that individual, personal input, you can achieve buy-in.  Then you can challenge them by asking, what are we going to do about it?

Do we need to ask ourselves if the library field has put the cart before the horse, working with individual teachers before there is a school-wide understanding of information and technology literacy in place? Should we have been “collaborating” with our curriculum committees, our leadership teams, assessment coordinators and our staff development committees instead - and first? Without whole school buy-in, we will have amazing successes with the few individual teachers, but not impact the entire learning community.

Is it too late for us to re-strategize? What should we be learning from our TLCs?

Ok, this ramble has gone on too long, I am not sure I totally believe everything I’ve written myself, and every criticism I’ve made can be applied to my own district and its library/technology program – for which I’ve had responsibility for 15 years. But if librarianship as a profession is to survive and thrive, we need to have some hard conversations about who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

Thanks again to Dennis and Justin for raising my consciousness more than a little. I’ll end with Dennis’s advice:

…librarians need to speak louder, be more active in curriculum building, and/or let go of ownership of ideas related to information.

 

Comments

[Doug Johnson]

Rob Darrow at California Dreamin' has already written a great response to this:

http://robdarrow.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/tech-role-of-teacher-librarians/

Read it!

Doug

[DW]

Great post!

I feel I do a pretty fair job of balancing the lit with the tech in my position; it's the four buildings I'm responsible for that contribute to my schizophrenia. In my little corner of the world, this seems to be the norm and I'll admit it cripples my ability to be all that I could be.

Di

P.S.
I just stumbled upon this blog (although I've been a fan of Doug's since I saw him at a conference) and am excited about what I see!

[Doug Johnson]

Joyce Valenza (one of the exceptions that prove the sexist rule) has a great response here:

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1340000334/post/1900021990.html?nid=3714

Doug

[Dennis Harter]

Doug,
This is why I love the sharing and collaborative model that the blog world provides us. Great post!

Your understanding and description of the issues and realities of the difficulties of integrating these ideas are enlightening. Despite my comment on the earlier post, I believe that in fact librarians have never wanted to "own" these ideas, but like you said, that they are typically among the more collaboratively-minded people in a school. I spoke of teacher resistance or administrative lack of support, but I could not pinpoint why this would happen. You offer insight into that.

Of course, there are terrific examples of librarians leading the charge on all of this (with many of them wondering where their tech people are). We do not claim that the TLCs (we like that acronym too) are the ones with the answers...merely that we are trying to help the cause at our school WITH our librarians.

The luxury afforded to the tech people is that schools are generally pushing for technology integration into the classroom. We use that directive to marshal the conversation towards info lit skills.

Ultimately, of course, the solution lies somewhere in between, with a healthy collaboration between the two - librarian and TLC. What we hoped to spur with this conversation was that ANYONE who believed in the imperative for a curriculum like this in schools, would take what we have or what they have and begin to move it forward or share how they are doing that already.

It is conversations the develop through posts like Doug's and others that make that successful (we hope).

Teaching information literacy skills needed for the 21st Century is EVERYONE'S job.

So how do we convince everyone?

[Carolyn Foote]

Doug,

I could barely make it through your post before needing to respond.

Your first point resonated with me completely--how many times I have felt the unspoken message that I wasn't supposed to be, as you said, "worrying my pretty little head about technology."

We were talking at Educon about the lack of women speakers at many conferences, keynotes, etc., in education in general(when a large percentage of educators are women!).
So I thank you for bringing this up.

I also think that we do need better partnerships with TLC's as you call our tech staff. I think they need to take us seriously, and we need to take them seriously, and we need to understand how helpful we could be to one another in our quest for information literacy, which is at the core of both of our programs.

I also completely agree that we need to be participating in curriculum teams, staff development teams, etc., though that is an area I do feel like we have made much headway on, in general. Many librarians are on their department teams or department chairs, but again, are they relegated to "the librarian" role, or do principals and other teachers really see us as instructional partners?

Another area I think needs much work is in collaboration between the education departments of colleges and library schools, as well as instructional technology programs, so that teachers entering in the profession have a better understanding of the collaborative partnership available to them (both from librarians and instructional technologists, I might add). It doesn't appear that information literacy is very much a part of teacher training programs, either, and yet it is a skill that cuts across all content areas.

Thanks for threading all these conversations together. Looking forward to tracking back through the other posts as well!

[Dennis Harter]

Carolyn is spot on: "I think they need to take us seriously, and we need to take them seriously, and we need to understand how helpful we could be to one another in our quest for information literacy, which is at the core of both of our programs."

Librarians and TLCs working together. This is how it should be and too often what I forget in an effort to "get something down."

I have in my most recent comments on another post, inadvertently given the wrong impression of my work with librarians.

I COMPLETELY believe in the cooperation and joint-effort. I work with librarians who very much care about integrating a library curriculum into the learning of students at ISB.

The work that Justin and I have described - involving embedding technology learning into the greater-good goal of information literacy - was not to step on the toes of librarians, but rather to tap into their expertise.

When Doug asked me where are our librarians, I responded to the general idea of "where are they" in education, pushing info lit into the classrooms, Since librarians have been aware of the need for these skills long before I have had my epiphany, I wondered why it still wasn't common practice in classroom learning.

I did not answer the question of where are they at ISB. If I had, the answer would be "ready move things forward with this and wondering why I haven't been working more closely with them!"

To which I can only say, I should be.

In my general question, I challenged Doug to respond (which in this post he did) to why a library curriculum that I call 21st Century Learning Skills hasn't been integrated into the classroom. I wanted to know this, because I want to know what obstacles we are about to face as we make the same try.

In the process of my challenge and our intial work on school leadership in a "different direction", it appears that my words have maligned librarians. This was not their intent.

Instead, when I theorized about why info lit hadn't made it as a common thread in all learning, I hazarded a guess that teacher resistance and lack of admin support were likely causes. I also suggested that librarians stuck in the library could be the cause, which I regret, because in that example, I was referring to what I imagine is a very small minority.

As I stated in my earlier comment, librarians are by definition among the most collaborative educators at a school. Their job is to collaborate and my experience is that they do, here at ISB and at all the schools I've worked. I apologize if anything I said appeared an attack on librarians. On the other hand, at all schools I've worked, I haven't seen a fully integrated information literacy curriculum. Therein was the point of my questions.

My questions spoke to why information literacy is resisted from a leadership point of view. If librarians (the info experts) haven't been able to get it into practice, what do I need to do to help push it along? Because like the librarians at ISB and around the world, I BELIEVE in this stuff. I KNOW that kids need this.

I am trying to get technology learning to happen as a by-product of this library curriculum...we figured that an info lit curriculum is more accessible to teachers and more important to students than a tech one.

So again, I'll focus on our point...how do we make this happen?

[Betsy]

Has anyone noticed that OUR national board certification process includes collaboration with teachers but the teachers' process has nary a word about it? It is obvious that teachers are not being trained to work with us in college since we have to grab each rookie to train them. While we are chipping away at teachers at the building level, who is working on the education professors? What is the deal? We as a profession are that lone voice crying in the wilderness.

[Carolyn Foote]

Dennis,

Good question. How do we do it?

I do think being able to get out of our spaces(be they libraries or computer labs or offices) and into classrooms is important.

We have to act as teaching partners. Part of that means being there teaching a project alongside teachers, and assessing it alongside them, too.

I also don't think most teachers embrace this concept. It doesn't fit their notion of school....not what they've experienced before...and not how they've been trained either. (So maybe we should also be advocating for colleges to embrace collaboration and information literacy as part of their teaching programs)

But perhaps it also requires rethinking the paradigm--how could we join department teams, grade level teams, etc. at our campuses/
And how can we do that if we are spread really thin to begin with?

I think until we begin in schools thinking of libraries and technology services not as frills, but as integral to the curriculum--and the librarians and TLCs as the only "curriculum" support team on a campus, it is a difficult proposition.

So, maybe I've just written my way into an idea--how about billing the librarian and TLC as the "curriculum support team?" I like the idea of a team approach, and it diminishes the "lines" between our roles as much.

Dennis--and Doug, great questions here. Lots to consider!

[Cathy Nelson]

This is a FABULOUS conversation (thanks so much Doug for the comments feed!!!)

@Dennis and @Carolyn i have a highly connected friend that sits on the board for the school lib progam at one of our state universities and he wants LMS's to join him in asking that SLIS in thei r program get more technology training in the integration department and if its not a grassroots effort this will never happen, and we will continue to see the tech people getting more and more of our turf--a turf that for all intents and apurpsoes should be shared.

I strive at my school to be in on curriculum meetings, departmental or grade, and make sure I make my presence known and felt. But that is the nature of a continual learner, and FAR too many of todays teachers (and SLMS's) have graduated with their degrees and STOPPED learning--something that can never happen in the field of education, much less any other field. I cannot think of a single field where you are allowed to stop learning. Why do our teachers do that?

@Betsy GREAT point about the NBCT process and the lack of requirement for collaboration on the teachers part--just the library.

[Carolyn Foote]

Cathy,

Liking that idea, but also I like the idea of Technology programs incorporating library collaboration models. Sort of along the same lines as principals receiving training on library and technology best practices. If we all understand each other's roles better, and have good models going in, then the collaboration process works more smoothly.

I'm thinking the word turf somehow reflects how we don't think as a "team" because really our turf should be the students and information literacy, and if we work together as a team, each doing our parts, then we are much more effective.

But your point reflects the difficulty sometimes in delineating our roles -- again, making me think a curriculum team of a librarian/tech is a great way to approach that as well. We used to meet once weekly with our tech coordinators to go over upcoming weekly projects, which was a great thing, but it was somewhat a one-way street, because they didn't go over projects they were doing with us--we just went over ones that we were seeking their help with.

For it to be a partnership, TLCs have to understand that we can be helpful to what they do, just as they are helpful to what we do, correct?

And I wish this partnership was reflected all the way up the administrative ladder, into central office positions, as well, so that training opportunities and collaborative workshops with TLCS and librarians happened.

I wonder if there is more crossover in these roles in some places at the secondary level than elementary, or perhaps that is just my district? Perhaps we are all reacting to our own experiences on our own campuses, rather than redefining the "best practice?"

I think the new AASL standards may put more pressure on libraries that are not embracing technology as a means to information literacy, and will contribute to making the need for partnerships even more vital?

Thanks, Doug, for prompting this conversation!

[Kathie]

This is a fabulous conversation that I wish all persons involved in this process could read and become a part of in someway. If everyone could just stop and take a look at their own buildings to see how information skills and technology are being integrated into the curriculum. Doug had a great diagram he posted a few weeks ago, showing the 3 major elements of our job as an LMS: information literacy, technology skills, and reading skills. We need to define what is most important in our schools. I agree that information skills are most important. I also work at integrating reading skills (with the help of staff) and technology into the mix. My other job is Technology Specialist.

I have been very lucky to be at the school I am and would find it hard to leave and go to another LMC. I was on the planning committee when we first opened this school and made sure that 2 very important items were part of the design; flexible scheduling and planning with teachers. Those two things have been the most valuable tools I have. Something else we did before we opened which has proven extremely valuable was to do some curriculum mapping. We are a multiage K1-5 school. We created units of study that were similar across the board, being taught at the same time. It is fabulous for me. I can plan visits to the LC for K/1, 2/3, and 4/5 on weather, for example, all at the same time. It helps me so much with unerstanding and knowing where kids are at with information skills and technology skills across the board. Right now, K/1's are learning about nonfiction books about weather. 2/3's are researching weather in two cities and comparing the 2 cities using Inspiration. 4/5's are planning a trip anywhere in the world. They are learning how to use the Internet wisely, and creating an open ended project.

During this whole process of development, I had knee to knee conversations about what this should look like with my principal, and yes I was lucky to have that. I still struggle with a few teachers, but the ground work has been laid, so there is enthusiasm from most, compliance from some.

I guess what I want to say again is that this is a wonderful conversation and to let people know that it can work, but it takes a lot of time, planning and legwork.

[Doug Johnson]

Please be sure to go back and read ISB librarian Rob Rubis's comment he left on the "Not Your Grandma's Librarian post (and the ISB's TLCs response):

http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2008/2/14/not-your-grandmas-librarian.html

Doug

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Kathie,

Thanks for example and inspiration that librarians CAN make a difference in their schools if given the chance. Your school sounds like it works really well in MANY ways.

My guess is much of your success has been due to your own drive and interpersonal qualities. What advice would you offer those librarians who may be struggling with a less than support administration and staff?

All the very best!

Doug

[Audrey Nay]

Yes. Yes. Yes.
The truth hurts
Reflecting on what you have raised- Assessing the situation and what can be done to change things for the better
then PLANNING -
having a vision- short term doable and long term rewards!!

I can see a lot of room for reassessing what has been.
In my school men @ the top Principal and "Computer Co-ordinator" who manages the technical stuff
but yet I have no access to anything because ?? even though I do the digital literacy stuff, the blogs, the websites, the web 2.0 stuff.I thought it was just me!!
I have no say, meetings are as rare as hen's teeth...decisions are just made.
I tried to convene them many a time.....
Now I just email them both with questions, requests and I am finding that some things are now after 5-6 years of asking, niggling, reminding-NAGGING it is called, things are finally being ACTED on!!!!!

THINGS will change for the better
KNOWLEDGE is power
You helped me create NEW knowledge and understand a few more WHY's!!
Thankyou Doug

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Audrey,

Happy you found the post enlightening. Perhaps awareness and articulation of a situation is the first needed step in changing it.

Cheers,

Doug