fyi : back issues

Summer 2005 - Thinking Curriculum

Reflections on a journey

Clare Burford

It is the final day of the year for the teaching staff – the students having ‘hoorayed’ themselves off on holiday last week. The program for this morning is typical with a staff meeting and farewells, a tidy-up, then a Christmas luncheon.

At 11 o’clock the scene for me in the library is typically ‘last day’ too: a box of new books arrives, ordered by the art department; someone wants to borrow a digital camera for the holidays; four of the middle school teachers want to borrow a copy each of all the books from the just compiled literature circles titles for 2005; a fax arrives (at last) with a quote for equipment to be installed during the holidays; some books missing in the stocktake arrive on my desk; a department head hands me a list of texts to be ordered for the beginning of the year; all the library furniture has to be placed in the centre of the library ready for the carpets to be steam-cleaned; two of the learning specialist’s children are sitting on the floor playing chess.

In the midst of all this, one of the teachers returns a pile of books that had been given to her last year but not first recorded on the system. “This is a bit different from last year,” she says, looking around the library. As I reflect on the year just past, I realise it is different. We have made quite a journey. The journey begins . . .

In 2003 the library collection for the new Village campus of Beaconhills College started out in a corridor at the Berwick Monash site where the staff and students were housed awaiting the finishing details to be completed on Stage 1 of the new school buildings. Its home for the rest of that year was to be one of the classrooms in what is now the junior school. During 2003, Stage 2 of the building development slowly took shape. The main building was to house the administration offices, staff room and library. Extensive planning had gone into the design of the library area. As the school grows from its first year intake of about 360 students in Prep to Year 7 to a roll of approximately 1400 students by 2008, spaces in each new building need to have the flexibility to serve several purposes during the development process. The area that will eventually encompass both junior and secondary libraries started this year partitioned for use as six classrooms as well as the library and a computer lab. With the student population doubling at the beginning of 2004, the junior school classroom library was no longer viable, so it was on the move again.

Putting everything together

At the beginning of 2004, two weeks before school was to start, I arrived as the Head of Information Services in a new library space in a new building. A circulation desk near the entrance was being fitted with telephone and electrical cables, while computer chairs, still in their plastic wrapping, were piled up in the far corner across a large expanse of bare carpet. An area behind the desk was to be the ‘workroom’ and the glassed-in area opposite, which looked ideal for an office and workroom, would instead be a classroom for the year.

Waiting in that junior classroom down the hall and piled in every possible spare space was the nucleus of our library. Twelve kilometres away, in the ‘parent’ campus library at Pakenham, were the stacks of boxes of books and materials that had been bought during the year, most of which were catalogued and processed by the staff there in readiness for addition to the collection in the new library. Putting everything together looked somewhat daunting, but we had a good team. Jenny Canty, the teacher-librarian at the Village campus in 2003, continued in a part-time capacity as the junior school teacher-librarian. The library staff at Pakenham was very supportive and had set up procedures to mirror what was in place at that established library. There were a number of parent volunteers ready to do book processing, and we were soon joined by an experienced library technician. Together we set about planning the layout for the 2004 version of the Village library. Mobile shelves were essential in our situation, as was the need to provide an atmosphere and facilities that would suit both the very young children in the Prep classes as well as pre-pubescent boys in Year 8. We have found that in our limited space in a shared library situation, some smaller children find numbers of larger students intimidating, so Year 7 and 8 use the library on Monday, Wednesday and Friday lunchtimes while the rest of the students come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I envisaged, and gradually established, a corner space with brightly coloured cushions, a learning-centre whiteboard and a mobile tub trolley near the open-fronted picture book shelving for the junior section. Tables and chairs in the rest of the open area doubled as working and class seating for all students.

Our fiction shelves moved a couple of times when it was realised that the lighting was not good enough for browsing by young readers. The reference collection also shifted, although it remains grossly underused in spite of all our efforts. We have no photocopier close to the library, and although a scanner is available in the adjacent computer lab, students are not willing to use this. In spite of my understanding of the need to save paper, I reluctantly admit that a photocopier is a necessary evil if one is to make full use of a reference collection. Students will not readily take the time to make notes from an encyclopedia, nor from a newspaper, no matter how relevant or succinct the information is. If information is not instantly accessible in a printout or photocopiable format it will not be used. However, we do have the school’s one colour printer in the library, to which all staff and students have access. It is not easy to monitor sensible use of that resource when print jobs are being sent from computers in other parts of the school.

Electronic Learning Centre

A computer lab, or Electronic Learning Centre (ELC), with 28 computers, is situated within the library. It has half glass walls separating it from the rest of the library, and as the workstations are arranged in a herringbone pattern, we are able to see lunchtime occupants from the circulation desk. Supervision of appropriate behaviour is just as much an issue here as it is in every other school. Each student has an account and space on the network, email access for school purposes and an allowance for internet access and print-outs. It is a popular venue at lunchtimes, so to control the inevitable rush, we devised computer passes which must be signed before school and then presented at the desk at lunch-time before a student is allowed into the ELC. Class bookings are organised by the teachers through library staff. We do not yet have an electronic booking system, as I wanted to develop personal contact between teachers and the teacher-librarians.

Workroom and network

Our workroom space was very limited with none of the usual fittings, so we set up tables and shelving adjacent to the circulation desk which was to double as my office. For teacher-librarians who like things ordered, it was a real learning adventure keeping track of the accessioning and cataloguing material, much of which was housed in tubs on the floor! Having adequate shelving, with areas defining the stages of materials in process, is our dream for this year. However, we managed to add over 5000 beautifully presented books to our shelves in 2004, in spite of seeming chaos.

Being new to Melbourne I had a steep learning curve to become familiar with the suppliers of the range of materials we would need. I relied heavily on my colleagues at the other campus, but also found sources from within the parent community. This is always a great bonus because it develops a deeper community interest in the operation of the school and often has happy spin-offs. The school and library have benefited from discounts we were able to get at book displays at parents’ days and information nights because we were working with a parent-operated business.

The network connection between the two campuses supported a shared library system, which proved to be our first major headache. The time delay meant that it was not practicable to use the system to issue books when classes were borrowing. After much frustration and many solutions tried by the IT department, it was decided to split the database for each campus, but keep access to both through intranet links. This has solved the immediate problems, but we will have to face some hard decisions about the requirements needed for system upgrades if we are to merge the two catalogues in the future.

Building relationships

One of the real benefits of being a teacher-librarian in a new library in a new school is the opportunity to establish an ideal co-operative working relationship with teachers. Set against that is the fact that library staffing is not always adequate nor timetabling flexible enough to take full advantage of this ideal. However, we have been able to establish a good base for future development.

The junior school teacher-librarian is timetabled once a week with each of the Prep through Year 4 classes. She is able to liaise with classroom teachers and set her library lessons around the classroom units. I have the Year 5 and 6 classes once per 10 day cycle for their library lessons, and teach a double period information technology class once a week to introduce the Inspiration and Microworlds programs. I negotiate time with the English/SOSE teachers for the rest of the middle school classes. My emphasis for these negotiations has been that literature and information literacy skills form an crucial part of the integrated English/SOSE units that the students are studying. I work in tandem with the teacher, assisting with the integration of IT into the curriculum and promoting literature and reading. It has resulted in my seeing each of the six Year 7 and six Year 8 classes twice a cycle. One of these occasions is in the ELC, where the Big6 information process, electronic note-taking and bibliographic citation are an integral part of each assignment, and where pathfinders and databases on our intranet form the basis of the students’ online searching strategies. The other is in a ‘Reading Rocks’ session where we talk books and reading.

There is still a long way to go to integrate the skills a teacher-librarian has to offer right across the curriculum, but a start has been made. We have not been successful in all of our ventures. We started the year with Jenny supervising a willing group of student monitors, but during the year this was not maintained. This was due in no small part to the fact that Jenny left to go overseas at the beginning of the second semester, and her replacement, an excellent primary teacher, did not have the opportunity to keep the monitor system running. However, we have a full-time teacher-librarian appointed for 2005, so we are planning a revamp of the student monitors program.

Reflecting on the journey

As I reflect over the year’s journey, I remember the frustrations and difficulties, but more importantly I can celebrate the successes. It is a working library with busy classes moving through each period. The ELC is filled with eager students both in class and at lunch-times, and the library staff members are busy organising, teaching, talking to students at the fiction shelves, processing still more books, issuing computer passes for the ELC, fielding questions, preparing book lists for teachers, supervising chess and draughts games during lunchtime, preparing and distributing audiovisual equipment to teachers, meeting with book sellers, exclaiming over the constant stream of exciting new books, and planning, planning, planning…

I know that the teachers no longer have to supplement their teaching resources from external libraries, the students are being supported in their learning of information literacy skills, a leisure reading culture is growing and the library has established its place in the learning and teaching of the school.

Clare Burford is Head of Information Services at the Village campus of Beaconhills College, Berwick.