I'm busy preparing for next week's library lessons. G5 has one of my favourite units in "How We Express Ourselves" People create messages to target specific audiences Ostensibly it's about advertising, as the lines of inquiry indicate, 1. Advertising techniques can be used to influence society (Perspective) 2. Critically evaluating messages presented in the media … Continue reading #NotOurDiversity
I subscribe to way too many Facebook groups. I need to stop it actually, they've become like women's magazines. But worse. You keep seeing the same things come up over and over again, but instead of ignoring them you can actually have a say, which is giving yourself the delusion of helpfulness, but actually the … Continue reading Educational advice – from Facebook?
The whole diversity thing bothers me. Has for some time. We seem to love the optics of diversity, but not so much the reality. And so we mete out our diversity in acceptable chunks at acceptable moments. And in doing so we can fool ourselves - most of the time. We also mete out our … Continue reading Meting out diversity
It must be an age thing - but as I'm getting further into my 50's I'm becoming less tolerant of fancy sounding reasons and explanations that are actually just excuses for staving off change. This is the first of a series of posts on things that really annoy me as an international librarian, with a … Continue reading No excuses: Syndetics
New year, new chances, old problems. The perennial one of scheduling library time. I kind of started commenting on people's posts and questions on FaceBook and then decided it merited a blog post on its own. There is also a whole discussion on libraries and librarians going at the IBO level where priorities, recognition, roles, … Continue reading Scheduling – priorities and dissonance
A fellow librarian in Shanghai and I have been working on creating some new MLA8 posters in Chinese for her bilingual school / library. It's been an interesting process to put it mildly. We started off with the MLA posters I created with Katie Day about 2 years ago, and which she updated recently to … Continue reading MLA8 and Chinese …
I received an email last night from someone who had read my blog on Building a LOTE collection in an international school and she quite rightly pointed out that it's a relatively easy thing for a librarian thing to do. Here is her question: I am a school librarian in an IB candidate school. We are … Continue reading L1 and the role of the school
I had the privilege of attending a presentation by Dr. Myra Bacsal of the NIE at Tanglin Trust School last night about how picture books can be used to promote SEL (social and emotional learning) and the work she is doing to bring both the "hardware" and "software" into the Singaporean school system. I'm totally … Continue reading Beyond “delight and inform”
With view to the fact that our school is celebrating uniting nations week in October, this year we're trying to add a literary bent to the proceedings. There are a number of steps to this, which are easy or complicated, depending on how "ready" your collection is. A little while back, I created resource lists … Continue reading Read around the World
Deep into my readings on this topic and it's not making me feel particularly cheerful. The statistics are appalling. On the one hand one should be glad that there are enough people who care enough to keep count. On the other, it doesn't appear that the counting leads to any measurable improvement. Here are the … Continue reading Diversity and "multicultural" literature
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 