I’m kind of partaking in an online (twitter) book group reading “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” by Maryanne Wolf. I say kind of, because I’m a couple of weeks behind the rest and not in the position to scramble to catch up. The latest letter considers the power of reading to engender empathy. And yes, I think any avid reader will concur that while reading one becomes immersed in the lives of others and are buffeted by the emotions and events of the book etc. and as a result hopefully develop more understanding if not empathy for the “type” projected in the book.
Lately I’ve been looking for something else – I get empathy and think it is a wonderful thing, but at the same time I fear it has a tinge of the abstract and dare I even say superiority about it? Or is it just that I’ve spent too much time around very empathetic but extremely privileged people? That sometimes the idea of empathy seems a little mired in superiority? I’m looking more for literature where I want to emulate the protagonist because of the way they are. Is it hope or inspiration I’m after? Am I becoming nostalgic for a youth of Heidi and Pollyanna and Anne of Green Gables, where an independent spirit or stubbornness were the worst flaws one encountered? Am I tired of grit and realistic messiness? Or is it a backlash of a world sullied by the likes of Potus 45? I’m of a certain age I guess where those were the aims of literature, – to make us better people. But if I google “Literature to make us better people” the results are all about empathy and theory of mind rather than emulation. I want to be around people that I can aspire to be more like, and every now and then I want to read books where the hero is a hero, preferably a kind and compassionate one, without the backing of immense wealth, nor with the adversity of extreme poverty. Naturally there are any one of a thousand “self-help” books one could turn to, but why are these a category separate to literature? Because life is more complex than a “how to”?
This is not to say that I don’t think that I and my students should be reading widely and have access to life in all its gut and glory – Chris Crutcher is visiting our school next month and I’ve been following with interest his involvement in the discussion on “Light and Hope in YA literature” as a response to “the unbearable darkness of YA literature“. I just wonder about literate voyeurism and whether it truly does create empathy or rather moral superiority, or allow for moral self-licensing?
I’m part of this club that I never want to be in the position to welcome others to, and yet yesterday afternoon I had to admit yet another member.
I don’t even know what to call it – I don’t want to name it – #metoo has connotations that I’d rather not introduce an 11 year old to, but maybe we need to.
The scenario. Last hours of the last day of a G6 camp. A young girl sitting to the side crying. As the nearest available woman I was asked to see what the problem was. She was really upset. Why? She’d had a great idea during one of the group activities that was ignored, but then wholeheartedly accepted when a boy reiterated the exact same idea minutes later. I affirmed her right to be upset, and angry and frustrated. And inside I’m thinking omg, how horrid that at the tender age of 11 she’s already being confronted with this. Or how admirable that she’s so aware – I think I was in my own private intellectual haze until at least university.
I told her there was a name for what had happened – sort of, and explained mansplaining. I told her there were other strong capable women out there who were ready to support girls like her and that I’d send her some articles. I told her that crying was unfortunately not the answer, nor was setting herself aside. I quickly taught her some calming breathing, and yesterday evening got in touch with a wonderful teacher at our school who runs a club for students around the themes of gender and identity. I spoke to a couple of teachers who had been at the stations where she’d been excelling in leadership – intellectual and physical and who totally “got” that what had happened was that she’d been taken down a peg or two by the wanna-be alpha males in the group. At 11. Yes. At the age of 11. It probably happens earlier, but perhaps the consciousness and self-righteousness and awareness of what has just happened doesn’t happen earlier (frontal lobe and all that?).
There are problems with reflection. Seeped in the IB tradition, first through my children and now as an educator, I know that no matter how well it’s disguised or re-engineered most students do not like reflection. In my own children, the response to me asking them about the reflection process resulted in one saying, “it’s over, let’s move on and what difference will the reflection make anyway?” and the other saying “I do my own reflection and it’s deeply personal so I’m definitely not going to share that with a teacher, let alone my class, so I just tell them what I know they’ll want to hear”. And with the adults in my life so far I think most fall somewhere on that continuum, with the rare exception of those prepared to be/risk being truly vulnerable.
This blog is my exercise in reflection, and heaven knows I screw up often enough, but how much of that is reflected in this? I’m afraid probably not enough. Because as a teacher one is also a public persona and unless your blog is private – in which case, why would you blog if not to receive feedback – you run the risk of incurring the ire or approbation of someone, somewhere in the organisation. Because to reflect in a way that it is meaningful one has to be open to change – either internally or in the environment – and change is one of those very hard things. Changing the self is difficult enough even if you ostensibly / presumably have control over self (I’ve just finished reading Homo Deus, where these philosophical questions were even better and more extremely expressed). As Harari wrote of power “The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” I think we give up more than just meaning for power. And I suspect one of the reasons reflection avoidance seems to hardwired from they youngest age, is that reluctance to show our soft underbellies, because for sure, the power-hungry will pounce.
Another part of reflection is the existence of pathways and an environment allowing for honesty without it being labelled as negativity. And that is a two way street that needs a rare combination of humility, excellent communication skills, acceptance skills and the intellectual rigour to have emotional detachment from ideas and practices.
Adaptive schools / cognitive coaching and the 7 Norms of collaboration go a long way towards bridging these human fallibilities. But there are many enemies (besides power) to the process including time pressure, face, and the very human difficulty in accepting sunk costs.
So who can reflect honestly? The very very young, the naive, the elders – provided they are still allowed to be seen as relevant, the very wealthy and perhaps the court jesters / devil’s advocates. The rest of us I fear go so far and no further. Or tell people what they want to hear.
This is a post I started writing earlier in the year that didn’t get finished and am now revisiting as it’s recruiting season again …
I’d also say to anyone – if you’re thinking of moving – it’s a really hard thing to do, particularly if you’re happy where you are. However moving and change results in a considerable amount of personal and professional growth – even as it perhaps hurts like pulling a plaster off a wound (cue my bursting into tears at the staff farewell last year).
——————
In November / December last year it became clear that I’d have to put myself on the international selling block as our continued existence in Singapore had become too economically fragile on one (local contract) based salary. And so I entered the fray of job search at international schools. Let’s say it just doesn’t work quite like this in the corporate world where I’d come from. But the longer I was in the process the more it was “same same but different”.
There are a few things that are quite unusual, but for logical reasons. For one you have a deadline by which you need to state your intent to leave or stay and that date is quite early on in the year, often around November. The problem with that is that both the school and the “leaver” could suffer from “well I’m/they’re leaving anyway” syndrome as funding for PD and admission to committees / strategic planning / POC’s dry up.
The other big problem is both schools and candidates have imperfect information – since different schools have different dates, and sometimes extensions can be negotiated, both the pool of jobs and pool of candidates isn’t known at the same time.
Thanks to informal networks like Facebook, if you’re in the right group, you may know about jobs coming up before they’re officially advertised. But the market is dominated by a few recruiters (Search Associates, Schrole, ISS and TES) who have a monopoly on the market without, in my opinion – or perhaps my advisor just didn’t “get it”, adding much value to the equation. Conferences are a great chance to meet people face to face and also to hear what’s happening in the world and who’s thinking of moving, decided to move / retire, move in or out of one part of the school or another.
I thought a lot about what would be a good fit for myself and the school and the family – and one of the interesting things I came across was the idea of the .eHarmony algorithm of compatibility – sometimes someone at the school (including the current librarian) may know that one person or another wouldn’t be a good fit or would be an excellent fit – so it’s often a good idea to reach out to them.
Something that I’ve always wondered about in the process is why no one ever bothers asking the library staff about candidates – they often know more about what the sphere is like, what the librarian really is doing and how things work than the principal – during last years job rounds I saw some pretty egregious examples of people padding or exaggerating their CV’s and taking credit for predecessor’s work.
If you don’t have an “inside” into the school it’s really hard to have knowledge of the principal / coordinators / departments / teacher attitudes to the library – aside from the dreadful ISR where it seems only people with an axe to grind give their opinions, and even if you know a school at a certain point in time, by the time you start everything could (and often will) change.
There is a heck of a lot you need to know before you jump into a job, and not all of it is as transparent as you’d like it to be – especially while you’re in the “finding out” stages – one of the jobs I was applying for, the previous person had left due to being unable to survive on the salary package – knowledge about salaries, benefits, cost of living is crucial – yet you can’t start asking too early about this, and the information on the recruitment sites is often abysmally out of date – with them hiding behind “we rely on the schools to keep it up to date” – sorry, that’s what you’re being paid for both by the schools and the candidates!
I also gained in self-knowledge due to a lovely encounter with a super principal where I was in the running for a job that I could have done perfectly well, but if I was completely honest with myself was just not the right fit for me (and I subsequently found out would not have been ideal for my family either) – I really appreciate that person’s kindness in rejecting me in the nicest possible way for the right reasons.
What have I learned? One thing is that it’s easier to be neutral about the process once you’ve finally got a job! A few podcasts that are apparently unrelated have had some interesting insights:
Learnings – we are a victim of our cognitive bias including optimism bias, planning fallacy, impulse control and information overload. In addition, it’s generally know that men are over-confident and go for jobs that are a reach, and females under-confident and undersell their abilities (the confidence gap). For job seekers it’s important to start early, budget way more time for the process than you could think is humanely possible, and learn to oversell yourself. For recruiters, the lesson is that job seekers are going to oversell (particularly if they’re male) and to check references carefully – as much in omission as in commission. In the library field I would always ask library assistants, a couple of teachers and colleagues, besides the curriculum coordinators / principal who may or may not be involved in the detail.
Apropos to careers – here is a pretty cool dynamic infographic from Satyan Devadoss
Professor of Mathematics at Williams College on the Impact of Major on Career Path for 15600 Williams College Alums.
And the best advice I got after the initial struggles in my last job, going forward into my new job was “don’t water the rocks” – i.e. work with the people who want to work with you and it will take a lot of pressure off the initial months that are hard enough anyway.
The phrase “life long learning” gets bandied around a lot, and today I’m going to write a little about just how much learning is involved in moving job, school section, country, and home.
I left a country that was easy to live in (Singapore) and I job that I loved and was comfortable with for a place (Beijing) that generally led people to shake their heads in puzzlement, even as they acknowledged that the school I was moving to was something special. Easy is not always good. I must admit I never really liked living in SG – it did not make my heart sing in the way that Hong Kong did. I never felt at home like I did in Hong Kong. And the only thing that kept me there for the last 3 years was a great job that kept me busy enough that the things that irritated me about SG didn’t bother me because I didn’t have time to be bothered.
Living Learning – my husband just announced he needs a haircut – what does that have to do with learning – well it’s just one of a myriad of daily / weekly / monthly things that one has to do in life where you have to relearn how it works and where to make it work. Of course the easy answer is – just pop into a barber or hairdresser – and that’s simple enough if you’re a no-nonsense type of short-back-and-sides-guy but just look in any Asian-expat forum for the pleas for hairdressers who understand curly / blonde / kinky / wavy hair and you’ll realise some things cannot be taken for granted. Like buying knives in Beijing. When you move here you need to surrender your passport to your employer for an extended period of time while all the visa work is sorted out. But no-one will sell you as much as a bread-knife without seeing your passport and registering it (history here – and I’ve learned something). We’ve moved into our house already and we’re in camping mode until our shipment arrives – so a few kitchen knives are kind of important – luckily we have nice colleagues with knives – presumably purchased prior to the ban!
Then there’s spatial learning. Orientating yourself in time and space, just like the PYP teaches. The Beijing public bus system is amazing. And cheap. For the equivalent of 20-50 cents you can go pretty far within your zone. Compared to 25x as much for a taxi (even if taxi’s are way cheaper here than elsewhere). So it’s a real good idea to learn how the system works. But it’s not that easy. I got a bit of a reputation of being the daring bus lady in our first few weeks, and this is the true story of why. My husband and I, newly married, moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1995. When we arrived we had no money, nearly no furniture and only his job. And if anyone follows South American economic history – it was just after the Plano Real, which meant that everything was super-expensive as the country came out of hyper-inflation, but the balance between cost and value was still being established. So there I was, stuck in an apart-hotel, without the wherewithal to attend all those fancy expat lunches and coffee-mornings, no car and no money for taxis. Oh, and after a 2 week Portuguese crash course I spoke next to no Portuguese and in those days not many people spoke English. And add to that, no smart phone, in fact make that no phone at all, as there was a 6 month waiting list and a $5,000 installation fee to get a phone line installed in your home, and no internet. So I used to walk down the road and get on a bus and drive that bus the whole loop and work out where it went and of what use it would be to me. I figured I didn’t have anything more pressing to do with my time (except find a job quickly); and I didn’t have any money, so there was nothing to steal from me, so what-the-hell.
These days it’s so easy. High speed internet, a “maps” app that works in Beijing, even for public transport and in English. But still you need to learn some stuff. Like the Chinese name for your compound / complex. The nearest bus stop. What time they start and stop and the frequency. If you need to change over, which combinations are the fastest at which time of the day. Whether it’s better to take a bus or the Metro or walk. The short-cuts and back streets. And how to cross the road without being killed.
There are still things I want to know. And I’m not there yet. Like what app to use for buses in advance – there are some great subway apps, like Metro Beijing where you can put in your start and end points. Maps sort of works, there is a workaround where instead of a location you can look for “transport” and then “Bus Stops” and then click on the bus number and see its whole route. But that only finds the buses near to your location, which isn’t much good for advance planning. I also know you can get an app for your transport card, but I haven’t found it yet. There are some I’m sure, but only in Chinese. Which I’m still re-learning. I’ll do Chinese in a whole other dedicated post.
Work hygiene learning. I call it that based on Herzberg’s motivation theory, because it kind of makes sense and I don’t have a better way of describing it. It’s all the stuff besides the technical / knowledge bits of your job that you need to know to survive and thrive in your new environment. Now this is a pretty steep learning curve. Because every school has their own “untouchables”. I was asking a friend about a new person in another school and her conclusion was she had great ideas and enthusiasm but this wasn’t being appreciated. I sort of know the environment there and I can just see that happening. It’s a dynamic tension. You’re presumably hired to a job because they want your input, and in some circumstances for you to change things. But not too much or to soon. Or perhaps they do what a lot of change and quickly. But who do you ask? Who wants to tell you? There is this mutual dancing around things. Both my predecessor and myself to my successor deliberately didn’t say too much about the environment, because it is important to try and feel it out for yourself. And it’s also nice after a few weeks to be able to ask someone if your experience aligns with theirs – because it’s so hard to know if it’s “just you” or if there are other things at play.
Similarly in my mentor group (another “first” for me – having 12 students to nurture throughout the year), I’ve deliberately not looked at their records or files, as I want to take them as they are without history or labels and then move on from there.
Where to play. It’s not all about work, so our Newbie WeChat has been full of which restaurants are good to go to, where to have a massage, where the beer is cheap, nice parks to hang out in, bars and clubs for the night owls. This morning I was delighted to find the Beijing Greenway just minutes from our house with I think about 12km of walkway along the river through wooded areas with lush green and few people.
I’m seeing similar exploratory type posts on the facebook pages of friends who have also taken the plunge into the new and unknown. It’s easy to say it’s easier now we have the internet and facebook and smart phones and apps. But change and adaptation in reality is never easy because it has its own absorption rate. And even after moving around for the last 35 years, I’ll put my money on the fact that it will take at least a year. Because it always does. Except in Luxembourg where we only lived for 10 months!
If you’re new to this game, you may want to read up more on “culture shock“; the 5 stages of culture shock – honeymoon; culture shock; actual adjustment; isolation period; acceptance and integration, the W curve etc.
We were lucky to learn this all at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam prior to our moving to Brazil. And they also gave us one of the best tips ever – which was easy to implement in 1995 when flights were expensive and phone calls cost at least $5 per minute – and that was – not to have contact with home in the first 6 months. That’s pretty unbelievable in this day and age, but it probably helped with the move and integration.
I threw down the gauntlet to my mentor, Katie Day last night. She who taught me all I know about being a teacher librarian in the weeks and months that I sat by her side while doing my MIS and part of my M.Ed before I was thrust into the world of a library of my own. I was mentioning how I was a little shocked and disappointed at the standard of writing of Masters’ level students, and she mentioned that in her current position she was seeing more student writing and had decided to give that a focus this school year. I have a mentor group for the first time this year, and I want to try to emulate a wonderful teacher in my previous position, Christene, who used back and forth journalling with her G6 class as a way of getting to know them deeper, while developing their writing and depth of thought – particularly over what they were reading.
Now Katie is a phenomenal librarian – probably one of the best in the Asian international school network. She suffers from one immense flaw generally – the fact that she doesn’t market herself, and currently, she’s gone silent and no longer stimulates and challenges the rest of our thinking frequently enough through her blog. This is where a biblical reference is most apt – that of hiding your light under a bushel. Like most newbies to a profession, I’m still greedy for knowledge and advancing my skills and look to thought-leadership in the field to advance my own understanding. So, the blogging challenge is on – at least a blog a week between now and Christmas.
In our first week at school, we were asked to do a Strengths Finder test – I’ve done one previously, but this was a different one. I found it a little repetitive as it kept bringing up the same questions differently phrased – I know, internal validity and all that. And then was a little surprised – bearing in mind the results of a previous such test – when the top strength spat out at me was “writing”. I immediately wanted to reject this, as actually I do precious little writing in my job. And it sounded such a stagnant non-sexy non-innovative type of thing that I felt undervalued me as a thinking, teaching, doing, researching, active professional.
As a librarian I read a prolific amount, a lot of it mediocre if I have to be honest, and I’ve always said that you’d never find me writing a book, in response to everyone who asks. I know enough authors to know that besides anything, it’s a poorly paid mugs’ game where you spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to get out there and promote the book rather than write – plus the financial returns are so poor that you inevitably need a second or third career to sustain your writing. So I don’t actually see myself as a writer. But then I realised, that I’ve been blogging now for 15 years, and that actually I have a need to write my experience. And I’m forever encouraging students and fellow professionals to do the same.
So here goes everyone – if you still have a blog out there – dust it off, start writing, or continue writing! Post your URL’s in the comments so we can follow and comment on each other’s posts.
A slight departure from my usual library and education pondering as we’ve yet again moved country and therefor house. My teenage son asked me the other day how many times we’ve moved in our lives, and we tried to start counting and then were going off on tangents like, “just countries, or while in countries?” and “just since we left home or also while being a child?” (not that that was soooo much as both of us came from fairly non-moving families!) and “does in and out of temporary accommodation while waiting for a home / shipment count?”.
There is some freedom in reducing life to a few suitcases.
So here we go again, this time we’re now in Beijing, China and LOVING it. This was the move, that when we told people they’d say “really? why?” or just look at us as if we’d grown a unicorn horn. Or put on that sympathetic gaze. But ever since I started learning Chinese at HKU 9 years ago, I’ve wanted to live in China. And that even more so since in the 7 years of Singapore I managed to lose 99% of what I’d learnt and deeply regretted it. I joke that doing 2 back-to-back Masters in Education and Information studies pushed all the Chinese out of what was left of my brain. It’s not far from the truth. Changing one’s career radically half way through your 40’s and then starting a new job in said-career doesn’t leave much room for practising a language that’s ironically not that widely used in a Chinese dominant country. It’s the environment. Both in HK and here, you saw Chinese everywhere – the characters that is. In Singapore, English has taken over.
Back to moving. As my husband and I strolled around the “hood” of our new environment last night, we remarked that actually this has been one of our easiest moves. Which may sound strange because it’s the first move we’re doing with me as the dominant career, and that being a teacher rather than a big-shot corporate banker with lots of settling in allowances and a huge administrative department etc. What has made the difference? The school has a designated person whose sole job is to take care of us newbies. Everything and anything we need and a need to know and need to have translated and need to find and need advice on. So after arrival he had our sim cards waiting for us. Anyone who has moved knows how huge this is an how difficult it can be (Singapore I’m looking at you where a “dependant” can’t enter a phone shop without his/her employment pass holder in tow). We went on trips to the bank and to see inside other people’s houses in the most popular living areas. Dinner every night with different people in different locations. Briefings by every department (finance, purchasing, human resources etc.) and so much more I can’t even remember it.
And now, 15 days after arriving, and only 5 days after my family arrived, we are in our home. We had secured it after a visit during the spring break, which meant the lease was signed and ready, so that made things a little swifter too. And because of the onerous visa process, our shipment can’t leave Singapore until our final version has been finalised, we won’t have our “things” until somewhere in October. So for now we’re camping in our house – which isn’t all that much different to camping in temporary accommodation, and it feels a lot better.
Oh I’m verbose – 566 words and now the point of this post – we have a lot of stuff. We did a huge sell and whittle down when we left Singapore and managed to fit everything into one container again. So the stuff this time is a lot less – particularly as I had to whittle our DVD and CD collection to nothing (they’re safely in our holiday home since I don’t do the cloud), and our book collection from about 2,500 books to the 200 we were allowed to bring with us to China (most were donated and given away, the more precious books were sent back to Europe – first editions, the children’s favourite childhood books, my Africana collection, our HK and China collection). So it’s mainly furniture we couldn’t sell, donate or give away because it was either – nearly brand new, or really old and sentimental as it had been passed down from deceased grandparents or bought sometime during our travels around the world.
So now we have that wonderful puzzle of working out how to fit everything that was in a fairly large apartment (over 300 m2) into a 4 storey townhouse with lower ceilings and smaller rooms of about 150 m2 which is more like 120 m2 when you take away the smelly basement that we’ll have to use to store the landlord’s fairly yucky but very welcome – while we’re in transition- furniture. While I’m fairly good at judging space and configuration, one can be badly wrong if you make sure, and if there’s one rule when moving and dealing with strong muscly types that typically move stuff from containers into houses and up stairs it’s “DON’T PISS OFF THE MOVERS”. I can just imagine their tales of stupid rich (it’s a relative term in the countries we’ve lived in, so even on a teacher’s salary we’re rich in their eyes) people not knowing where to put their too much stuff.
And here’s the nerdy stuff. I have a spreadsheet, that I’ve had since we first moved from Brazil to the Netherlands of the dimensions of every piece of furniture we own, it’s cost price and the insurable value. And I keep it up to date as things get left behind or get added. This makes making those darn inventory lists so much easier. It also makes it easier to plan where everything goes in the new place / configuration, because then I either get a house architectural plan from the landlord / agent or I go in and measure up every room (much easier now you can point and shoot with your phone – but I usually still check with a measuring tape). I then enter it all into a floor planner (link to the one I use) and put the furniture into the plan. It’s 3 dimensional – so I can make sure of height as well.
An old planner from one of our favourite houses in Singapore
So today, while the painters come, and since it’s raining I’m going to be doing some measuring and reallocating furniture around.
And because this is a library blog – a few pictures of my new work environment:
Classroom libraries vs. school libraries, teacher superstars marginalising teacher librarians – or is it our fault?
This post was first going to go one way and then through holiday laziness in posting, it has taken a kind of dual direction as I have more time for self-reflection and research.
The first offensive was launched by KC Boyd (2018) in her post “Easy Like Sunday Morning: School Libraries vs Classroom Libraries” where she reflects on Chicago School System and the impact on literacy of shifting from school libraries to (only) classroom libraries (hint – it wasn’t favourable). She refers to Ariel Sack’s post on the importance (and diminishing) role of school librarians who asks “Can this project be done by an individual teacher? Yes. But it’s something different when one person with a vision and the time to implement it leads it consistently for the entire school, every year” (Sacks, 2018). I’d argue there is another factor – one very rarely meets a librarian who doesn’t read (I have however met library assistants without any interest in books or reading); but the Peter Effect is well documented in teachers (Applegate & Applegate, 2004; Binks-Cantrell, Washburn, Joshi, & Hougen, 2012; Turner, Applegate, & Applegate, 2009) with studies in various places around the world documenting aliteracy in teachers / pre-service teachers – “Findings revealed that 54.3% of 195 teacher candidates were classified as unenthusiastic about reading and only 25.2% of teacher candidates reported unqualified enjoyment of reading.” (Binks-Cantrell et al., 2012, p. 526), and the picture appears to be getting worse rather than better (Skaar, Elvebakk, & Nilssen, 2018).
This is something easy to lose sight of when twitter, YouTube, Facebook, blogposts and podcasts are dominated by literacy superstars like Pernille Ripp, Colby Sharp, Mr. Schu, Jennifer Gonzalez, Angela Watson etc. But for every one of them, even a small imitation of them, there are likely to be three or more other teachers who are either not enthusiastic about reading, or, who actually don’t deign to read the types of books their students do – something I know my librarian mentor Katie Day, (successfully) worked very hard on with the teachers at UWCSEA-East when she was there. Based on my own experience I have encountered whole grades where not one teacher has been actively and passionately engaged in books and reading, and where this is apparently not seen as an issue (except when it is reflected in their students’ testing scores – but then the solution has been to work on the students rather than the teachers).
Regie Routman in her article “On the level with levelled books” (Routman, 2018), makes some valid arguments for free voluntary reading, and the choice of a selection of relevant and developmentally appropriate books for classroom libraries, but only makes oblique reference to public libraries and with no mention of school libraries or librarians – not even in a nostalgic or wishful manner. Relying on teachers who care and the intervention of a literacy expert is not a long term solution!
Colby Sharp, boasting a 3,000 book classroom library, ordered in a numbered system unfamiliar to any librarian I asked, talks about book checkout and is quick to dismiss the scanning system a librarian assisted him in setting up as “too much trouble”… (Sharp, 2018)
To which Day responded on FB “as long as he is on top of what all his students are reading, then, yes, it could work. But it’s not scaleable — and he doesn’t mention inventory checks — so at the end of the year you know which books might need to be replaced. With 3,000 books, it might be good for his students (other students? other teachers?) to be able to search and discover what books he has in his class library… Just sayin’… And LibraryThing’s TinyCat is definitely an option he might consider — to be able to see his collection online, whether he uses their circulation system or not.”
And then I found out what his library looked like – with a self-invented number system – ok so Dewey doesn’t do it for everyone, but those random numbers? (Sharp, 2017). I love the idea and potential of classroom libraries – I baulk at the cost, duplication of effort, waste of resources, money and time, lack of discoverability, lack of meaningful data and often stagnant nature of them. I have seen money wasted on thoughtless last minute purchasing without any clear strategy, collection management or development. I’ve seen classroom libraries with books that would better be relegated to pulping or, redistributed to older or younger students. I’d be the first to admit that often no one knows students better than their class-teacher, but just as we shouldn’t have to choose between classroom libraries and school libraries, so too the burden of creating dynamic exciting collections needn’t be the domain of only the class teacher or the librarian – together we definitely are better. Dialogue, collaboration, debate, relative expertise – all these things make us stronger as a learning community.
I started out being a little annoyed at the lack of mention of (school) librarians, but then reading the FB question of a librarian, (who shall remain nameless) challenging whether she should be expected to find a selection of books on a specific theme for a teacher because “she’d already shown the teacher how to find book in the system” and the responses I wondered how much of it was our own fault? We should be falling over ourselves to help teachers, parents, administrators, everyone in the community with lists and suggestions and books and resources they didn’t even to know to ask about. We should be anticipating and proactive. Not whining on FB as to where the limits of our job lie. I love the fact that this is one of the careers where you can pretty much be without boundary and limitless in what you can do – all in the interest of teaching and learning.
Spending a bit of time on Twitter I saw what was going on with Project Lit – something started in an English Classroom that is going viral (Riddell, 2018), (and what an excellent book collection they’ve created!) and I thought, darn it – we’re missing so many tricks here. Why aren’t teacher librarians initiating things like this, or the GRA? Why aren’t we leveraging our knowledge and experience in more ways than just fretting about our increasing marginalization and extinction? Why aren’t we taking more leadership and visibility in these arguments and discussions?
We aren’t part of these discussions and we’re not top of mind to any of the people who are getting attention. Whose problem is that? Do these “superstars” have a blind spot to anything NIH (not invented here), monstrous egos, or are we / have we become just so marginal to the whole reading / literacy scene that we don’t even merit a mention unless prompted (as the Sack article intimated)?
On FB again, another librarian spoke of her school that has gone from a thriving library system with two libraries run by two qualified librarians that’s been whittled down and compromised to one remaining librarian and was wondering what the moral of the story was – I commented “frog in a pot that slowly comes to boil”.
The problem with being a passive Anura is that no one else is going to turn the gas off and you don’t want to be left alone when the party is no longer in the kitchen – with apologies to Joan Lewie (WiggyOfStHelens2008, 2008).
References
Applegate, A. J., & Applegate, M. D. (2004). The Peter Effect: Reading habits and attitudes of preservice teachers. The Reading Teacher, 57(6), 554–563.
Binks-Cantrell, E., Washburn, E. K., Joshi, R. M., & Hougen, M. (2012). Peter Effect in the Preparation of Reading Teachers. Scientific Studies of Reading, 16(6), 526–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2011.601434
Skaar, H., Elvebakk, L., & Nilssen, J. H. (2018). Literature in decline? Differences in pre-service and in-service primary school teachers’ reading experiences. Teaching and Teacher Education, 69, 312–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.10.019
Turner, J. D., Applegate, A. J., & Applegate, M. D. (2009). Teachers as literacy leaders. The Reading Teacher, 63(3), 254–256.
Many schools, and particularly those following the IB (International Baccalaureate) framework are attempting to incorporate Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their teaching and learning. The library can play an important role in supporting this through curation and discoverability.
Our G6 students used the SDGs to focus their research during their PYP Exhibition Project. I’d been meaning for the longest time to curate a list of books around the SDGs and this was the ideal opportunity. In curating the list there were actually two phases. In the first I was looking for books that would act as provocations and allow students to form a feeling of empathy and identification with the goal. In the second, when they’d chosen their area of focus, it was to find books that would aid their research and investigations. These are two quite different goals, with very different resources.
So that everyone could see the images clearly, instead of a read aloud, I projected a YouTube video of the books being read.
We then discussed which SDG’s were covered by the respective stories, which was easy enough for them:
Empathy Map
After the story I introduced the concept of an “Empathy Map”. There are many different versions of the empathy map, (the original is from Dave Gray) but I wanted it to be as visceral as possible. Students were each given 4 sticky notes to write what they thought the main character in the book would “say / do”, “think/feel”, “see” or “hear”. Now this may sound quite simple, but the exercise is very effect just because this is way harder than what it seems. Students had to really get out of their own heads and it took a bit of prompting by the teachers and myself to put themselves in the character’s shoes and consider things from the protagonist’s perspective. The map was just a piece of flipboard paper with the name of the book and the 4 quadrants written in.
At the end of the lesson it looked like this:
The follow up to the lesson was to create a page on my PSEL library guide to include the books I’d curated for the SDGs. The images are linked to my resource lists in our library.
As the students decided on the focus of their research, and narrowed down their central idea and lines of inquiry, I helped them to find relevant books in the library, or, for quite a few we needed to purchase additional books. I also started (but have not yet finished) making lists on EpicBooks (e.g. SDG7). EpicBooks is simultaneously a wonderful and very exasperating resource due the inability to tag resources and easy group and regroup them.
With the G6 teachers and some of the exhibition mentors we also started a flipboard with appropriate news articles related to the student choices.
Move forward a couple of months and within the #IntlLead group we’re currently trying to initiate an International Libraries week with a focus on SDGs, and so to write this post I started uploading all my lists onto my Library Things account. I’ve put them into a collection called SDG and tagged them SDG1, SDG2 etc. and the name Zero Poverty, Zero Hunger etc. Since LibraryThings can be quite geeky for the non-librarian I’ve also created a TinyCat for this collection, which is visually much more appealing. It’s also not corrupted by the 1000s of other books in my collection.
What else is going on in the world of SDGs and libraries and schools?
Join the international version of school libraries week, 22-26 April 2019 focusing on UN SDG’s (Sustainable Development Goals), and put the dates on your school calendar now! More details to follow on @inTLlibweek
Please comment if you’ve got anything else to add.
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 (Reflection)
3. Ways adverts can cause people to form opinions (Causation)
however to paraphrase and misquote Twain I’ve never let reality get in the way of a good lesson. So I’m loosely interpreting “media” to include books, and advertising to include things like book covers.
My opening salvo last week was “Cover Bias” where we looked at the cover of a book as the way in which it was advertised and I showed the class some more egregious examples of stereotype and bias in the creation of book covers
This week is my chance to tackle something I feel very strongly about – how the concept of children’s book diversity has been cornered by a very specific type of diversity – i.e. the North American type, which to be honest in the lives of my students is #NotOurDiversity. So I’d like to provide a counterbalance to that, as well as to start my students and everything thinking and curating resources that do reflect their diversity.
This is tomorrow’s provocation:
And I’m hoping at the end we can start creating a padlet of the books which they consider to be their mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors.
What do I think their diversity looks like? Some of it is typical to 3CK (3 culture kids), but each place I’ve lived has delivered its own nuance:
Product of multi- cultural / linguistic parentage and heritage (including multi-racial if that is even a term that is at all relevant – I don’t think it is to them, but probably in other contexts, countries it would be)
Multi-national residential where home is defined more by current location of self, parents and siblings than by family and passport
Financial privilege that transcends typical migrant / immigrant issues and trauma
Underlying uncertainty on matters of identity and lack of sense of “place”
High expectations of resilience, grit and adaptability to constant change
Before anyone thinks that the market is too small to matter for book publishing for example should have a look at the numbers – 56.8m people estimated by 2017 and even more importantly the demographics of expatriation has changed dramatically and will continue to change – no more British administrator, the reality is more likely to be an Indian IT specialist or Korean Engineer. And so too our literature should be evolving to provide their children in international education the mirrors, windows and doors they are entitled to.
Apropos to careers – here is
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 
