By Dr. David V. Loertscher
Canada has led the world in the vision of the role the school library and learning commons can play in the education of successful and capable young learners. Beginning with Ontario’s Partners in Action (1983), and continuing with other significant provincial documents including Together for Learning: School Libraries and the Emergence of the Learning Commons, From School Library to Library Learning Commons: A Pro-Active Model for Educational Change, Extending the Classroom: The Library Learning Commons, and the national work Leading Learning: Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in Canada. Canadian School Libraries was formed in 2016 with a focus on professional research and development in the field of the school library learning commons in Canada. By adapting the library learning commons model in Canada, the pathway to excellence in education has been significant.
Canadian teacher-librarians have also led the way in implementing the vision of the documents they have produced. This has happened partly because a fresh new group of professionals who were not steeped in “traditional” library practices just jumped the rope of a stereotype directly into a world of creative experimentation. However, acceptance across the country has been mixed since a vibrant learning commons requires a fairly substantial investment across time and so must compete for resources when other pressing needs are identified and general revenues do not grow in proportion to the perceived benefits. The pandemic of 2020-2022 caused so much disruption in education further complicated the development of many educational ideas and strategies. Now as we are all emerging from the tsunami, It is time to reconsider all the realities of the new normal and press forward with the best of the best ideas of the past while pushing the envelope since technology, social media, cultures, and new challenges seem to demand faster paced responses. Returning to pas strategies is and comfort zones are not acceptable.
Amazingly, the assembly of the seventh national Treasure Mountain Canada Symposium held in New Westminster, British Columbia on October 21-22, 2022, brought together incredible professionals who had not allowed teacher-librarians to rest a pandemic minute, but continued to make substantial differences for learners and teachers across the country. And, as a result, both in the United States and Canada, a grassroots initiative known as the Alive Library Project emerged to spotlight the successes and to remind those who had forgotten the contributions of teacher librarians what excellence really looks like.
The AliveLibrary.Info project website contains nine different “exhibit” rooms where the major contribution of teacher librarians can be viewed and used as discussion starters for schools and districts across the world. These roles are as follows:
- Literacies: Promoting the love of reading expands to larger literacies such as: reading skills, writing, speaking, and listening; alongside initiatives such as digital citizenship, numeracy, and transliteracy.
- Information: Building a culturally relevant collection of printed books expands as the entire school community curates high quality information as a part of a student’s personal learning environment.
- Inquiry: Assisting students in discovering what is known about a topic or question expands to a deepening sophistication across the grade levels as investigation complexity requires careful analysis and trust of information sources.
- Instruction: Teaching library skills and information location expand to embrace change and opportunities to partner with teachers to create deep learning. This leads to self-directed learning, design thinking, plus project and problem-based learning across the school and measuring impact on what learners know and are able to do.
- Innovation: Preserving traditional services of a library gives way to embracing change and constantly reinventing the Library Learning Commons, serving as the school’s incubator of new ideas. It facilitates and provides physical and virtual spaces and resources where students can learn to flourish and evolve in a changing world.
- Technology: Advocating for equitable access to technology at home and school expands to facilitating the use of the digital learning tools to redefine learning experiences that promote communication, collaboration, creativity, invention, problem-solving, critical thinking and efficiency at the top of the SAMR Model.
- Expertise: Managing a library expands to the development of leadership to constantly infuse educational theory, technology prowess, librarianship, and innovation to create a learning commons culture across the school and into homes.
- Service: Helpfulness to patrons expands to service initiatives to self, family, school, community, and beyond. Proactive librarians create a safe, mentored, inclusive and exciting environment for all faculty and students.
- Space: Preserving the layout of traditional physical spaces gives way to totally redesigned flexible learning commons, physical and virtual spaces, that adapts to the needs of individuals, small groups, and large groups as needed.
The intended audience for the entire project are administrators, boards, parents, teachers, and the teacher librarians themselves. For each of the topics covered, there are interviews of the greats, but there are also think boxes that bring up topics to start local conversations.
When you take the ALiVE Library tour, you will find five videos featuring interviews that Dr. Loertscher conducted with participants in CSL’s seventh Treasure Mountain Canada Symposium, held in October 2022 in New Westminster, BC. In this issue of CSL Journal, we feature TMC7 papers by Alanna King & Tim King, and by Beth Lyons, with their video conversations with Dr. Loertscher. The other three papers and videos will be featured in our spring edition.
Dr. David Loertscher has degrees from the University of Utah, the University of Washington and a Ph.D. from Indiana University. He has been a school library media specialist in Nevada and Idaho at both the elementary and secondary school levels. He has taught at Purdue University, The University of Arkansas, The University of Oklahoma, and is presently a professor at the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. He served as head of the editorial department at Libraries Unlimited for ten years and is President of Hi Willow Research & Publishing LMC Source. He has been a president of the American Association of School Librarians. Email him at: reader.david@gmail.com.