By Caroline Freibauer
Originally published in The Teaching Librarian, Volume 3 Issue 2, May 2022 (Ontario School Library Association) Republished with permission.
Inspired by the tributes to Dr. David Loertscher published in the Winter 2022 edition this journal, the late Caroline Freibauer, then the editor of OSLA’s, The Teaching Librarian, noted that there really hadn’t been anything written that went beyond the tributes to actually tell his story. We are grateful to have permission from OSLA to re-publish Caroline’s profile here.
News of David Loertscher’s retirement has been greatly exaggerated.
In the fall of 2021, former colleagues were convinced that Loertscher, after a long and prolific career as a researcher, educator and leader in the school library world, was going to retire. They organized tributes from collaborators in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians were effusive with their praise.
There was this tribute from Anita Brooks Kirkland, chair of Canadian School Libraries: “David, you are larger than life, and have been a larger-than-life influence on my career.”
Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan, long-time book and workshop collaborators, expressed their
gratitude for the countless hours spent writing and presenting. “You have been so generous with your time and energies investing in the advancement of the library learning commons vision and implementation here in Canada,” they wrote.
“David Loertscher reminded us of the continuing role we have to play as mentors ourselves, even as some of us approach retirement,” Richard Beaudry, chair of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations Intellectual Freedom Committee, wrote of his experience with Loertscher at the Symposium of the Greats conference in 2019.
Meanwhile, Loertscher, 81, has just published a book aimed at helping young adults take charge of their own learning, is teaching two courses at the University of San Jose’s School of Information, and may be applying for a grant to launch a global project to provide supports for school library professionals. He didn’t understand why his colleagues thought he had retired, although he conceded that he may finally pack it in at the end of this year.
“I’ve had a great career,” he said. “Opportunities fell in my lap.”
Loertscher was vice-president and senior acquisition editor at Libraries Unlimited for 10 years, worked as editor of Teacher Librarian magazine, served as president of the American Association of School Librarians and helped launch Treasure Mountain, a school library think tank founded in Park City, Utah.
He has worked as a teacher librarian, a professor and a program director and, without exaggeration, has presented at hundreds of conferences, schools and universities in Canada and in 48 of 52 U.S. states.
He has produced dozens and dozens of academic papers and books. In many instances, he was the sole author, but, more often, he preferred to collaborate.
“Individually you can do much and together you can do more,” he said.
Blanche Woolls met Loertscher in 1970 when they began their doctoral studies in library science at Indiana University. Loertscher moved from Idaho, where he was a teacher librarian, and Woolls moved from New Mexico, where she was a co-ordinator of school libraries. They were the only two in the program who came from school libraries, so they naturally began working together. It’s a partnership that continued throughout their careers.
“While David and I spent those three years in our doctoral program at IU, we started giving programs together. It was so natural,” said Woolls. “During our long working together, we have always asked the other person to join on projects. This began the first year after we graduated.”
Woolls speculated that their partnership has worked so well because they agree on the major issues of school librarianship. “We have always been interested in what was best for the profession, and focused, agreeably, on just what that track, attack, plan should be.”
Koechlin’s collaborations with Loertscher began with an unexpected phone call in 2001. He had read Info Tasks, the Pembroke publication Koechlin co-wrote with fellow teacher librarian Zwaan. He was so impressed with the way they embedded information skills in curriculum that he wanted them to write a book for Hi Willow, the publishing house he ran out of his garage. A year later they published Build Your Own Information Literate School and that was the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership. They went on to co-present at many conferences and schools, as well as co-authoring several books – some with Zwaan – including: “Coteaching and collaboration: how and why two heads are better than one.”
“The reason we had such a successful run together is because David is a master collaborator,” said Koechlin. “He knows how to work a team and build trust. He has the ability to draw the best from everyone and provide feedback that really raises the bar.”
They didn’t always agree and many of their meetings ended in lively debates, with Loertscher always appreciative of new ideas. “I remember one writing session at my dining room table,” said Koechlin. “He laughingly said: ‘When working with you Canadian gals, I have to park my ego under the table!’”
Loertscher was especially interested in Partners in Action, a 1982 document on collaboration in the library resource centre produced by the Ontario Ministry of Education which promoted the notion of partnerships between the teacher librarian and teachers. “It changed everything I thought about a school library,” he said.
Koechlin said Loertscher was desperate to build on teacher librarian partnerships. “This notion remained at the heart of all our work and of course was fundamental to designing the learning commons model for school libraries, only the idea stretched to partnerships within the entire school – teacher librarians, teachers, administration, students and the larger community,” she said. “David’s motto for the learning commons is: ‘You help me; I’ll help you. And together we will get better and better.”
Loertscher grew up one of four children on a dairy farm near Park City, Utah. The hospital where he was born was later converted into a public library. “I am the only librarian in the world who was born in a library,” he says.
His love for teaching developed when, at 13, he was asked to teach five-year-olds at Sunday school. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was in charge of eight, nine, 10 five-year-olds and I learned that if I loved them, they would love me back. I am 81 and still benefiting from that simple idea.”
He learned to trust children’s creativity. “They start out asking a million questions, but we beat the creativity out of them. What I learned from the very beginning was to follow what they wanted to know.”
Loertscher’s love for libraries came later when he pursued an undergraduate degree at the University of Utah and needed a minor. He decided to try library science and immediately fell in love with the profession. He did a stint as Library Media Specialist at an elementary school in Elko, Nevada, and then worked in a high school in Idaho Falls, Idaho, before making the jump to teaching university level students.
His passion for technology and innovation evolved from his drive to continually make things better. When he went to teach at San Jose State University’s School of Information, he had a student assistant who came into his office with the news that it was possible to attach a document to an email. “Find out how to do it and teach me!” he told the student. Loertscher said it took six or seven steps to do it, but suddenly the world changed. No one came to his office anymore and he became a teacher 24/7.
Then came the Google document. “The first time I saw people writing together on a single digital document, teachers came to my eyes,” he said, calling it a historic moment in innovation. Years later, when he and Koechlin came to my high school to run a workshop for teachers, he was outraged to discover that my school board blocked everything to do with Google. “This is a crime against education!” he railed.
Koechlin recalls Loertscher sitting at her dining room table during one of their collaborations, calling her over to see what was happening on his computer screen. “It was awesome to see the spreadsheet building with comments and questions from his students who were located all over the world,” she said.
“David was so happy; tears were streaming down his face! I will never forget his excitement. Now we take collaborative technologies for granted but only because pioneers like David tested them out and made them mainstream in learning.”
Loertscher went on to use Blackboard, an online learning environment, and now uses Zoom to facilitate co-construction of learning. His students were recently working together online to create trust triangles featuring the teacher librarian, the administration, and the classroom teacher. “I soon learned that I got more out of my students online – more learning in less time. People stuck in the text world haven’t got a clue.”
Technology also has been a tremendous support for him personally. For the past 10 years Loertscher’s vision has been steadily declining, a consequence of macular degeneration. Now legally blind, he relies on his computer to read everything to him. San Jose University has provided a graduate student to help with the courses he teaches from Utah, where he lives in an assisted living home with his wife, Sandra. They met while on a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission and married shortly after they returned. Together they raised nine children – one was adopted – and now have 30 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. The families are scattered across the United States but three live relatively close to Loertscher.
As he begins to wind up his career, Loertscher reflects on all that has been accomplished in the school library world and how things are changing now. “You can’t look back,” he said, even as the program he established at the University of Arkansas has disappeared, hundreds of teacher librarian positions are being lost across the United States and he still finds San Jose School of Information students who only want to move into school libraries to teach a love of reading and to sign out books.
“You can’t look back. You make a difference while you can,” he said.
Despite talk of retirement, Loertscher continues to look for ways to make a difference. It’s part of his commitment to the profession, said Woolls. “He is so willing to share and to finance efforts to make things better for school librarians and for the students in our schools. He doesn’t like it when he sees human efforts being used for minor projects,” she said. “Case in point, when he and Sandra moved into their assisted living quarters, they were invited to all sorts of “activities” which David did not see as being very interesting and not very rewarding, so he got materials to make baby quilts and gave the residents something that would help others as well as be interesting for them to be doing.”
Loertscher remains convinced that teacher librarians can be school leaders. Those who have the “I can change the world” vision, need to know how to build trust in that vision. “Success only moves as fast as the speed of trust with administration, students and the teachers they work with,” he said.
“We have the key if someone will just collaborate with us because we know how.”
Our dear colleague Caroline Freibauer had a distinguished career as a secondary school teacher-librarian in Brantford, Ontario, and in Toronto. She was the editor of The Teaching Librarian Magazine (Ontario School Library Association), and a member of the Canadian School Libraries board of directors. Please read Tributes to Caroline in this edition.