By Alison Bodner
The 2020 Manitoba School Library Association SAGE conference, Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic: Opportunities, Reflections, and Provocations, was an amazing day of learning and even with all the uncertainty due to the new Code Orange restrictions for schools in Manitoba I was able to come away feeling inspired and invigorated from all the presentations I attended. I’m excited to share some of my impressions, highlights and take-aways with you from our conference.
For me, one of the high points was Diana Maliszewski’s keynote presentation: Failing with Style, Embracing “Crisitunity”: How Emergency Response Remote Learning Shook Up for Better or Worse. Diana took us through the challenges, celebrations, and the opportunities for change this pandemic has and will continue to lead us towards.
There were many key take-aways but the ones that really resonated with me were the following:
Crisis leads to new opportunities: As Diana noted in her keynote she didn’t invent the term Crisitunity, and as a library professional Diana needed to give credit to the original creator, Homer Simpson, who immortalized it in a Simpsons episode. None of us were expecting or prepared for the COVID crisis but we responded to it with “Crisitunity” and like the Chinese proverb says, we discovered that crisis does in fact lead to opportunity! In a blink of an eye we had to shift our teaching from in school to learning online using new teaching methods and tools, and somehow adapt in the midst of this chaos. It has been daunting but also exhilarating to find new ways to teach and engage our students that will continue to endure and evolve beyond the pandemic.
There are positives to both in person and online learning: We also discovered that there are positives to both in school and online learning. The benefits to traditional in person learning include being able to give direct responses, peer socialization, supervision, hands-on learning, and non-verbal communication; the benefits to online learning is it’s convenience, sense of safety, flexibility, and differentiation of participation. These benefits are true for both the classroom and library learning commons. This information is backed up by the research of teacher-librarian Alana King.
The pandemic highlights the inequities in the education system: We must also address the inequities that have always been part of the education system but were exacerbated by the pandemic and move to remote learning. It is no surprise there’s not equal access to technology, and at the start of the pandemic school boards across the country scrambled to round up devices from all their schools and loan them out across their school districts. Another inequity across the country is the urban and rural divide around access to the Internet and bandwidth. Even in the city there was an issue of many users within a family trying to access Internet bandwidth simultaneously. (I have a colleague and friend who posted her lessons during the night so she didn’t have to worry about the availability of bandwidth in her household.) Finally, there are inequities in resources between cities and school divisions; the access to resources is not equal! Hopefully, this pandemic has made these inequities more visible and will lead to positive action to address them.
Teacher-librarians, school library specialists are more essential than ever: This message is highlighted in the Canadian School Libraries position statement, issued by the Board of Directors on September 23, 2020 on the Role of School Libraries During the Pandemic.
“Quality school library programs have never been more essential. We cannot afford to sacrifice the library’s unique contribution to student success and well-being during this period of emergency measures, nor can we risk the future by weakening this essential resource in the shorter term.”
Canadian School Libraries (Sept 2020) Role of School Libraries During the Pandemic
We need to ensure our boards here this statement loud and clear! I know our Library Learnings Common Consultant, Jo-Anne Gibson, has shared this with our Pembina Trails School Division board!
Diana is an amazing resource so I also recommend you follow her on Twitter @MzMollyTL and tune into her Monday Molly Musings blog.
In addition to the keynote, I found all the other sessions I was able to attend at our MSLA MTS Day conference to be highly informative and valuable, and I will try and briefly highlight these sessions for you.
Session 2 of our MSLA conference was Agency and Equality: Students Shaping School Library Collections Pre- and Post Covid presented by Diana Maliszewski and Jonelle St-Aubyn. This collaboration came about from Diana’s presentation of her paper “Toward an Understanding of the Impact of Youth Involvement in Purchasing Resources for the School Library Learning Commons and Issues of Equity in Participant Selection” at the 2020 Treasure Mountain Canada Symposium and Think Tank. It’s about the importance of giving our students a voice in what is purchased for their library learning commons. I’ve always encouraged my students to make recommendations to me about the types of books and resources they’d like to see in our school but allowing them to be part of the shopping experience gives it so much more agency. I loved hearing about this collaboration and seeing how you can make it work either as an in school activity or adapt it to remote learning as Jonelle had to do. I highly recommend you take a look at Diana’s paper, which is archived with all the 2020 TMC6 papers here:
https://researcharchive.canadianschoollibraries.ca/category/tmc6-2020-papers/. I also look forward to reading Jonelle’s paper about this project in an upcoming article in CSL Journal!
Session 3 presented by Shauna Cornwell was titled Supporting Anywhere, Anytime Learning in a Climate of Uncertainty and it explored the pedagogy, planning and practice that best supports learners in a digital world regardless of its context: face to face learning, blended, or remote. The biggest take away for me from this session was around pedagogy and remembering that “good teaching is good teaching and effective practice is good practice” and we can’t lose sight of this throughout these challenging times. During these uncertain times we must also be prepared for any learning scenario – Face to Face, Blended, Remote, or Hybrid. However there are resources that can help us navigate this.
Session 4 was the Nutrients for Life Foundation presentation, which is a registered Canadian charitable organization that is committed to bringing educational materials to the classroom. Ray Cochrane, who has been with the organization for eight years, was a wealth of information. The program focuses on soil science, plant biology, and agricultural sustainability and their website offers a plethora of online resources for all grade levels. They also offer funding opportunities, resources for Learning Gardens, resource packages, seminars, and classroom visitations. As an educator you can sign up for a teacher membership, I did! I really can’t even begin to outline all the resources available to educators so please visit their website at: https://nutrientsforlife.ca/ There is also lots of fabulous resources on the Nutrients for Life USA site: https://nutrientsforlife.org/
Session 5: I was extremely excited to attend Session 5, the StoryWalk® presentation given by Karen Burkett and Holly Pike. A StoryWalk® is when individual pictures from a book is placed up for students to take a story walk along a path. Karen (T-L) and Holly (Phys Ed Teacher) collaborated so that their students could enjoy the story and incorporate some physical activity along their walk. I had been interested in setting one up for my school and found the session extremely informative. They explained in detail what it is and the necessary steps to set one up for your school. As always we need to be cognizant of copyright, you need to buy two physical copies of the book and you need to check with the publisher to get copyright permission. Another important detail they shared is to check your city bylaws for sign placement if you’re taking it off your school grounds and into the community. Finally, it’s critical to give credit to the creators of the StoryWalk® concept. It was created by Anne Ferguson of Montpelier, VT and was developed with the help of Rachel Senechal, Kellogg-Hubbard Library. For more information you can visit the official webpage of the StoryWalk(R) movement.
The two other sessions that I didn’t have an opportunity to attend were:
- The Manitoba Council for International Cooperation
- How the National Film Board of Canada’s Film and Resource Collection Can Support Remote Learning
In summary, I found the conference to be very timely, relevant, and informative for these challenging times. I look forward to applying what I learned to our current challenges, and to the many possible opportunities ahead.
Alison Bodner. Over her 30+ year teaching career Alison has had the opportunity to work with students from Kindergarten to Grade 6 in a variety of roles including coverage teacher, enrichment teacher and teacher-librarian. In 1996 she taught a Year 5, 6, 7 class in Geranium, South Australia as part of an international teacher exchange. She’s been the teacher-librarian at Bairdmore Elementary School, in the Pembina Trails School Division, in Winnipeg, Manitoba since 2007. Alison was the 2019 recipient of the MSLA Outstanding Teacher-Librarian Award in Memory of Lois Gervais, and she was one of the recipients of the 2020 Canadian School Libraries Angela Thacker Memorial Award.