Canadian School Libraries Board of Directors member Richard Beaudry was the recipient of this year’s BCTLA‘s President’s Award. CSL Journal asked Richard to share his reflections on this honour.
At the October 23rd BC Teacher Librarians’ Association Conference, I was the recipient of the BCTLA President’s Award in recognition of my advocacy work on behalf of teacher-librarians in BC during the years that the government made cutbacks across the province and my work in defence of intellectual freedom and challenges in library learning commons.
I was asked to make a speech at the virtual conference:
I would like to thank the BCTLA for this award. It is an honour. Too, being recognized by my peers is, on one hand, humbling, and on the other, very thrilling. My journey as a teacher librarian began by serendipity, when I moved from Alberta to Maple Ridge. Initially, I was hired to start up the French Immersion program at Westview Middle School. Part of my teaching assignment included working one day per week in the library learning commons to set up a French collection. The role suited me well as I was interested in access to information and finding resources in French. I applied to the School Board for a grant to purchase the first acoustically coupled modem using the phone receiver in my office. It retrieved information from a library in Montreal (SDM – Service de Distribution Multimédia) to my computer in Maple Ridge through a telephone line. It was slow, but I was hooked on the Internet from this first “archaic” attempt. Since I was new to the world of teacher librarianship, I decided to apply to the Teacher Librarian Diploma program at UBC. This is where I met my first mentor, Dr Ann Clyde. If anyone remembers, Ann was interested in information retrieval systems and it was a particular area that interested me as well. She encouraged me to complete my diploma and apply to a Master’s program. Back in the mid 1990’s, there wasn’t a specific Masters in Teacher Librarianship so I applied for a masters in Literacy Education at UBC. It was at this time that I met Marlene Asselin, another lifelong mentor, and she encouraged me to meet and talk with Ken Haycock, the director of the MLIS program at UBC. Ken became another mentor. He was extremely helpful with providing access to courses on information technology and literacy in the MLIS program which I needed to compliment the literacy classes at UBC. After a 3-year journey, I graduated with a Masters in Information Technology and Literacy from the Faculty of Education.
With the full potential of the Internet coming into schools, my first job, after graduation, was at SFU as the director of the French Education Resource Centre. My role was two-fold, the first was to buy resources for the centre and publish the cataloguing information for the 256 schools in the province with either French Immersion or Francophone Programs; secondly, to create a database that would be accessible on the Internet by those schools with French programs.
With that experience, I was then hired in the Vancouver School district. Along with fellow teacher librarian, Moira Ekdhal, we were tasked with weeding and assisting in the transfer of the card cataloguing system at Gladstone Secondary into a computer catalogue.
It is during this time that successive governments started cutting funding to school districts which resulted in many teacher librarian positions being cut and some library learning commons being closed. I was still interested in being a teacher librarian so, to add to my education, I decided to pursue another Master’s degree. I applied to, and was accepted into the MLIS program at UBC. I was lucky enough to be a student in the program at the same time as Leigh Hussief, a previous recipient of the BCTLA President’s Award and a good friend. We have had the good fortune to work together several times over the years. One of the projects that we worked on together as students was a review of the Surrey Book Case that ended up at the Supreme Court of Canada. Most of the students were tasked with finding information and Leigh interviewed the main people involved in the court case. I learned a great deal about Freedom of Expression, charter rights and the importance of school library learning commons.
This information would come in handy when I encountered my first case of censorship in a school library learning commons. A group of parents had introduced a caveat in a school that superseded the district policy for challenged books. In effect, the parents reserved the right to enter the library learning commons and remove items that included art books, photography books, dark, horror or evil books, and books that deal with teenage lust or contained recurring swearing. When I was asked to intervene, I was told that it shouldn’t matter because this was only in one school. My response, that I ended up repeating several times since, is that removing a book from any library affects all the libraries in the country.
Since then, I have been an advocate for school library Learning Commons Access to Information issues. In my dual roles as the chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations and part of a working group of librarians for the Centre of Free Expression, I bring forward the issues related to Access to Information and Intellectual Freedom in school library learning commons.
Part of my advocacy has been helped by the different organizations that I have had the opportunity to be a part of the governance over the years, including the Association of Teacher Librarians of Canada, the Canadian Association for School Libraries and Canadian School Libraries. All of these organizations had strong voices to speak about the issues related to school librarians. And I need to add the BCTLA to the list of supporters. I did not have a specific role within this organization, but I am thankful for their tireless support of teacher librarians during some tough times and the important statements they have issued regarding teacher librarians in the province. I am especially thankful for their statement on Book Levelling and School Library Collections that was an important document in one of the most complicated challenges I undertook in the censorship of a library learning commons’ collections in BC. I would like to add all the wonderful and dedicated LTLA teacher librarians that I have worked with like Allison Hewitt and Chris Janzen, who are present here tonight and thankful that we had Joanie Proske, another recipient of a BCTLA award tonight, as the president of our association.
Finally, I can thank the Internet and social media for the access to all the wonderful mentors for teacher librarians within BC –Jennifer Fernandes, Rebeca Rubio, Andrea Langelaar, Angela Monk and Leigh Hussief; out of province – Jonelle St. Aubyn and Rabia Khokhar; nationally – Carol Koechlin and Anita Brooks Kirkland and finally Internationally – Joyce Valenza US, Elizabeth Hutchinson from the UK and Kay Oddone, from Australia. When the pandemic arrived in the spring, these teacher librarians and librarians started posting numerous online resources for teacher librarians across the globe. I posted and reposted over 70 online resources during the two weeks of spring break. It was a good start and the number of available resources has increased over time, as teachers transitioned first to online teaching and now to a hybrid of in-school and online teaching. Last but not least, I have another two years before I take the time off to walk my granddaughter to her first pre-school. Until then, I will enjoy my work as a teacher librarian and coordinator at UBC, and will continue to advocate tirelessly for school libraries locally, nationally and globally.