This week’s content was a timely reminder of my commitment as a school librarian to advocate for information literacy to stay in the discussion of what/how/why we teach. And when many of the educators in our buildings have so many initiatives they are charged with implementing (structured literacy, STEM, SEL, etc.), it is easy for information literacy to be left to the school librarian. However, as an ELA teacher for many years, I felt a shared responsibility for developing information literacy skills, if not complete responsibility. (I was not always fortunate to have a librarian to partner with for this work.) I remember sensing this responsibility around 2015. My students were becoming very aware of the information at their fingertips when we moved to being 1:1 with Chromebooks. Content was not just coming from me anymore. And what they had access to outside of my class period felt like a tidal wave for me, colleagues, and especially parents. We were all growing increasingly aware of the need to respond.
Now, as I transition to my librarian role, I feel the greater responsibility for it all over again. And I echo the commitment shared by Valenza (2016): “Nurturing information literate, responsible, active citizens is what librarians do. There are no guarantees of truth from any source. We teach students to be discerning consumers of information.” Well, one thing I know to be true about life is that we can’t do it alone. So, how do I avoid the silo that I felt as a teacher without a librarian partner, and prevent a silo of being a librarian without a teacher partner? In other words, how do I work towards a shared responsibility for developing students’ information literacy skills? As I reflected on the content for this week, I bounced between both perspectives and I kept coming back to the idea at the core of it all - literacy. One collective mission (and passion) for us across the grade levels and down the halls is literacy - reading, writing, and thinking skills that work together to develop our students into self-sufficient and successful humans. And when it comes to this full plate we already have with literacy instruction, where do fit in more?
My attempt at an answer here is to share where I found my Aha Moment: close reading. The Common Core Standards for ELA presented close reading in the first anchor standard, and the concept is explained more here and here. CCSS had a lot of impact on K-12 ELA instruction, even here in SC, where we ended up with our own College- and Career Readiness state standards. So what does all of this have to do with Module 3? This Aha was where I found the intersection for literacy efforts in my practice, which includes information literacy.
One notable resource for me in this work came from my professional study of Kylene Beers and Robert Probst in their 2017 publication, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters. Its target audience is the classroom teacher, but it really makes sense to the greater collective of us with a literacy mission. I was reminded of the authors’ specific stance of social media use, fake news, and information literacy as I studied our module’s content this week. In returning to this text to revisit the connections I made, I found a statement that spoke to my commitment: “Until we teach students to read responsibly, we run the risk of being a nation of readers who not only harm themselves, but potentially hard others as they share not just misinformation but blatant lies.” (pg. 43).
So, back to the shared responsibility of this work. We know we can lead from the library, and as many of us argued in our first blog posts, our AASL and ISTE standards guide us as leaders in this work. So, I’ve bookmarked a lot of our material this week to return to on this topic with colleagues when we have opportunities to collaborate. (Side note: I loved the catchy song shared on the Liturgists Podcast; how ironic is it that I can’t use it in elementary school, where songs are often used to make learning stick.) I will also look back at the strategies shared in Disrupting Thinking, as well as Reading Nonfiction, its “cousin” text from Beers and Probst. I recommend both texts to anyone that would like to explore more practical literacy strategies to add to our toolboxes.
References:
Beers, K. & Probst, R. (2017). Disrupting thinking: Why how we read matters. Scholastic, Inc.
Beers, K., & Probst, R. (2016). Reading nonfiction: Notice & note stances, signposts, and strategies. Heinemann.
Valenza, J. (2016, November 26). Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. Neverending Search. https://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/
Your experience as a teacher with and without support from the school librarian to teach information literacy illustrates how important it will be for me to build relationships with the teachers in my school. Teaming up on this topic will allow us to share the tasks while reiterating skills across content areas. I collaborated with a teacher in the Spring semester and she was unaware of any standard research process so I introduced the Super3 to her fourth-grade class. The students seem to enjoy the simplified format and used a daily checklist to help them complete the steps of their research.
ReplyDeleteI also liked the rap in the podcast but disappointed it can't be used in the school setting due to the explicit language.
I am very sorry to hear of the lack of support that you had experienced as a teacher, but I know that this will motivate you even more in your own library to become a leader, collaborator, and partner to other teachers. As you said, literacy is the unifying goal for all educators. It is important for us all to remember this and to understand that librarians cannot do what they do alone, and neither can teachers. With this idea in place as the foundational understanding and with the goal to increase literacy for all students, collaboration will be an easier thing to make happen.
ReplyDelete