Further Up And Further In

After our second face-to-face meeting at the York School, Cohort 21 participants have been asked to think about what issue or question we might want to explore. I found myself a bit rattled by the end of the day, and not just because of Garth’s frequent reminders of my threat to his person.

I often find myself to be somewhat of an outlier at events like this. Now, it might be because I do things like picking “Bizarre Love Triangle” as my theme song, but I think there is more to it.  At the very end of the day I had a brief conversation with Jesse  about the lens with which we view our upcoming tasks. He was curious about how I will approach things. I do not bring the disciplinary focus to the table that so many others do, nor do I have a slate of classes with which to apply new strategies. On good days, I think this status allows me to see the “big picture” across departments and disciplines, a whole school approach. On the bad days…well, they are the bad days.

I spend a lot of time battling, usually without success, perceptions. In the independent school world it seems the librarian is the librarian, and that means gatekeeper of a physical space with a physical collection, that some people see as quaint, but for the most part irrelevant to the 21st century skill set. The divide between the technology integrationist and the librarian seems huge most of the time.

Lately, I have read several pieces on the importance of teaching “search”. Jeff Utecht writes here about the critical importance of teaching search skills to high school students, and Phil Macoun expands on these ideas in his blog. What strikes me as remarkable, and distressing, is the complete lack of any mention of librarians in their two pieces. For whatever reason, librarians have missed or been left off the electronic information literacy train. Now there are librarians out there, like Buffy Hamilton or Joyce Valenza, who have worked in schools successfully blending tech integration skills with traditional librarianship (whatever that is), but the disconnect between the two worlds seems to be almost insurmountable. This is not meant to be any slight toward the two bloggers I mentioned. Both their pieces make interesting and relevant points about the gap in high school students’ search skills, and for all I know, both of them may have fruitful relationships with the librarians in their lives. My real point is that, within school librarianship, many practitioners concern themselves with 21st century skills, but outside the school library their voices do not seem to be heard.

Garth tweeted me a link to a piece on why good libraries are important to education, describing the impact of public and school library cuts in Chicago. The author refers to existing research suggesting adequately supported school libraries make a measurably positive impact on test scores. This is a valid reason for supporting school libraries, but one that continues to focus on the library in its traditional sense, a physical collection with a gatekeeper who makes recommendations. Done well, that is an important role, but the librarian is now competing with a lot of other current awareness and recommendation services, in the form of Yelp, Facebook, Amazon, and blogs too numerous to mention.

Over a year ago, Seth Godin wrote a blog post describing his vision for the future of the public library. Now, I probably made it pretty clear I can get pretty impatient with some of Mr. Godin’s prognostications, but I think his vision of the public library is a good one:

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user serviceable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

My hunch is this is already going on in some places. Maybe in some places a librarian wants to have nothing to do with this kind of thing. In still other places the librarian wants to be more Godin-like, but the dominant culture of his institution keeps him straight-jacketed in the role of bookish gatekeeper.

My plea to anyone reading is to simply ask your librarian what they want/can do. You may be surprised.

All of this is a mighty long prelude to saying I want to explore the role of search more. How do our students do it? How do we do it? Do we model good search behaviour for our students? Do we adequately prepare our students for the requirements of university-level search?   Everyone searches. I know more than a few tech integrationists who have taken the Mastering Search online course offered by Google. I did it. Should the focus be on training students to Google effectively? Is that all there is? In my heart I believe librarians bring more than this to the table. Beyond the mechanics of search, librarians think about the question. The techniques of the old-fashioned reference interview, something every library school grad learns, is really what we are talking about. What would a truly comprehensive search program look like, and how could it be collaboratively implemented by teacher-librarians and their classroom colleagues?