DR JENSON: Another thing that I am interested in is the trend over time – whether the trend is an increase in the number of teacher-librarians, both in real terms and normalised for population increases or decreases in schools, to see whether this is a profession that is going downhill or actually picking up. The interesting thing is that some of the anecdotal evidence we have been getting, particularly in some of the states, is that this is a profession that is being allowed to die: whether it is passive or active in another question … Do you have any feel for whether there has been an increase or a decrease over, say the last 10 or 20 years? (Emphasis added)
I came across this in an article by Karen Bonanno in Access the journal of the Australian School Library Association (ASLA), reflecting on the hearings of the House of Reps Inquiry into school libraries and teacher librarians in Australian schools. Earlier Dr Jenson had said:
It seems to be a sector that is in decline – in fact, it looks to me as though you are almost in a death spiral.
I think Dr Jensen’s interlocutor in the first quote was an officer of The Queensland Department of Education and Training. The officer’s answer was roughly, we don’t know what’s going on, no information was kept historically, but we are taking steps to find out.
I can tell him that back in 1991, when I signed off on a 60-page review of provisions in relation to standards, we did know. Back then there were 229 teacher-librarians in 168 state high schools, 1.36 per school, albeit some were time-tabled for part class teaching duties. There was a shortfall against standards of 81. A total of 19 schools, all but 2 in remote locations, had no teacher-librarian. Anecdotally, I’m told that the Gold Coast now has 7 government high schools without a teacher-librarian. In 1991 none were without, the region had an average of 1.5 teacher-librarians per high school.
Teacher-librarians are certainly aging. A 2008 Edith Cowan Study found that just on 89% of teacher-librarians were 45 or older, while 55% were 55 plus. (Access both parts of the study here.)
Back in 1991 there were 348 Queensland state primary schools with teacher-librarians against 36 school that were eligible but didn’t have one.
One submission to the current inquiry spoke of a district in Queensland with no primary teacher-librarians and primary schools without any library at all.
If you want to see how some of the T/ls employed in Qld are getting along, have a look at the case studies attached to the SLAQ (School Library Association of Queensland) submission (283).
We compiled the 1991 Review in large part because the Labor government at the time made specific reference in its policy documents to the need for “improved school grants for library books and equipment and for the appointment of additional teacher-librarians.” What the Labor government did in fact was to decapitate its capacity to implement its own policy.
Since then we have had greatly enhanced computer storage capacity, the internet and the promised convergence of the various media into digitised form. Books, that ancient technology, still exist. However, the buzz words have moved to ICT, digital literacy, e-learning etc. Modern teacher-librarians are fully on board, many with a passion, but I wonder whether the liber bit is sending the wrong message. Some schools are putting an ICT teacher in charge of the library, supported by a ‘library technician’, ‘library support officer’ or similar.
In Queensland, way back in 1970, we saw the teacher-librarian as a specialist teacher. The standards required at least three years of successful classroom teaching experience.
For over 40 years research has shown that student performance and the capacity for autonomous learning are enhanced with the provision of adequately resourced school libraries and the appointment of a qualified teacher-librarian. Back in the early 1970s you could make this contrast, because with the Commonwealth secondary Schools Libraries Program from 1969 was overlayed on the truly shocking state affairs existing then in Qld schools.
As of February this year the score with the BER was about $4 billion allocated to 3,500 school library projects. The ASLA submission tells us that the NT has approved 62 shiny new projects, but only 3 will have qualified staff.
The Inquiry itself has been overrun by the election and I gather won’t automatically be re-convened. So I’d suggest that some lobbying might be in order.
There is a basic issue here between mandated system standards and school autonomy. I think national standards are now appropriate for facilities, resources, maintenance budgets and staffing.
In the 1991 Review I mentioned above we were proposing to overhaul the system completely. I’d been on a special project for about a year investigating resource and information networking. It was a brief I wrote myself on half a page. I had a lovely time, conducted some 200 interviews, identified about 100 district and regional resource centres and visited school/community libraries in South Australia. It was in fact a ‘make-work’ project as a consolation prize for missing out on a director’s job.
As I was about to write up my report I was re-integrated into the system with a brief to implement the kind of thing I’d been going to include in the report. The review then gave it flesh, recommended a committee and a group of six dynamic professionals to carry it forward, along with some seasoned senior staff within the existing central services group (who did most of the work in compiling the review).
We abandoned the notion of ‘libraries’ (we’d long called them ‘resource centres’) in favour of school-based curriculum resource services. So we were going to explore new patterns of providing such services with flexible spaces, curriculum resources and personnel, to soften the notion of a hard-edged institution within an institution.
We were going to network curriculum resources and associated services through to the national level.
We already had a resource evaluation unit with about 15 people in it. We were enhancing this by about another 10 in order to form teams to match new curriculum development projects. They would evaluate core resources, then also resources to enhance and enrich the curriculum.
Anyway, the pigs took over the palace and noticed. A line was put through the plans. The resource evaluation unit was deemed unnecessary. One morning I received a phone call that said, “We’ve got to clean them out”. So within the hour I had to accompany a very senior officer to the place where we where nesting these leaches on the system so she could tell them all where to go.
In the course of time I left too and didn’t think about any of that stuff for over a decade.
In the 1991 Review we’d identified the installed base of curriculum resources in Queensland government schools as having a replacement value of about $280 million. The annual spend on curriculum resources, resource centre staff and facilities was about $60 million.
For two decades school administrators have been siphoning off that funding to other purposes or in many cases making changes to render them less effective.
That having been said there are places that stand out like a beacon and provide possible models of excellent practice for the future. But they are isolated, in large measure unconnected, under-appreciated and depend on what can only be described as heroic effort and enthusiasm.
What to do?
I think there should be national guidelines of school level provisions, based on the rights of children to the best educational opportunities. If principals want to do something significantly different they should make a case and also arrange for their model of service to be independently evaluated if they think it’s better.
My own little problem right now is that I have been asked to give three speeches next week at a joint conference in Brisbane of the SLAQ and the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL). After the Governor has opened the conference the organisers have asked me to launch a book that is about to be published on the history of teacher-librarianship in Queensland. Then in the first keynote session I have to overseas and interstate delegates (300 in all) why SLAQ honours the much-loved Dr Roy Lundin who died too young in 2005. Finally, I have to present a professional practice award.
It’s been occupying my mind for a while and words have to go down on paper, starting now.
Then I might get back to worrying about the planet again. Meanwhile I think others should buttonhole certain politicians and ask them a question. Given the research above-mentioned and the expenditure of vast amounts of money, what are they going to do to see that educational aims are best served?
BTW I see the overall aim of education as assisting young people to attain mature personhood within a social setting rather perform tricks for an examiner. But I’d also leave you with this from James Madison in 1822 in relation to the need for information literacy in the digital age:
“A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance….”
Not sure about that last bit, unfortunately.
Brian, thank you for the background detail on how what would have been excellent planning for the future 20 years ago was sideswiped to leave us with the gutted system we have now.
The strength of librarian expertise is the systems they know and use for the organised archiving of information so that that it can be recalled efficiently when and only when it’s needed: this is exactly the sort of skill that should be taught with the schools’ new focus on computer resources – losing that key expertise because some technician IT types understand the computer itself better is a tragic missing of the point.
tt the sleuthing for information is certainly one aspect. One t/l I was talking to told of a biology assignment where the students were asked to critique a paper, which they had to find, on a topic. But each paper had to be different. So she ended up having to help the kids find 60 different papers, each written at a standard of complexity appropriate to the students’ understanding.
I commented that perhaps the teacher should have spoken to her before he set the assignment. She said, absolutely. Part of the roll of the T/l is in what they call co-operate planning and teaching (CPT). The t/l helps, not only in the availability of resources but also in teaching the skills of finding, assessing the reliability/credibility (a problem in the digital environment) extracting and using the information in a variety of possible outputs.
The student output can involve a web presentation, which branches rather than is linear like powerpoint. Qld has school-based assessment, so these outputs can be marked, although there are problems in assessing individual effort in a co-operative project. I understand there are ways of tracing this, although it’s a bit invidious.
A good t/l understands the whole process including assessment and marking and can help in designing the whole learning experience.
This t/l works in a ‘library’ that has 7 bookable spaces that can be used by class groups. The furniture is flexible and can be open tables, rows of chairs with writing tablets or bean bags in a circle within minutes.
There are some smaller rooms sound-proofed.
The whole school has a wireless network covering the whole school and heaps of laptops. The t/l herself is bookable in the library or in a classroom elsewhere. She’s there and full-on from 7am to 3pm and then has another 90 mins, when she closes her door.
She says she has good staff. I’d like to pay a visit, but even talking on the phone seems like an imposition. I had to book a time to do it.
BTW,when I asked about lighthouse schools in the current environment, most of the ones I was referred to were Catholic schools. Not sure whether you can generalise on that, however.
Also, last night after I’d finished I noticed the what I’d cited as the 1990 Review actually had January 1991 on the front cover. So I’ve corrected the post.
“The strength of librarian expertise is the systems they know and use …”
Well, that’s one of our areas of expertise. Depending on the the library and clients, knowledge is crucially important. Knowing the subject, your collection, and other sources of information. It’s built up over decades of experience, and these days valued at about zero.
An example from last week: driving to work I was listening to a live broadcast on Classic FM. A piece was announced as being ‘by the South American composer ????’ sounded like Natale, Nattali, Na…. of whom I’d never heard. Incredibly beautiful and well played by some kid in Shepparton.
So I looked at the Classic FM website but the program there was the one they would have played had they not been doing the live broadcast. Very helpful. So I emailed them: what was played this morning at 8.50 etc? and got back a cut and paste of the program that hadn’t been broadcast.
To cut a long story short, I couldn’t get the answer out of Classic FM, and my excellent Googling skills didn’t help. So I contacted a librarian who had worked in the music section of the State Library, who was able to answer in a second “that would be Gnattali, with a G”.
Moral – you need people who actually know stuff.
Don’t get my wife started on this one. A librarian and thereafter a school librarian. Her mantra is “When you’re there they don’t notice you, they take you for granted, you’re background noise. Then if you’re away for whatever reason the cry is “How did that happen?”
The devaluation is palpable.
@Russell,
My apologies, Russell. I never meant to imply otherwise. My sentence about librarians’ systematising skills was meant to incorporate the direct knowledge aspect as part of the package of librarian skills, but I phrased it poorly. Knowing your catalogue intimately is crucial to knowing how best to apply those systematising skills to archiving that catalogue for others to access, and for keeping those systems ticking over so that items don’t get misplaced and thus inaccessible. It’s all a glorious circle of knowledge!
Tig Tog – no apologies needed, librarians love their systems (I think we can claim to have invented effective metadata), but these days most generalist librarians have access via the web to vast amounts of information, so need to know as much about dealing with that as with their own systems.
But real subject knowledge is vital for many librarians – look at the example I gave. Law is another area – all sorts of people turn up at a state library who need help with the law and God help them if they don’t find someone who knows what they’re doing.
Catalogs will never capture the knowledge and context that experienced librarians use to connect a particular person with the the information they need.
I am glad to see this issue get a run on a blog outside of the profession.
It’s not just schools that seem to undervalue librarians (and those of us that have had our titles changed) – major research and policy organizations also seem to have a misguided notion that ‘all we need is ‘. Witness the mind boggling efforts at the EPA in the US as an example.
correction:
‘all we need is (insert the name of your favorite search engine here)!’
Then again if you’re reading this post, you probably guessed that.
As a University Librarian I am sometimes surprised at how little first year students know about libraries and how they work. I will now fall into ‘in my days’ mode. But during my final year at high school we were expected to know how to use a library catalogue and find a book. Now they seem to get these ‘study packs’ where all the material is there for them to use. So when they reach tertiary study we have to organise what we call ‘literacy information skill’ classes to teach them how to use the library. I believe that perhaps if the Librarian role was still important at High School we wouldn’t need to do much of that.
A couple of personal anecdotes. My own experience as a practitioner before taking up the schools position was short, fairly undistinguished, and entirely in the tertiary sector.
In a university library I was asked to catalogue a series of mathematics monographs, originally written in Chinese, but translated into Russian, when I didn’t know the Cyrillic alphabet, let alone anything about maths.
We did cover about 25 languages in that cataloguing department, but the guy who knew Russian was I think traumatised by the war and wasn’t the best communicator.
Working in interlibrary loans, landing some microfiche copies of documents from the Vatican Library.
One day in a teachers college a lecturer asked me for the small green book she borrowed last time. We found it, but it turned out to be a large blue book.
On subject knowledge, I believe that historically the British Museum Library saw it important to have subject experts on staff. The best example in Oz is perhaps the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library Service, where they hire subject specialists to research stuff for the pollies and even write papers. Or at least they used to when I visited there about 30m years ago.
At that time they also had a journal abstracting service where a small bunch of people sat. read journal articles and wrote abstracts. the standard seemed to be an abstract produced every 45 minutes. Not my idea of fun.
On subject knowledge, clearly a t/l in a high school can’t have detailed knowledge across the curriculum. We saw the basic skill set as demonstrated classroom teaching experience. The main learning site in schools is the classroom and you have to understand what goes on there.
So t/ls need understanding of teaching methodology, expectations in relation to year level and ability level, and the kind of output kids are expected to produce.
In 1972 a workshop of ‘stakeholders’ was gathered together in Canberra and worked on the roles, duties, qualifications and best preservice preparation of school library personnel. So we looked at teacher and non-teacher librarians, paraprofessional staff etc.
The role of teacher-librarian was established and seen as best set in teachers colleges. The role was seen as having enough ‘librarianship’ content that ALIA the professional library association was happy to accredit courses. Which means that qualified teacher-librarians can move seamlessly into other library settings.
At QUT the course exists now as a masters degree, which you can see on p.12 of their inquiry submission. They make courses such as ‘Cyberlearning’ and ‘Youth, popular culture and texts’ available to teachers studying for other qualifications. They’d probably be dead in the water by now if they only relied on prospective teacher-librarians for clientele.
Actually I wouldn’t mind doing some of their course modules.
@Guido
You would probably not be surprised but people can actually manage to graduate (even with a PhD) and still need Information Literacy training…;D
Information Literacy training. I had assumed that students used libraries until my own nieces and nephews hit honours and then asked for help since they had never actually visited the uni library. By that stage they’d apparently missed the window of opportunity in brain development that allows learning information literacy. It was easier for me to do all their research. Which meant reading and copying the stuff, so I highlighted the parts they really needed to read as I went. That’s service.
Brian – you don’t like abstracting?? I spent two years in the National Agricultural Library in Indonesia abstracting articles in their agricultural research magazines. Everyday conversation was difficult because although I had a massive vocabulary related to chicken diseases etc I didn’t have the vocab for much else!
Russell, very simply, I don’t have the speed and fluency to do abstracting. Mark does, but he didn’t get it from me!
Perhaps I’m just ridiculously naive, but I would have thought that even an educational bureaucrat would be able to appreciate that:
a) schools need both areas of expertise available to students and teachers.
b) that expertise won’t necessarily be found in the same person.
Robert, ideally, perhaps. But unless you have a sizeable school you are unlikely to have the capacity to employ both.
We had a concept of ‘adjusted’ enrolment for eligibilty, which from memory meant doubling the year 12 enrolment. On this basis the best we did in the 1980s was one full-time t/l for a secondary school of 300, 2 for 800 and 3 for 1600. Support came from aides, monitors (illegal student labour!) and volunteers.
In primary there was supposed to be a F/T t/l at 300, at 250 if it was a P-10 school, and we never achieved multiples.
In a secondary school of 800 I’m guessing you could have 50 teachers or more. If you believe in co-operative planning and teaching resourcefully, as it were, the elementary maths would say that you need a lot of t/ls available.
If the state of pedagogy is what it ought to be, which it ain’t!
But then the sociologist Basil Bernstein did once say that the personnel implications of our educational aims were unachievable.
My secondary school has 1500+ students and I am the sole TL.
I also teach 2 Senior classes. We had another TL years ago but when she retired she wasn’t replaced. I know that if I left I wouldn’t be replaced by a qualified TL but by someone the admin wanted to shift sideways.
School Libraries are soft targets. Budgets and timetable load can be eroded to prop up other school priorities, often technology.
It seems ironic that the Federal government would spend so much money constructing new school libraries when State Education Departments are reluctant to staff them adequately or at all. Cynics may say that the BER was not about educational outcomes at all.
The result of this is a student population already brought up in a culture of cutting and pasting/ pirating anything they want doing assignments using Google and Wikipedia.
They are able to design websites and nifty Flash games but are unable to spell or write grammatically because they simply don’t read anything of value anymore.
Frustrated TL, I wonder whose brainwave it was to spend all that money on school libraries. I’d be really interested to know what their motivation was.
Then they might have a second brainwave to ensure that much of it won’t be wasted.
Oops, I’ve just checked some figures. The post said that in 1990:
That’s been corrected to read:
Brian:
Important topic (IMHO). Can’t comment yet; have downloaded and shall read it thoroughly next weekend.
Take as long as you like, Graham, I’ll be interested in your comment.
I’ve just heard about a brand spanking new “library” in a large secondary school where they filled the place with computer terminals, cleaned out the books and sent them to subject departments.
Jesus wept!
I think that’s what you get when the people making the decisions are not information literate and never had the benefit of interacting with a good librarian.
There are also many people who assume that the knowledge/information model for their particular domain of expertise reflects that of all other domains and thus everything will be available on demand at the click of a button and the resolution of a link.
Brian:
Apologies for taking so long to respond to your interesting and important topic.
What a shame. It sounds like the efficiencies and the administrative style of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union are surviving and prospering in the Australian schools system.
We come from two different backgrounds: you, a teacher; me, a member of the general public …. so here goes ….
So far as I’m concerned, EVERY school, no matter where and no matter how small, should have four things:
1. a Classroom – where learning can be encouraged and happen; a indoor laboratory with basic equipment would be nice too. 2. an Office – where activities can be planned and assessments analyzed for the benefit of each and every student. 3. a Playground – where physical training, sports and PLAY can happen: some basic gymnasium equipment and access to safe swimming facilities are needed too. and …. 4. a Library – where knowledge can be hunted down and organized …. knowledge that comes out of old-fashioned cloth-bound paper books as well as out of the latest bit of fashionable gee-whizzery.
Any school without all four of these basic things is only a pretend-school, a mere factory for churning out future consumers and shoppers, an ignorance mill, a kid-holding pen.
Naturally, each of these four would have at least one permanent full-time staff member dedicated to it.
Labour intensive? My oath!! Expensive? Too right!! And so it should be.
As it is, we already have many tens-of-thousands of very, very expensive people wasting oxygen on “make-work” in the bludger economy so we can well-and-truly afford to quadruple the staff of every small school in the nation – and increase the staff of every larger school too. There are no excuses, other than timidity and the lack of political will, for not doing this right now. As for the credentialist’s excuse of not having enough “qualified” people to do the job, let’s try something novel, like a bit of flexibility, like stamping on the 21st century’s medieval guilds, like giving Principals more local autonomy, so that people with the broad ability to do the job can be employed.
I also see our schools as an underutilized resource in each community. I would rather see all of them used for educating the young by day – and as community meeting and learning centres in the evenings …. and if we can achieve that, why not have TWO teacher-librarians for each and every school? One on day shift, the other on afternoon/evening shift.
We CAN afford it.
[ btw, I liked your phrase "....the pigs took over the palace ...." .
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