Another School of Thought

Another School of Thought

(School Library Journal Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)As a doctoral student hoping to teach school library courses at a university, I may be shooting myself in the foot to say this: school library degree programs should operate within schools of education, not in schools of library and information science.

The focus of most school library degree programs is on the library as a source of information and on developing the skills of librarianship. No surprise there. To be sure, there are many, many skills to master. The school librarian must be a jack of all trades, competent in collection development, Web design, cataloging, budgeting, marketing, and management. But the school librarian must apply these skills in the enormously challenging context of teaching and learning, the demands of which are so overwhelming that half of all new teachers quit the profession within five years of landing their first job.

Think about your own training. Did your course work examine the ways school library programs contribute to teaching and learning within the broader school community or such fundamental issues as differentiated instruction and scaffolded learning? Did most of the professors even know what these terms mean?

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