Librarianship, Teaching, and Curation
You know that thing where you have two essays tumbling simultaneously through your brain all tangled up and then you try to write both of them at once and discover that neither of them can possibly live up to what's tumbling around in your brain?
Yeah, that's what I'm experiencing right now. So you get this essay now, another one later, and neither of them are going to adequately express everything I'm thinking, which I suppose is the eternal curse of the writer. (I *love* that line from "The Hours" where Richard comments on how everything was so much less than he wanted it to be even as he's winning the most prestigious poetry award out there.)
In this particular instance,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
siderea crossed over into my subject area with this post, and now I am having Thoughts.
Once upon a time, in the days of yore, most schools had at least one school librarian. I don't think school librarians have ever been funded *well*, but there used to be more of them, and they used to be recognized as professionals with a complementary but not identical skillset. For that matter, they are a complementary but not identical skillset to the public children's librarian; I had some of the same classes as people doing that but a lot more freedom in my schedule. We have, as school libraries have been cut, been taking on a lot *more* of those functions than we're actually meant to or suited for (libraries: the catch-all social service, and that is another essay entirely)-- in an ideal world, if the teacher says "here is a list of people you can do your biography report on", they've consulted with the school librarian first and made sure grade-appropriate biographies of all of those people actually exist in the school library, and because serving the curriculum is part of the function of the school library, if they say "I want to have a biography report and need you to have grade-appropriate biographies on a bunch of these people," the school librarian will *do that* insofar as her budget allows. The teacher does not need to go try to hunt down age-appropriate biographies; the librarian will do that-- or will come back and say "there are no age-appropriate biographies on this person; here are some other Local Personalities you can use to try to get that same local flavor, or you can drop the requirement that they must use print books and they can use these online sources."
(The school librarian will also explain to you why, in this age of graphic novels winning the Caldecott and picture books winning the Newbery, declaring you are going to read the year's winner with your class before you've seen what won is a bad idea. Yes, a school librarian did in fact write in to School Library Journal asking how to explain this to a teacher for whom it was apparently *not* self-evident that a book obviously out of the age group of her classroom shouldn't be used with her classroom.)
Curation is a subtly different skill from teaching. My experience is that a lot of teachers are aware that we're more trained for it than they are or aren't great at it don't have time to do it themselves, although there's unquestionably a lot of sample bias there-- I don't encounter the ones who aren't asking me to please find them twenty books on sunflowers that are appropriate for second-graders.
When I look at what siderea suggests schools should be doing for the pandemic, I see things that the school librarian should be helping with: finding existing educational online resources that are at least somewhat captivating, helping the teachers incorporate those things into the curriculum, and helping the teachers interface with the unfamiliar technology they're now using. (No, not all librarians are great with tech, but we have fewer excuses for it-- informational technology is within our remit, as is, within reason, being able to figure out things we don't know how to use.)
Many of the public libraries have in fact done the thing siderea is describing! But we're necessarily communicating to a wider audience. Children's departments have babies up through teenagers to cater to, and the way we conceive of "developmentally appropriate" is not always the same way the school system conceives of it. It's the same reason public libraries don't respond to every collection development request they get from teachers, even though they are getting more and more of them as the school libraries get cut. Our primary function isn't supporting the schools; it's supporting the community, which includes the schools (*all* of the schools, which can sometimes mean five or six elementary schools alone in a suburban city that's large enough for multiple schools but not multiple libraries) but also includes homeschoolers and children too young to go to school and teens who've dropped out-- and *doesn't* have a primary mission of curriculum support but instead one of community support. The school library has a much narrower focus.
(Incidentally, we're also a lot more conscious of the childcare role the schools play, because we are explicitly *not* playing a childcare role, but one of the reasons we're closed right now is that when the schools are closed people congregate at the library, including randomly leaving their children there whether said children are old enough to be left there or not.)
So where am I going with this? Again, not anywhere specific; I'm mostly just pointing out that school librarians exist for a reason and that we'd probably be doing at least somewhat better at the distance-learning aspect of the pandemic if schools had librarians-- and that the school librarian actually is a much more professional role than most people admit to. But I'm also pointing out that "Can't they do more curation" is actually a fundamentally different skillset with a completely different career path attached to it. I've used very little of the half an education degree I got before deciding it wasn't for me in my career as a librarian, even during those periods of time when I've been fortunate enough to actually be working in the children's that I've trained for. (How do you get half an education degree, you ask? My college had a program where you could do a combined BA/MAT in five years. I wanted to do this until I'd done two years of it and then I really, *really* didn't, but by then I'd taken many of the required classes.)
Yeah, that's what I'm experiencing right now. So you get this essay now, another one later, and neither of them are going to adequately express everything I'm thinking, which I suppose is the eternal curse of the writer. (I *love* that line from "The Hours" where Richard comments on how everything was so much less than he wanted it to be even as he's winning the most prestigious poetry award out there.)
In this particular instance,
siderea crossed over into my subject area with this post, and now I am having Thoughts.Once upon a time, in the days of yore, most schools had at least one school librarian. I don't think school librarians have ever been funded *well*, but there used to be more of them, and they used to be recognized as professionals with a complementary but not identical skillset. For that matter, they are a complementary but not identical skillset to the public children's librarian; I had some of the same classes as people doing that but a lot more freedom in my schedule. We have, as school libraries have been cut, been taking on a lot *more* of those functions than we're actually meant to or suited for (libraries: the catch-all social service, and that is another essay entirely)-- in an ideal world, if the teacher says "here is a list of people you can do your biography report on", they've consulted with the school librarian first and made sure grade-appropriate biographies of all of those people actually exist in the school library, and because serving the curriculum is part of the function of the school library, if they say "I want to have a biography report and need you to have grade-appropriate biographies on a bunch of these people," the school librarian will *do that* insofar as her budget allows. The teacher does not need to go try to hunt down age-appropriate biographies; the librarian will do that-- or will come back and say "there are no age-appropriate biographies on this person; here are some other Local Personalities you can use to try to get that same local flavor, or you can drop the requirement that they must use print books and they can use these online sources."
(The school librarian will also explain to you why, in this age of graphic novels winning the Caldecott and picture books winning the Newbery, declaring you are going to read the year's winner with your class before you've seen what won is a bad idea. Yes, a school librarian did in fact write in to School Library Journal asking how to explain this to a teacher for whom it was apparently *not* self-evident that a book obviously out of the age group of her classroom shouldn't be used with her classroom.)
Curation is a subtly different skill from teaching. My experience is that a lot of teachers are aware that we're more trained for it than they are or aren't great at it don't have time to do it themselves, although there's unquestionably a lot of sample bias there-- I don't encounter the ones who aren't asking me to please find them twenty books on sunflowers that are appropriate for second-graders.
When I look at what siderea suggests schools should be doing for the pandemic, I see things that the school librarian should be helping with: finding existing educational online resources that are at least somewhat captivating, helping the teachers incorporate those things into the curriculum, and helping the teachers interface with the unfamiliar technology they're now using. (No, not all librarians are great with tech, but we have fewer excuses for it-- informational technology is within our remit, as is, within reason, being able to figure out things we don't know how to use.)
Many of the public libraries have in fact done the thing siderea is describing! But we're necessarily communicating to a wider audience. Children's departments have babies up through teenagers to cater to, and the way we conceive of "developmentally appropriate" is not always the same way the school system conceives of it. It's the same reason public libraries don't respond to every collection development request they get from teachers, even though they are getting more and more of them as the school libraries get cut. Our primary function isn't supporting the schools; it's supporting the community, which includes the schools (*all* of the schools, which can sometimes mean five or six elementary schools alone in a suburban city that's large enough for multiple schools but not multiple libraries) but also includes homeschoolers and children too young to go to school and teens who've dropped out-- and *doesn't* have a primary mission of curriculum support but instead one of community support. The school library has a much narrower focus.
(Incidentally, we're also a lot more conscious of the childcare role the schools play, because we are explicitly *not* playing a childcare role, but one of the reasons we're closed right now is that when the schools are closed people congregate at the library, including randomly leaving their children there whether said children are old enough to be left there or not.)
So where am I going with this? Again, not anywhere specific; I'm mostly just pointing out that school librarians exist for a reason and that we'd probably be doing at least somewhat better at the distance-learning aspect of the pandemic if schools had librarians-- and that the school librarian actually is a much more professional role than most people admit to. But I'm also pointing out that "Can't they do more curation" is actually a fundamentally different skillset with a completely different career path attached to it. I've used very little of the half an education degree I got before deciding it wasn't for me in my career as a librarian, even during those periods of time when I've been fortunate enough to actually be working in the children's that I've trained for. (How do you get half an education degree, you ask? My college had a program where you could do a combined BA/MAT in five years. I wanted to do this until I'd done two years of it and then I really, *really* didn't, but by then I'd taken many of the required classes.)