LIBE 467: Post 1

In response to the question: Do you see the need to promote an "Information Skills Framework" in your school? If so, how might you accomplish this?

There is certainly a need to promote an information skills framework in my school. Over the past couple of years I have come to see information literacy skills as perhaps one of the biggest and most pressing needs facing secondary school students today. At the same time, implementing an effective information skills framework into an existing secondary school curriculum/culture/schedule is a task fraught with difficulties and complexities (at my school specifically, at least).

One of the difficulties is the basic human resistance to change. Teachers who have a curriculum or system that works often—and understandably—ask the question, “Why change?” The basis for this question often comes out of the fact that—assuming that a teacher’s class is engaging and produces students are succeeding on Provincially-mandated exams that cover Provincial Learning Outcomes—teachers do not want to change just for the sake of changing (and any sort of changes that teachers are asked to make often feel this way). When TLs start presenting the need to integrate information literacy skills into a central part of a school’s curriculum—even if the need and the benefits for the students are obvious—then TLs often start sounding like so many administrators, superintendents, school board officials, and education consultants who, year after year and in cycles that tend to repeat themselves, talk of the vital importance of changing from what are generally in some form labeled “the old ways” to any of a number of “new ways,” which might include such titles as: “individualized instruction,” “differentiated instruction,” “21st century learning,” “6-Traits writing instruction,” “collaborative learning,” “student choice,” “virtual classrooms,” and so on. While each of the educational elements previously noted are important—and an effective teacher will likely integrate small pieces of each of them into his or her classroom over the years—they also serve as examples of the sort of educational buzz words that represent trends that come and go, or trends that gain prominence and popularity for a number of years and then fade away into the back of the education world’s collective consciousness when the next buzz-worded trend blows through the educational atmosphere. The point here is this: information literacy skills are important, but one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of successfully implementing them on the school level is the way in which they are presented to a staff of teachers. If “information literacy skills program” becomes another “change” or “thing to do” that already-successful teachers are tasked with implementing, then the buy-in at the teacher level will be minimal at best. I touch on this idea on my blog Reflections on Literacy, Libraries, and Learning in a post titled “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” where I discuss the sort of tension-filled educational intersection that teachers work in at the moment—an intersection of enduring teaching methods that work and new ways of communicating, delivering, and interacting with information, ideas, and content.

I am not altogether sure how to promote an information skills framework in my school. It would need to achieve at least these things for it to have any chance of getting off the ground:
• Positive connotations associated with its title as well as positive connotations associated with the person (in all likelihood a TL) who is promoting its place and worth in the curriculum
• An “ease of use” or “ease of implementation” on behalf of the teachers
• Active buy-in by teachers, administrators, and students
• Sustained focus on the practice so that it becomes part of the “school culture”
• A sense that the skills are genuinely valuable and enduring, so as to avoid the overwhelming sense by teachers that information literacy skills are “just another breeze blowing by in the educational environment” (and therefore not of enduring worth for students and curricula, and therefore not worth teachers exerting time and effort to modify their classrooms and curricula to include information literacy skills)

I feel a strong desire to see information literacy become a more wholly-integrated facet of BC students’ high school experiences. I also know that I feel that desire based largely on the fact of my own teaching niche and my own personal-professional interests: as a senior-level English and Literature teacher who is also a “TL-wannabe,” my perspective makes perfect sense to me and is informed by years of experience as a literacy teacher and years of reflecting on the library’s role in secondary education. The big problem that I see right now is this: most other teachers do not share this same background, and most teachers are already immersed in curricula and classrooms that are overflowing with content to teach and demands to meet. How, then, do I successfully integrate an information skills framework into my school’s working culture without wielding some sort of Harry Potter-esque wand magic?