ETL503 Resourcing the Curriculum - The beginning

The thought of doing a subject over the Christmas break seemed like a good idea, until I realised that I would have both kids at home for a majority of it! Oh well, 'thems the breaks'. I was looking at the assessment pieces and thinking this is going to be a lot of work but this is an area that I need more clarity on - I am fairly sure in my interviews for jobs it is my understanding (or lack of) that limits my ability to 'nail' it.

I think one of the main aspects I have to get my head around is the digital collection - especially reviewing and see if it suits my school. It seems easy enough to look at this with the print collection but I seem to run out of time with the digital side and I know this is a problem as we head towards a digital library scene.

I started by reading the first section of Chapter 1 - What is collection management? and found that this matches what we consider collection management in our schools - again I have to make sure I go through our guidelines a little more thoroughly for this subject! I continued reading the next section and was interested in how the two terms developed and for what reasons. It seemed a little pedantic to change the term as I am sure that as libraries were doing collection development there was the management side to it too, so to introduce collection management then and have the confusion or synonomous meanings occuring seemed likely. What I will take from this is as our module states, 'advisable to detect and take into account' the differences when people are writing about them. This will be the main issue with me I think is to have it clear in my head what they are meaning with the use of the term they have chosen.

I did like the alternate definitions in our notes where it linked it to school libraries with teaching and learning aspects and the needs of the users.

Finally, I examined and considered the definitions of 'selection', 'acquisition', 'deselection' and 'collection evaluation' and thought that for the student interest side of needs of the users of a library these are fairly standard - but that for curricular needs and teaching practices/learning theories there requires to be a knowledge of the units teachers are teaching, quite difficult when I am there one day a week and with teachers who haven't used a TL in that way before. So even though we have a Guidelines document for policy and procedure it is generic and I am looking forward to putting some school level documents in there.

Information Literacy - the beginning

Whist doing the initial readings for information literacy from Langford, L. (1998), Abilock, D. (2004), and Herring, J. and Tarter, A. (2007) I thought to myself it seems very familiar, fairly self-explanatory. I kept thinking back to teaching English and Science, having to write my assessment pieces from scratch, identifying what I wanted the students to achieve, did my task allow that? Then scaffolding it in steps so the students could see the different parts and when explaining it, working through the different phases as they did the task to make sure they were doing what was expected. Then I also remembered the students that had difficulty, that they required more scaffolding, more structure to achieve it and remembered the basic questions - what are you looking for? what do you know or need to know? Where do you need to be at the end?

Then I remembered doing this exactly with my Year 12 English group on Frankenstein. I think it seems that some students 'get' the process without being told the name of it, but as a teacher (or teacher librarian) we need to be aware of it for the students that don't know. Looking at my schools we have a large ESL population, a lot of these students wouldn't know the process, or where to start, even our learning support students would need to know the steps but we mustn't forget that other students will need the process when they do come up against something that is new and different and they think they don't know where to start. So explicit teaching of a process is important - what process? that is something that needs to be decided considering all the different ones out there. It is a process that needs all staff to be on board with and doing in all subjects across all year levels and not left to the TL to teach it during their library lessons.