The seventh iteration of the Canadian School Libraries Treasure Mountain Canada Research Symposium just wrapped up in Vancouver, BC. Canada is one of the only countries in the world without a national education strategy, though weirdly we have an international education strategy - just not one for Canadians in Canada. That is strange, right?
TMC is an opportunity for teacher librarians to escape Canada's provincial education silos and share common challenges (which are very similar). By sharing these problems and brainstorming solutions, best practices and future-ready strategies emerge. Wouldn't it be efficient if the whole country were engaged in this powerful professional practice instead of repeating the work over and over (if at all)? Yet many provinces were not not in attendance. I'm still struck by how there is no such thing as "Canadian Education", which has lasting implications for equity in our country. Some provinces have cut teacher librarians entirely from their schools, preventing any of their students or staff from benefitting from these information literacy specialists - and these cuts happened during an information technology revolution when a guiding hand would have been most helpful. |
| We're in the middle of an information revolution and your school system wants to remove all the information specialists? What an odd choice. |
Treasure Mountain attracts librarians who are working to put school library learning commons squarely in the role of digital literacy development. This event was full of energetic thinkers who were digitally literate and well aware of the ongoing digital skills crisis happening across Canada.
Our presentation was about how using industry standard project management tools and organizational strategies not only prepares students for life after graduation, but also provides them with the organizational tools they need to be both resilient and successful, even when our school systems stagger under the weight of multiple pandemic shut-downs. Being able select the right tools and move between digital and real-world information allows students to attend class, stay organized and continue to author their own student-led projects no matter how much chaos surrounds their learning. Digital skills development and knowledge of a swiss-army knife of readily available digital tools could make our education systems pandemic-proof, if only we'd do it.
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Treasure Mountain is very much a hands-on experience with everyone participating and collaborating on developing ideas. Those ideas are brought forward by the participants. This year there were 27 (!) papers submitted on subjects ranging from how to audit your book collection to enhance diversity and how to keep an LLC operational during a pandemic, to how to embrace emerging digital literacies. In my new role at ICTC I am especially interested in that digital literacy development.
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| Another example of the many cracks in Canada's siloed education approach. |
This isn't just a Canadian problem, as code.org states, most schools don't have a computer science program (ours got locally cancelled during the pandemic). Even though there has been a recent push to put coding into Ontario elementary curriculum, it's being delivered by teachers with little or no technology fluency themselves, and coding is only a tiny part of a much larger and more complex digital/media literacy framework.
Library learning commons are an ideal place to begin this work as (when they're well run) they act as a shared space for engaging with the iterative learning needed to make emerging technology work. Librarians have always been information management specialists - the mediums may change, but the fundamentals of rigorous inquiry and source credibility assessment don't. A digitally fluent librarian makes the LLC central in 21st Century learning models that effectively leverage digital tools.
Before the Friday night awards ceremony, Alanna and I did an interview with Dr. David Loertscher, one of the conceptual founders of the learning commons model. David was curious as to how digital tools could be used to amplify and organize student-directed/inquiry based learning models, and our talk gave us a chance to clarify our own understandings too. It'll eventually be available on Dr. Loertscher's ALiVE Virtual Library. It's collaborative opportunities like these that help pave a pathway into the future that will not only make library learning commons relevant to student experience, but will also provide the framework for much needed digital skills system building capacity.
