The first one includes an open letter to Julia Gillard from Marj Kirkland (National President The Children’s Book Council of Australia)
The main points that I liked were:
o The Lonsdale Report (2003) advocates that school library programmes should be run by a trained teacher librarian in order to make significant difference to student learning outcomes – must read this report further!!!!
o OECD shows Australian literacy levels are declining. This underpins an individual’s ability to succeed. The best way to improve literacy is to immerse children in reading (Krashen 2008) – must read this too!!
o Teacher librarians are dedicated to finding the right reading for each student and run specialised reading programmes to encourage reading
I particularly liked this last point. When I originally started the course it was because I had such a love of reading and literacy. Very little mention has been made throughout the course of reading, with the bulk of the emphasis being on RBL and information literacy. I was pleased to see that reading was actually still a part of the T/L’s role.
Phew!
The other was from Australian Standing Orders (April 2010). SOme interesting points here were:
- There is no mandate in Australia to employ T/Ls in schools
- Brisbane Catholic Education Office is now offering scholarships for current teachers to retrain as librarians - living and working in the wrong city aren't I??
- The position of T/L needs to be placed outside of school staffing allocations so that principals are not forced to choose between a T/L and smaller class sizes
Here's hoping that the profession of T/L is not on the way out as seems to be the case - have actually read/heard a few things since starting this course. Would hate to start a new direction in my career only to see it stall. Especially given the impact it is having on me - feeling like I have less time with the children and temper is more frayed and incredibly frustrated by this.
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