Pre-service teachers often lack opportunity or encouragement to build professional partnerships with teacher librarians during their teacher training. While pre-service teachers may visit the school library during their placement, this may not provide an adequate opportunity for teacher librarians to effectively highlight the services and resources that are available. Teacher librarians and principals have collaborated with Southern Cross University Library to produce a series of video clips showcasing the value of school libraries, and what teacher librarians can offer their colleagues.
HMCS Max Bernays Pre-Deployment Brief (May 2024).pptx
What your teacher librarian can do for you
1. What your Teacher Librarian can do for you Margie Wallin Liaison Librarian Education Southern Cross University Jann Small Liaison Librarian Health and Human Sciences Southern Cross University
2. Regional university on the east coast of Australia established in 1994 3 campuses at Lismore, Coffs Harbour and the Gold Coast 16,500 students, including 7,000+ distance education and offshore students Over 200 courses at undergraduate, masters and doctorate level
10. Found some “volunteers” Local libraries as filming venues Created a list of ‘leading questions’ which would allow us to showcase key issues Funding The nuts and bolts…
15. We planned for 2 film shoots, at 2 locations separate primary/secondary clips $$$ 6 clips We did 5 film shoots, at 4 locations ‘blended’ clips $$$$$ 11 clips The need to be flexible …
16. Supportive principals “the TL is a cooperative learning partner with the classroom teacher” “the library is an extension of the classroom” “the TL is a curriculum leader & an information specialist”
19. Segments on this clip include: - words of advice - get a library card - recommended resources Don’t forget the public libraries
20. It’s important to have a laugh Some words of advice For all those fans of wikipedia
21. SCU Library – libguide for students going on placement / practicumhttp://libguides.scu.edu.au/practicum YouTube http://www.youtube.com/libraryresources TeacherTube http://www1.teachertube.com/viewProfile.php?user=Sculibresources Where are the clips now?
26. “MANY thanks for sending these videos. They're excellent, much needed resources; We have noticed a lack of promotion of school and public libs in our BEd course. We'll pass them on to the BEd coordinator. We'll certainly share them with our MEd(Teacher-Librarianship) students.” Dr Hilary HughesSenior Lecturer. Coordinator/Lecturer - Master of Education (Teacher-Librarianship); Master of Education (Information-Learning Connections). “These clips are fantastic.. I will place some links onto my Education Study Desk for students to access across all courses; I’ll certainly be highlighting them during classes as well, as both information and motivational resources. Initially I thought we might want to do a similar series.. but I can’t see how we could possibly improve on what you’ve already achieved... they are indeed generic and relevant across the board. Congrats to everyone involved on producing a valuable series - an educational and promotional tool .” Ron Pauley Faculty Librarian for Education Library Services | Global Learning Division
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28. Louise Cleary (Teacher Librarian), Coffs Harbour Senior College Megan Hart (Teacher Librarian), Woolgoolga High School Lyn Howlin (Teacher Librarian), Coffs Harbour Public School Annie Madden (Teacher Librarian), St Augustine's Primary School, Coffs Harbour Dr Jake Madden (Principal), St Augustine's Primary School, Coffs Harbour Tanya Molloy (Teacher Librarian), Woolgoolga Public School Julie Morgan (Teacher Librarian), Tyalla Public School Audrey Nay (Teacher Librarian), Sandy Beach Public School Tony Watts (Principal), Mary Help of Christians Primary School, Sawtell Mary Welsh (Deputy Principal & Teacher Librarian), Mary Help of Christians Primary School, Sawtell Judy Atkinson (Children & Youth Coordinator), Coffs Harbour City Council Library Carolyn Elmes (Team Leader, Information & Outreach), Coffs Harbour City Council Library Independent Productions http://independentproductions.com.au/ SCU School of Education staff and students Special thanks to
Notas do Editor
Good afternoon – thank you for the opportunity to share our video production project to showcase what a teacher librarian can do for student teachers on placement.
Just a little bit of background.Southern Cross University is a regional university originally situated at # Lismore, in far northern NSW. # It now also has campuses at Coffs Harbour, Tweed Heads and the southern Gold Coast. # We have some 16,500 students # and offer over 200 different degrees
Margie & I ‘live’ at Coffs Harbour –
a lovely campus with lots of space.
SCU offers a range of degrees in the field of Education, from Early Childhood to Secondary to Masters – just over 1000 students across all programs.
At SCU, the Education liaison librarian and academics have been trying to think of ways to encourage our students to visit and use school libraries, while they’re on placement.
In the lead-up to their practicums, local TLs would occasionally be able to come and talk to the students during lectures or tuts, but the logistics of coordinating schedules was a nightmare. Doing this across 3 campuses proved just impractical.
At the local teacher librarian network meetings, TLs were alsocommenting on how they rarely got to see our student teachers while they were in the school on placements. How many of you have students on placement at your school? [just a show of hands]Have any of you had more than a token visit from those students? [another show of hands]….Maybe you can share your stories with us later – we’d be interested in how that happened!
So, at one of the network meetings, the group discussed ways of solving this problem. They came up with the idea of a virtual option. The initial idea was for a series of short video clips,using an interview style with some of our local ’real life’ teacher librarians talking about ‘real life’ situations and opportunities. Two other issues came to light during our discussions – one was the importance of the support of school principals in library ventures.The other was the invaluable services that local libraries could provide for students on placement. So we decided to include input from both these groups.
Now, how did the team go about this? Surprisingly, eight teacher librarians agreed to star in the clips, along with two of their school principals… and four were happy for their libraries to feature in the clips.We decided to create a list of ‘leading questions’ – questions that would enable our interviewees to talk about all the things they ever wanted to share with pre-service teachers & never had the chance! The participating teacher librarians chose the questions they’d like to answer and all had input into how their own filming session was structured. Originally, the plan was for the project team to do the scripting, filming, editing – well, everything really! But we were spared some of that as funding became available and…
the team was able to engage the services of a professional video production team. There was relief all round and then…
it was ‘lights, camera, action’! We had all the gear – fluffy microphones, cheat sheets…
Each venue was different of course - we needed to deal with lighting and external noise issues … in some clips you can hear playground noises / lorikeets … in others the air-conditioner provides a background hum.
Whilst we thought that wine & chocolate would be great incentives, our participants had to be happy with lots of TLC, water, the ability to do multiple takes, and the promise that the bloopers would never be made public.
Things didn’t go quite according to plan – what a surprise! We ended up with more participants than we’d originally thought – which was great. Some participants had more to say than others – again which was fine! And we ended up filming at more libraries than anticipated – as this suited the participants. This too was great, but it did impact on the final cost. We also produced a list of hints & tips for anyone doing similar projects.
We thought we’d play some short excerpts from the clips to give you an idea of we produced. We’ll start with some comments from two of our local principals. It was a highlight of the project to have input from principals who are so supportive of the role of TLs in schools. Our apologies in advance for the expressions – it was a challenge to extract the relevant sections of the clips.
Despite volunteering, none of our TLs wanted to be filmed independently – suddenly, they were all too shy! This is our first group – 4 primary TLs who wanted to work together. They allocated specific ‘questions’ amongst themselves and discussed how they wanted their clip to be filmed. This group features two of our local secondary TLs, Megan and Louise who teamed up at one film shoot, And, as you saw earlier, we had two sessions at other primary schools where the principal was involved – they worked as a team with the TL. Lastly we have our City Council librarians.
Let’s start with Lyn…..Tanya….Annie….Julie
We wanted to include some content from our city council library colleagues, so we had two staff from the local council library work together to address specific questions. This is important as student teachers on placement will often need to access such local resources and we really wanted to make our students aware of this. A few words from Carolyn and Judy…
There was much laughter during the project, & especially during the filming… we thought we’d share this snippet from Megan and Louise.And the last word goes to Megan on Wikipedia! This came at the end of the clip dealing with ‘information literacy’ and entertained the film crew as well.
Originally, the clips were designed just for our SCU students and staff – they were incorporated into unit guides for students heading out on their placements. However, it soon became obvious that the clips had wider appeal so we uploaded them to YouTube and TeacherTube, and circulated the links to people we thought would find them useful.
This is the libguide Margie has put together specifically for our students on placement. Links to the clips are embedded in unit materials, for both the primary and secondary ‘placement’ units. Rather than trying to get a local teacher librarian to attend some of the lectures and/or tutorials, lecturers have played a number of clips in class time. One of the most viewed clips is the one where Lyn refers to the fact that teacher librarians are able to provide a DET username/password for student teachers to use while on placement. This is a really really big thing for our students because they are unable to access DET intranet resources in any other way – they aren’t given access as uni students.
Our clips have also been noted in a couple of blogs – great publicity for us!
You may also be familiar with James Herring, a lecturer in teacher librarianship at Charles Sturt University. He’s made some positive comments about our clips.
Some of our clips are now linked from this new website, which is aimed at principals and teacher educators as well as pre-service and in-service teachers. The site focuses on ways to improve teaching and learning by connecting with TLs – something I’m sure is important to all of us.
And some comments from a couple of staff at other universities.We’re delighted that the clips are also being used by other unis, with their own student teachers.
Schools are definitely the place to start making a difference so we hope that these resources will encourage our student teachers to take full advantage of the wonderful teacher librarians out there and the resources that school libraries provide to our younger students. Hopefully, then, this stays with them later in life & they’ll continue to see the value in libraries and librarians whether it’s at university or the local public library.
We’d like to acknowledge all the people involved in the project & thank them for their time, enthusiasm & energy.
Thanks for the opportunity to tell you about our project. We’re happy to answer any questions.
