Check out your school library
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 128 , 21 July 2023, page no.22
The school library you may have visited as a child might have been a quiet space at lunch time, occasionally visited by students, filled with books and little else. School libraries today should be busy, vibrant places where all students feel welcomed and inspired and where they can engage in various activities.
School libraries are uniquely positioned to support the specific needs and interests of children and teenagers. Furthermore, they differ from public libraries in that they support students’ learning across the curriculum.
They provide a refuge for the student with anxiety, a diverse collection for the avid reader, a makerspace for the student who loves STEM, a hangout for the student interested in Dungeons and Dragons and a friendly face for the teacher needing resources for a new unit. School libraries should continually adapt to meet the needs and interests of their school communities, but they can only do so if properly resourced in terms of staff.
Qualified teacher-librarians play an essential role in ensuring that school libraries live up to their potential. With their curriculum knowledge and teaching expertise, teacher-librarians can curate relevant, differentiated resource collections aligned to the curriculum, provide lessons on information and digital literacies, and support students’ reading habits, among many other things.
In Week 7 of Term 3, school libraries will be celebrating Book Week, an important event in the school calendar that promotes reading for pleasure, which is essential for the social, emotional, and academic development of students. Australian School Library Day takes place during Book Week on Wednesday 23 August and highlights the wonderful work school library staff, including teacher-librarians, do for their communities.
These events are a great opportunity to visit your school library and check out the wonderful things happening there. If your school is fortunate enough to have a qualified teacher-librarian or a dedicated library teacher managing your library, talk to them about what they can do for you and how they can assist you and your students.
And if your school library is not all that it could be, perhaps it’s time to start a discussion with your colleagues about how this could change to better support both students and teachers.