Doug Johnson

 The Other Shoe Redux

Head for the Edge, Library Media Connection, November 2008

… we as a profession have a history of dropping the ball when it comes to making new technologies our own… In how many schools is the librarian not seen as a computer expert, even though we all know that a tremendous amount of information is available to patrons in electronic format? In how many schools are word processing, database and spreadsheet use, and computer-assisted drawing no part of the media skills curriculum, even though two-thirds of our mission is teaching students to process and communicate information? – “Sound of the Other Shoe Dropping “Head for the Edge, March 1995

If we take an honest look at what we as librarians have done since technology has come into our buildings, as painful as it is to say, we have dropped the ball – big time. Why?

1. Sexism.
Ok, let’s just start out with the one reason that will get me in the most trouble. Our profession is comprised of about 90% women. Brilliant, dedicated, hardworking women, but women subject to the same sexism that pervades society as a whole. Ideas coming from the field of librarianship are not given attention and seriousness because the majority of its practitioners are women. Guys rule school administration, and as technology came into schools, its implementation was turned over to the guy math teacher, not the female librarian. In our district, 12 out of 17 of our principals are male; 11 out of 12 of our librarians are female. Who gets heard?

Our own profession has a gender-bias. When AASL closed its 2005 conference with “a panel of leading figures in the school library media field,” all five were men. What has the male/female ratio of keynote speakers at your library and tech conferences looked like over the last decade?

Is the subtext in education, been “don’t you librarians worry your pretty little heads about technology -just leave it to us manly men?” Well, girls?

2. Schizophrenia
The school library field divides itself pretty cleanly and clearly between the children’s/young adult lit people and the research skills/technology people. And to a large extent, the lit people are in control.

The Nov/Dec 2007 issue of AASL’s Knowledge Quest is a telling example. I was very excited to learn that the theme was “Intellectual Freedom 101.” But I was very disappointed in reading it to find that the majority of the issue was devoted to book challenges – not Internet censorship and filtering problems. What does this say about the librarian’s role in technology integration when we still seem to be more concerned about a few cranks wanting to strike a couple fiction books from our shelves than we are about an entire generation of children losing access to a broad range of online information sources and tools? The teachers I talk to don’t worry about kids getting access to Harry Potter, but to Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs and wikis.

Until our profession sees its primary instructional focus as teaching information and technology literacy skills, we will lack both credibility and voice in technology implementation efforts.

3. Strategy
If librarians had a coat of arms, collaboration would have to be one of the biggest symbols on it. Our profession has books, articles, standards, workshops, and probably t-shirts and coffee mugs all devoted to collaboration with teachers in designing and implementing good information literacy and technology experiences into the curriculum.

But the emphasis has always been one-to-one, never the kind of systematic, whole-school collaborative approach that Technology Learning Coordinators Justin Medved and Dennis Harter from the International School of Bangkok describe as their school-based approach to technology integration:

We had to create a shared understanding of what 21st century learning is and why it’s important. We had to allow them [teaching staff] to help frame the context in which this could work at ISB.

Do we need to ask ourselves if the library field has put the cart before the horse, working with individual teachers before there is a school-wide understanding of information and technology literacy in place? Should we have been “collaborating” with our curriculum committees, our leadership teams, assessment coordinators and our staff development committees instead - and first? Without whole school buy-in, we may have amazing successes with the few individual teachers, but not impact the entire learning community. Is it too late for us to re-strategize?

Every criticism I’ve made can be applied to my own district and its library/technology program. But if librarianship as a profession is to survive and thrive, we need to have some hard conversations about who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

I will end this column with the same words I ended the March 1995 column:

… if a critical mass of librarians don’t become the on-line information specialists…, the next sound we hear won’t be that of a ball being dropped, but the sound of the other shoe.