Blog 1 – Dutch Fork Middle School – Lisa Wilkins – Engage – November 13th

By Joseph Brown

This blog post is the first of four posts that interview a school librarian about how the AASL National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries (AASL, 2017) realistically look in their media centers, with each interview focusing on a specific Shared Foundation.

Shared Foundations (AASL, 2017)

This first interview is with Ms. Lisa Wilkins who runs the media center at Dutch Fork Middle School in Irmo, South Carolina. The interview took place on November 13^th, 2019 and focuses on the Engage Shared Foundation. 

The Engage foundation is about demonstrating “safe, legal, and ethical creating and sharing of knowledge products independently while engaging in a community of practice and an interconnected world” (AASL, 2017).

From a librarians perspective this includes “promoting ethical and legal guidelines for gathering and using information”; “acting as a resource for using valid information and reasoned conclusions to make ethical decisions in the creation of knowledge”; “promoting the responsible, ethical, and legal sharing of new information with a global community”; and “supporting learners engagement with information to extend personal learning” (AASL, 2017).

Ms. Wilkins incorporates these competencies and ideals into her library program in multiple ways. Every month, she and the schools Digital Integration Specialist jointly cover a digital citizenship aspect with classes. For example, this past November’s topic was cyber bullying. She often has joint research lessons with teachers; in these, she always includes ethics and legal aspects, as well as where to find information for citing on a website. She often teaches citations and encourages the use and double-checking of citation managers like EasyBib. 

She also leads by example and encourages teachers to lead by example as well by making a point to include these things in her own presentations, themed bulletin boards, and reports. She provides teachers with copyright resources at the beginning of the year and reminds teachers of this when necessary. She also makes an effort to reach out to teachers, particularly English Language Arts (ELA) teachers, to help with research projects and assignments that include ethical issues or copyright.

The Engage competency is supported in the media center by a variety of resources including her makerspace, Discus, online video resources, books, and people resources, including herself as the librarian. The makerspace supports learner’s engagement with materials that lets them create and share their projects in an ethical way. Discus is a great way for students to learn about quality resources as well as getting in the habit of citing sources since Discus makes it easy to cite by providing the citation. Short online videos are a great way to teach middle grade aged students about Creative Commons, the importance of citation, and other digital citizenship skills due to the visuals and multisensory factors. Students at Dutch Fork Middle are also one to one with Chromebooks so every student has computer access. 

Often times she will infuse her collaborations with teachers with the Engage competences. While the majority of the time, she will collaborate with ELA teachers, she will collaborate with any teacher that is willing, which has included everything from the Spanish teacher to the band director. Regardless of who she collaborates with, if the project is a research project, she is sure to include ethical research practices as a part of her lessons. A common example is to include a lesson on using Discus, pulling the citations from it, and explaining the differences of Google, Wikipedia, and Discus through the context of a research assignment. 

Her number one constraint in implementing the Engage competency, along with the rest of the Shared Foundations, is time. She noted that when teaching concepts, she often has to “go wide, not deep”, meaning that since she does not have time to cover everything in-depth, she wants to at least make sure students are introduced to each concept. Realistically her choice is between teaching one thing very well and just touching a little on everything, so she determined that it would be better to introduce everything rather than focus on just one thing. She said she “you only have time to do what is required, but not what you need.” 

Other challenges include that it takes time to convince teacher buy-in, students and even teachers may be quick to just give up on using proper methods for convenience, and students and sometimes even teachers do not see any harm in using things like a Google picture without citing it. Another challenge is finding a way to get the point across to students in a way that they relate to; in the past she has used music copyright lawsuits as examples.

One of the things that stuck out to me while we were reviewing the Engage Shared Foundation at the beginning of the interview is that the Engage competences focus more on ethics than actually engaging with content. Ms. Wilkins actually commented that she did not think the competences lined up with the name Engage as they focus more on the ethics and legality of using information. In a way, they are more about building the skills and capabilities to be able to engage rather than actually to engage with knowledge products. However, this said, if you do not have the skills already in place, engaging with knowledge products and information will probably be difficult. 

References

American Association of School Librarians. (2017). National school library standards for learners, school librarians, and school libraries. Chicago: American Library Association.