Blog 2 – Dutch Fork High School – Evelyn Newman – Curate – November 14th

By Joseph Brown

This blog post is the second 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 second interview is with Ms. Evelyn Newman who runs the media center at Dutch Fork High School in Irmo, South Carolina. The interview took place on November 14th, 2019 and focuses on the Curate Shared Foundation.

The Curate foundation is about making “meaning for oneself and others by collecting, organizing, and sharing resources of personal relevance” (AASL, 2017).

From a librarian’s perspective this includes challenging “learners to act on an information need”, promoting “information gathering appropriate to the task”, guiding the “information resource exchange within and beyond the school learning community”, and showing “learners how to select and organize information for a variety of audiences” (AASL, 2017).

Ms. Newman implements the competences in the Curate Shared Foundation in a number of ways. Some of those ways include providing and teaching students how to use graphic organizers, slide templates, NoodleTools, Google Drive folders, and outlines. She notes that writing outlines is not taught enough in school anymore. Note taking skills and searching skills may need to be taught too for students to be able to find and organize the information they need.

She also teaches necessary concepts needed in order to be able to ethically collect, organize, and share resources such as teaching copyright laws, fair use, and citation skills. She also provides teachers with this information and encourages them to model it in their presentations and examples. She teaches the CARP method for evaluating resources so students will know how to choose sources for their collections. Teaching presentation processes and skills also can be a part of this foundation.

Part of her job in implementing the Curate foundation is making sure that students have the resources available to create well balanced collections. To do this she ensures that there are resources of all formats, reading levels, and diverse viewpoints. She makes a point to make sure diverse perspectives are represented on various topics so students can form a balanced view of a topic. She also makes sure that students know of varying levels of information available through Discus such as using Culture Grams versus Britannica. 

One of the primary ways she implements these competencies is to collaborate with teachers and include teaching these concepts and providing these resources to students in the context of an assignment. This may include showing students Discus, the library catalog, useful video resources, and teaching website evaluation skills as a part of a research assignment in one of their classes.

The aspects of the Shared Foundations taught may vary depending on what the teacher has in mind for a lesson. When teaching a collaborative lesson, the librarian must know what the teacher wants from their students; this is things like how many sources they need and what kind of sources do they need. An example may be an ELA teacher may require their students to have two scholarly sources and a print source. In this case, the librarian would need to teach the students to navigate Discus and the library catalog. 

The media center at Dutch Fork High School uses multiple resources that help with implementing the Curate Shared Foundation: Discus, books, videos, the internet, graphic organizers, Google Classroom, Google Suites, Google for Education, NoodleTools, computers in lab, and Chromebooks, which every student has as the school is one to one with them. NoodleTools is a citation manager that the school pays a subscription for its student to access the premium version. It is extremely useful for students regarding the Curate foundation.

The number one challenge in her library for implementing the Curate Shared Foundation or any of the other ones is time. Classroom management and misbehaving classes may also hamper lessons. It is easy to apply the concepts to ELA but it is more challenging to apply them all across the curriculum. She noted that the standards are more of a goal to aim towards but it is unrealistic to have time to reach each one every time. 

One of the things that stuck out during this interview is that all of the standards are interconnected. Many of the things mentioned in this interview also were mentioned in the Engage interview and could easily apply to the other foundations in some way as well. The Curate foundation in particular is central to what a school media specialist does on a basic surface level as it is all about helping students learn to find, organize, and then use information.

References

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