Blog 4 – Irmo High School – Judith Head – Include – November 20th

By Joseph Brown

This blog post is the fourth 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 last interview is with Ms. Judith Head who runs the media center at Irmo High School in Irmo, South Carolina. The interview took place on November 20th, 2019 and focuses on the Include Shared Foundation.

The Include Shared Foundation is about demonstrating “an understanding of and commitment to inclusiveness and respect for diversity in the learning community” (AASL, 2017).

From a librarian’s perspective this includes directing “learners to contribute a balanced perspective when participating in a learning community”, establishing “opportunities for learners to adjust their awareness of the global learning community”, facilitating “experiences in which learners exhibit empathy and tolerance for diverse ideas”, and leading “learners to demonstrate empathy and equity in knowledge building within the global learning community” (AASL, 2017).

Ms. Head implements the Include foundation in the Irmo High School library in multiple ways. The first way is keeping it in mind during collection development. To create an inclusive environment, the library needs to have diverse resources. This includes having diverse reading options, making sure every group in the school community is represented, and having materials that support all kinds of subjects, beliefs, and values. This also includes making sure students with handicaps and special needs have materials available for them and relatable to them.

One major way to implement the competencies in the Include foundations is to make sure that students have relatable literature to read and relate to. This requires having a diverse young adult literature section that proportionally matching the school’s community. This means that if you have a large number of minorities, then it is imperative that the library has a collection to match. It is also important to provide choice in reading and provide what the students want and not necessarily what we think they want. This also means that even if the school’s population is not diverse, the collections should still include significant diversity. 

In teaching lessons, this may be adapting a normal lesson with differentiation to adjust it to be accessible to a student with special needs. It may be having books available for students that are on a third to fifth grade reading level, while still making sure the content is relatable to them. The library hosts a Teen Read Week every year that emphasizes diversity and attempts helping students to find a book that they are interested in, which often times means finding one they relate to. Another thing the library does is a book pass, where students will come in for a class, and each student will read a book for five minutes and then pass it to the next student, read the next book for five minutes, and so on until the class is over. It is important that the library feels like a comfortable place for everyone and having books that serve as mirrors for these students is one way of helping create that environment.

Resources in the library that help implantation of the Include foundation are collection development resources like School Library Journal and AASC book lists, databases and Discus, and technology resources like Google sites and slides. Research into the different communities helps and just asking what people want helps. Irmo High School is a one to one school with Chromebooks so each student can use their Chromebook to find resources on the catalog. 

Implementing the Include foundation in collaboration with teachers requires understanding what the teacher’s goals are and how Include competencies can be appropriately integrated into lesson. Like any collaboration, the key is to make yourself available and to build the teachers trust so that they will be open to the librarians help and insertion of different viewpoints.

One of the major challenges in this library is that not every teacher wants to collaborate and since that is one way to implement the Include foundation, it is also a challenge for implementing it and the other Shared Foundations. Another challenge is that while the library has a role in setting the foundation for skills and practices like the Include competencies, the librarian has no role in the final product or grading process, which makes it difficult to assess how well the lesson went

One of the things that stuck out during this interview is that these standards apply to all parts of what the library does. This foundation of Include applied to collection development as well as teaching and student interactions like readers advisory. Ms. Head noted that all of the standards overlap with each other and they apply to most things that a librarian does daily, but they put them into a more complicated, academic phrasing.

The competencies that are a part of the Include foundation are an important part of our role as a librarian that are increasing in importance as diversity continues to warrant the attention it should have had from the start. During our talk, we mentioned how great it is that there has been an increase in books that feature minorities or people with disabilities but the numbers are still not anywhere near where they need to be. If we, as librarians can successfully impart the competences and ideas that are at the root of the Include foundation, we may be able to get those numbers up to where they should be, and who knows, we may even be able to make the world a better place, even just a little.

References

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