A New Vision for Teacher-Librarians in the 1980s
 |
| Ontario library class, 1980s |
To further the standing of T-Ls in the field of education, the Canadian School Library Association (CSLA) issued a statement, "The Qualifications for School Librarians," in 1979. By this standard, a qualified T-L must possess dual professional qualifications: a valid teacher certification in a province or territory, as well as expertise in librarianship through a specialized diploma or degree. CSLA also released a second publication, "A Recommended Curriculum for Education for School Librarianship," in 1981. In this statement the CSLA adopted an ambitious plan to advance the role of T-L s by proposing nine areas of competence: (1) administration; (2) selection of learning resources; (3) acquisition, organization, and circulation of resources; (4) guidance; (5) design and production of resources; (6) information services; (7) promotion; (8) cooperative planning and teaching; and (9) professionalism and leadership.
Although clear statements on qualifications and improved training were necessary forward steps, there were barriers for teachers to confront. Many were reluctant to enroll in full-length professional library degree programs at faculties of library science that offered few courses on school libraries and had residency requirements. The faculties of education offered some courses in school librarianship, and the ministries of education encouraged teachers to pursue additional qualifications; however, there were many other attractive options available to teachers, such as special education. Because education authorities did not require school libraries to be staffed by qualified teacher-librarians, there was less incentive to enroll in library courses.
The Stanley House Seminar on Education for School Librarianship (1982)
In the following year, 1982, a small group of Canadian library educators gathered at Stanley House on the Gaspé Bay Peninsula for a week-long session to review the current state of school librarianship and to recommend specific actions to further the education of school librarianship. The CSLA and provincial leaders across the country believed the national statements and a shared vision of partnership across provincial and territorial education authorities would succeed because they emphasized collaborative planning, teamwork, and collective responsibility for student learning. This collegial philosophy placed greater emphasis on the T-L's work as a cooperative planner and joint implementer of the curriculum with teachers. The planning concept proposed integrating the development of library skills into jointly planned and implemented classroom teaching. The direction and focus of this strategy were increasingly centred on helping students 'learn how to learn' and on advancing the role of the T-L within the school planning framework. Now, the school library resource centre was to be a more dynamic hub offering a flexible schedule for teaching information skills as part of classroom activities.
 |
| Partners in Action, 1982. |
The Stanley House seminar was a major step in the planning for the education of school librarians. The conference presented 43 recommendations to CSLA to implement the Qualifications Statement and its Recommended Curriculum. However, this alternative 'model' was developed during two severe economic recessions: the first from 1980 to 1982 and the second from 1990 to 1991. Most notably, governments at all levels across North America began to adopt 'neoliberal' economic policies. Generally, neoliberalism stands for free-market capitalism and government policies that dictate deregulation, privatization, and reduced public expenditures to promote economic growth and individual freedom.
The tenets of neoliberalism shift the purpose of education as a public good towards transactional terms of investment by taxpayers. What students should be taught is relative to their individual prospects for future earnings. Schools, traditionally mandated at the provincial level and governed locally by elected boards, increasingly came under the scrutiny of neoliberal values of efficiency and economy. In 1980 public funding for elementary and secondary schools had reached just over $14 billion; in 2001 it was almost $38 billion. However, adjusted for annual inflation, in constant dollars the increase was just 3 percent over twenty years.
During this time, elementary and secondary education underwent fluctuating innovations and restructuring. Governments in different jurisdictions consolidated smaller/rural schools, and many new priorities, such as French immersion classes, computer training, and standardized testing, emerged. Enrolment in 1970 was 5.8 million, in 1985 it declined to 4.9 million, and in 2000 it rose to 5.4 million. In 1970 there were 262,000 full-time teachers; in 2000 there were about 298,000 working full and part-time. In 1970 there were approximately 15,000 schools; in 2000 there were 16,000. After the federal government began to slash transfers to provinces for health, education, and social services in the mid-1990s, educators were forced to make hard choices about their programs and the future of student learning.
Several provinces and regional districts did provide general policy statements or guidelines, such as Partners in Action (1982) in Ontario, as well as consultative assistance at the provincial level. But, gradually, the number of professionals at the provincial or district level with supervisory responsibility for school librarianship declined, and so did the influence of these policy statements. Increasingly, in teacher librarianship, there was a disconnect between educational policy and school practice. Reliance on quantitative standards for school libraries was often ignored because decision-makers reacted negatively to such guidelines, including those in the aging Resource Services for Canadian Schools (1977).
Continual downsizing, cutbacks, and the merger of boards into larger geographic entities were all examples of the institutional erosion of support. In 2000, there were just more than 500 Canadian school districts, and New Brunswick had eliminated school boards entirely. At the national level, there was no general agreement among principals, teachers, T-Ls, and librarians on the role of the library and the T-L in resource-based programs. This was a fundamental problem which required a change in the school authorities' attitudes about the benefits of school libraries. Consequently, the professional standing of T-Ls did not receive widespread recognition in the curriculum, and the T-L's active presence in the school curriculum was not typically considered a significant factor in the development of educational programs.
Too often, the library component of joint planning was subordinate to the provincially mandated policies governing student classroom learning and standardized testing. T-Ls were reassigned to teaching, reduced to half-time, allocated to more than one school, or eliminated. Library technicians, non-professionals, and volunteers who substituted for T-Ls or media specialists were generally not trained in evaluating materials for appropriate-age school collections. By the 1990s, Canadian publishers were noticing a reduction in the volume of school library sales and interest in Canadian authors.
School library funding eroded as governments prioritized economic restraint, and educators implemented various new educational programs or fostered the adoption of emerging technologies. With the rapid growth of the Internet, educators were faced with an entirely new way to teach information skills. A national project, SchoolNet, was launched in 1993 to link schools and libraries via the Internet and to develop Canadian educational resources. It was particularly prominent from 1995 to the early 2000s and promoted a new way to introduce students to self-learning. The T-L's place in this context was heightened as the term 'information centre' or 'information commons' began to be applied to some school libraries.
Forging Forward (1997) and The National Summit on School Libraries (2003)
As the declining fortunes of school library funding and staffing became more apparent in the late 1990s in affluent provinces such as Alberta and Ontario, library associations and leading spokespersons began to sound a warning and reevaluate current conditions. In November 1997, at Ottawa, CSLA and the Association for Teacher-Librarianship in Canada organized a summit, Forging Forward: The National Symposium on Information, Literacy and the School Library in Canada, to discuss the role of computers, the impact of the 'information highway,' and serious threats to funding. Delegates expressed the idea that T-Ls were 'knowledge navigators' in an information rich environment who could relate the objectives of the school and classroom curriculum to the school's learning resources. The three-day symposium set many objectives and goals, most importantly, that the school library belongs to everyone because it is an integral part of school quality and a fundamental right of Canadian children. Important principles were reaffirmed:
* every child should have the opportunity to engage with the best learning material available.
* every child should leave the school equipped with skills and literacy capabilities leading to a continuous learning process.
* every child should be able to use the computer to find needed information and to realize that the school is only one part of a global learning environment.
Participants felt the 1997 Summit was a success in identifying new directions, and the conference received favourable media attention. Nevertheless, the thorny issue of halting cutback management at all levels persisted. Unfortunately, reliable statistical data was not immediately available because Statistics Canada (SC) had long ceased its annual surveys in favour of occasional data collection. During the late 1990s, administrators also had to deal with annual inflation rates of about 1 to 2.5 percent. There were concerns from coast to coast about the state of school libraries, and the newly appointed National Librarian, Roch Carrier, also became alarmed. In June 2003, a School Library Summit was held in Ottawa in conjunction with the International Forum on Canadian Children's Literature.
The Summit opened with the National Librarian welcoming participants and announcing that a Canadian National School Library Day would be held each October. Important speeches and the release of detailed reports on the state of school libraries and T-Ls highlighted the conference. The newly formed Canadian Coalition for School Libraries had sponsored a major study by Ken Haycock, The Crisis in Canada's School Libraries, which analyzed recent data from across the country. The Haycock report painted a gloomy picture: for example, in Alberta in 1978, there were 550 T-Ls working half-time or more; by 1998, this number had declined to 252, and by 2000, to 106.
Across the country, teacher-librarians are losing their jobs or being reassigned. Collections are becoming depleted owing to budget cuts. Some principals believe that in the age of the Internet and the classroom workstation, the school library is an artifact. In a growing number of Canadian schools, in fact, the libraries are shuttered all or part of the time, with well-meaning parents scrambling to fill the void. Through neglect, too many school libraries are now little more than storage rooms.
One of the major findings in Crisis was that current research showed student achievement improved when the library operated with adequate hours and was staffed by a qualified librarian. Thirteen recommendations were put forward, most directed to Ministries of Education in order to provide useful data, provincial direction for clear roles and program definitions, and improved staffing qualifications
Another speaker, Marla Waltman-Daschko of Statistics Canada, spoke about the results of data collected by the Canadian Centre for Education Statistics, Elementary and Secondary Schools: The Role, Challenges and Financial Conditions of School and School Library Resources in Canada, which confirmed the decline in library funding in current dollars relative to late 1990s trends.
* overall public spending by provincial and municipal governments on school libraries decreased by .4%, dropping from $535.3 million to $532.9 million between 1993-1994 and 1998-1999;
* provincial government spending on school libraries decreased from $261.8 million in 1993 to $260.1 million in 1998, a drop of -.6%;
* overall per student school library spending decreased by -5.3% between 1993-1994 ($102.74) and 1998-1999 ($97.26). School library spending per student varied widely by province.
To conclude the summit, Dianne Oberg and Ray Doiron, two prominent school library educators, explained the new national standards for Canadian school libraries issued in a joint publication, Achieving Information Literacy, which had been released earlier in June at the combined American Library Association/Canadian Library Association conference in Toronto. This reworking of standards went into detail about staffing school libraries, collections, facilities, information and communication technologies, and collaborative teamwork to implement successful literacy programs in schools. But it recognized, in a wistful way, that the vision it presented entertained exceptionally hard work ahead to reach 15,000 schools.
If each school library were to have a teacher-librarian who taught children and youth the skills necessary to be effective users of information in all its forms, a powerful mechanism would be in place for enabling Canadian children and youth to be literate citizens, lifelong learners, and contributing adults in a learning society.
The Summit caught the attention of many newspapers across the country. On June 27th, the National Post reported that a proven "literacy tool" was being eroded. A Regina Leader-Post editorial on June 28th surmised that governments should recognize that "School Libraries Play a Key Role" in improving student literacy rates. In a July 6th article in the Toronto Star about the worrisome decline in school libraries, Graham Fraser wrote, "computers can't replace books" and "books and libraries are invaluable for young people."
Two years later in 2005, another Statistics Canada survey, Canadian School Libraries and Teacher-Librarians, provided additional information on the status of school libraries at a time when public elementary and secondary student enrolment had dipped to 4,979,112. The findings provided detailed information.
* the vast majority of schools (14,451) had libraries, 93.3%, but the median expenditure on resources was only $2,000. In total, schools with libraries spent $56.2 million on collection development in 2003/04. Most schools spent little or no money on electronic materials.
* few schools in Canada had a full-time T-L on staff: on average, each school had 0.25 full-time T-L.
* staffing included 3,424 T-Ls, 433 professional librarians, 3,476 library technicians, 679 teachers who were not librarians, 2,060 clerical staff, and 712 'others' (i.e., volunteers, assistants). Total staff: 10,784.
* the provinces with some of the lowest average numbers of T-Ls per school had the highest number of library technicians: Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba. The levels of T-L, library technicians, and total staff in secondary schools were roughly twice those in elementary schools.
* schools with at least one T-L devoted to the school library were roughly three times more likely than those with less than one full-time T-L to have links to the library on the school's informal website.
* since 1998, education funding had increased approximately 2% but library funding had decreased 4%.
Millennium Re-evaluations
Achieving Information Literacy established a new set of standards at a time when Canadian school administrators lacked the resources to implement them in terms of staffing and technology. Teachers and school librarians were still tasked with being teaching partners in implementing units of study in the classroom. The idea of the library as an 'information centre' was persuasive but perhaps too all-encompassing, especially in smaller schools. Although the aim of the school library program to help students become informed decision-makers and lifelong learners was laudable, there were disparities in access to qualified staff, adequate collections, and computers. The emphasis was often on developing competency using computer hardware to locate information. Further, the long-standing services of T-L guidance in student reading, listening, and viewing continued to be valued and perhaps contributed to the lack of a clear implementation strategy inherent in the new standards. The commons approach encouraged students to collaborate, be creative, and work as a team.
Despite the recency of the 2003 standards, they came at a time when the role of an information centre was beginning to give way after 2005 to the idea of the library as a 'learning commons' that could harness library resources to foster collaboration, creation, and learning engagement rather than access to information. The concept of 'Library 2.0', whereby patrons could use social media to create content and shape services, and the rise of the 'Google Generation', who grew up with search engines, quickly changed the thinking of library educators and practitioners. Educators began to call for the transformation of the school library and computer lab into a virtual and physical learning commons. In 2010, the Ontario School Library Association outlined new principles in Together for Learning: this study wholeheartedly adopted the learning commons concept, in which teacher-librarians and other learning partners cultivated student reading engagement, multiple literacies, critical thinking, creativity, and guided inquiry so that students could learn how to learn.
Shortly after 2010, the Canadian Association of School Libraries (CASL) began to work on revised standards for the learning commons. Achieving Information Literacy was still a valued resource because it had solidified two decades of efforts to establish the T-L as a highly skilled teacher, able to function on the school team as a professional with competencies from teacher education, classroom experience, and school librarianship and media services. Now, attention returned to the library's role, in which the combined activity of students, teachers, and T-Ls could stimulate learning in a multitude of ways.
However, at the federal and provincial levels, politicians and economists continued to rely on the neoliberal catchwords of reducing government spending, lowering taxes, and relying on private sector investment and growth to drive the economy. Although neoliberal policies were shaken by the financial crisis of 2008, national funding of elementary and secondary education increased by almost a quarter from 2010 to 2020, slightly outpacing inflation. Yet, by fall 2020, school library and T-L conditions had worsened to the point that a new group of Canadian educators, library workers, writers, children's book publishers, and library advocates came together to form the Save School Libraries Coalition.
This Coalition sought to press for open, well-staffed school libraries and children's access to quality reading materials, a constant goal since the 1950s but more difficult to attain after the rise of free-market capitalism in 1980. The school library, in its many manifestations, and bolstered by its many supporters—parents, educators, community members, publishers, authors, friends groups, journalists, and organizations interested in literacy and student success—awaited a post-neoliberal revival.
Further reading
Provincial guidelines published by departments of education in the 1980s and 1990s are available on the Internet Archive.
Ontario's Partners in Action (1982) is at this link.
Alberta's Focus on Learning (1985) is at this link.
The Newfoundland and Labrador Learning to Learn (1991) is at this link.
Les bibliothèques scolaires québécoises is at this link.
Also,
The Crisis in Canada's School Libraries by Ken Haycock (2002) is at this link.
The CSLA Achieving Information Literacy (2003) is at this link.
My earlier blog on School Libraries and the Education for School Librarianship Workshop at Jasper Park in 1968 is at this link.
