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Field experience reflections from Kate
This is Kate.
Today she spent her last day with me as a intern. I asked her to reflect on her six weeks at Springfield.
Kate shared what she learned and what she wished she had known prior to her field experience.
Admittedly, I came to library science and school media from a background differing from that of most of my peers in the school media specialist program. Many were teachers, teaching assistants, or even library assistants. While I was going to a corporate job every day before logging on at night to do schoolwork, they worked in schools or libraries. So when it came time for my field experience, I had to quit my day job, as the expression goes, and immerse myself in school and library culture.
When I started observing my mentor’s practices, and when I began helping the students and making plans to instruct them, I found myself calling on what I had learned after two years in the school media specialist program. At the same time, however, I discovered a number of tools and skills that I wished I had known prior to my field experience, and that all student teacher-librarians should learn, or at least gain familiarity with, during the course of the program.
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• Technology tools: I now have several new log-ins scrawled in my notebook so I can use Twitter, GoAnimate, VoiceThread, and Wikispaces, among others—not to mention reminders to try out Pageflakes and join professional networking sites like TeacherLibrarianNing and listservs like LM_Net.
• Collaboration: I have observed and participated in lesson planning with teachers, but I did not expect the large amount of collaboration. Most likely in the future, if only one or two teachers come to me for collaborative lesson planning, the tiny number will stand out to me, and I will start strategizing how to encourage more faculty to take advantage of the resources in the library. I hope to soak up as many of the techniques, subtle and not-so-subtle, that my mentor teacher-librarians use with the faculty, to make them feel that the library is one place they always can get instructional support.
• Copyright Issues & Digital Information: Working with the students on projects such as wiki pages on poetry movements, I have had to think about copyright when it came to the images the students wanted to post. I remember discussing copyright in one of my earliest courses, but it pertained more to posting warning signs next to the copier in the public library than to what these students were creating on the Web. I began to see firsthand that our knowledge of fair use only scratches the surface of the policies we have to remember, revise, and enforce when it comes to students’ learning and work.
• Administration: For example, budget analysis takes on a greater meaning when I stand in the middle of a library that needs, say, more materials to encourage reluctant readers. I learned to write grants in school, but they were directed to imaginary benefactors. The “real live” library has “real live” needs, and I am going to need to know where to go to find funds to take care of them. It would be difficult for me, knowing what I know now, to resign myself to the limitations placed on a library if I felt the library needed more. Which brings me to. . .
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• Attitude: Beyond what I learned in the virtual classroom about making the library a welcoming place for the community, my experience has taught me about having the right attitude to manage a school library as a whole. A positive attitude, and even a little correctly-placed aggressiveness when it comes to advocacy, can make a major difference as to whether a library thrives or languishes—not that it all rests entirely on the teacher-librarian—but the teacher-librarian can set the tone. A teacher-librarian who has confidence and a positive outlook most likely manages a library that has a real impact on the learning community.
In the end, I understand that often in a ten-week course information must be compressed, and some things receive only a comment in passing. I do believe, however, that if we are teacher-librarians in training, then we need to be made aware of not only what we will encounter in a given school media center, but also what we can use and do to improve a school media center.
While I wonder how much more I might have learned during my experience had I not needed to spend time learning the skills and qualities above, it just might be possible that learning them here with Joyce had far greater an impact on my development, and will stay with me as I go on to learn even more about becoming a fantastic teacher-librarian for my future students.
Thank you, Kate, for your contributions and your enthusiasm. We will all miss you. I wish you the very best entering this wonderful and challenging career at the most exciting possible time!
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About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
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