International Association of School Librarianship | 48th Annual Conference and the 23rd International Forum on Research on School Librarianship

Darryl will be delivering a keynote: Between the classroom and the library …

Ivan Illich argued that the principal lesson School teaches is the need to be ‘taught’.

While ‘this’ lesson may not be intentional, it is almost inevitable in an educational paradigm that is centred on ‘teaching’ rather than learning (instructionism). It is also a lesson that increasingly fails to prepare our students for the world unfolding around them.

What might an educational paradigm that is centred on ‘learning’ look like (constructionism), and what might it require of us, particularly in School?

Norman Beswick, writing about the Library-College movement that reached its apotheosis in the late 1960s, points us in the right direction – it is not the library that ‘supports’ the classroom, but the classroom that leads (or should lead) inevitably and essentially to the library. This is not to say that the library is more important than the classroom, but that the complex reality in which students have actually been positioned to find what they need to know when they need to know it (Seymour Papert) is the consequence of deliberate and effective collaboration between the classroom and the library, between teachers and librarians.

A community is the stories that it tells and the songs that it sings (Leonard Sweet). This is ‘an’ unfolding story/song about trying to locate learning in the space ‘between’ the classroom and the library.