Why it's Time to Get to Know Your School Librarian, An Interview With Elizabeth Hutchinson

Episode 13 of The Teaching Space Podcast is an interview with Elizabeth Hutchinson from the Schools' Library Service in Guernsey. Podcast Episode 13 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands.  Hello, and welcome to Episode 13 of The Teaching Space Podcast. It's Martine here, thank you so much for joining me. In today's episode, I'm interviewing Elizabeth Hutchinson from the Schools' Library Service in Guernsey.  Martine: Welcome, Elizabeth. Elizabeth: Hello there, nice to be here. Martine: Lovely to have you here. Rather than me do the introductions, I'm going to kick off with a question to you. Who are you and what do you do? Elizabeth: Okay. I'm Head of the Schools' Library Service in Guernsey. I'm a librarian, and I support the school libraries across the Bailiwick of Guernsey. We look after and support all primary schools, all secondary schools, and we even fly across to Alderney to support them too. Martine: Fantastic. It's a busy job then, by the sounds of things. Elizabeth: It is. I've got a nice little team, which is good. We sort of share the schools between us. We each allocate, I allocate schools to individual librarians so that schools expect to see the same person most of the time. Of course we're sharing across our resources too, so it's a bit of an unusual role for us to play because it's a support service that we offer, but we work very closely with schools and teachers, which is our aim really. Martine: What do people think the role of the school librarian is, and what is it really? Two questions in one there. Elizabeth: Okay, well our service is slightly different, we are providing the professional school librarian role. Throughout the years that I've worked at Schools' Library Service, there is a very clear misconception on what a school librarian does. There are two people that you would see within a school library, one is a library assistant whose job is to issue the books and look after the day to day running of the school library. The other one is the professional school librarian, and their role is very different from what most people think a librarian does. Our role as a school librarian is just to work alongside the teachers and the curriculum. Our role is to support information literacy, which is the ability for anyone to find access, evaluate, give credit, and use good quality information. We provide resources and support in accessing those resources. There are the book loans from the Schools' Library Service that you can get from your own school library, but there's also the online resources. Our role is to support the students in using those effectively. What we find is that students are very good at doing that Google search, that question into Google and hoping that the answer's going to pop out. As you progress through your academic schooling you need to be using better quality academic resources or be very highly skilled in evaluating the resources that you're finding. We work with them to make sure that they understand a keyword search, that they understand that in any academic source you cannot type a question, that you have to think about what you're looking for, and actually how you tweak those keywords to actually find what you need. The more students look online for information, the less skilled they get at actually finding what they really need. That's where we're sort of, our main aim at the moment is, is to support that. Is that the new Guernsey curriculum has changed incredibly recently to look at the skillset. This is what school librarians have always done, the skill of research. We are now in a brilliant position to be able to go, well the skills that we have are the skills that we can teach your students, and what you've highlighted that you need at the moment. It's interesting times for a school librarian I think. Martine: It strikes me that the role of the school librarian has changed dramatically over the past sort of 20 years or so, but ultimately as you said, it comes down to research and helping students learn how to research properly. I guess it's not the sort of fundamentals of the role that's changed, it's where you're looking for the information has changed a little bit perhaps. Elizabeth: Oh absolutely. If you think about when we were back at school. Our research was probably the school library, but it was books. You could always copy and paste, but you'd actually have to hand write it. The chances of you being caught for doing that was quite unlikely unless the teacher was probably going down to the library to check the books that you were copying from. We live in a world now where information is really freely available and really easy to access. It's even easier to plagiarise but even easier to get caught. It's those skills, that skillset that has suddenly become very usable and shareable and people want them. It's a much wider world out there, and actually far more opportunities. Our skillset has had to adapt and change, but it has in a very exciting way, opened doors that I couldn't have imagined at the beginning of my career. Martine: It's a good time to be a school librarian, is what you're saying? Elizabeth: Absolutely, really exciting. Do you know, just the opportunity to share ideas on social media, talk to experts in our profession in a way that was just not possible before, has up-skilled all of us in a way that just wasn't possible. Having a personal learning network on social media has not only helped me to understand my role a bit more, but also helped me learn about things that I can then share with the students that I teach and the teachers that I work with. The worlds of research has really opened up in the last sort of few years and it is exciting times, yeah. I love it. Martine: It's really interesting to hear you talking about social media in that way as well, because I'm in huge agreement with you there, in that I get a massive amount of my CPD directly from Twitter because of all the links people share, and the Twitter chats that go on, and things like that. Technology is really exciting right now and it's great to hear about how the role of the school librarian has adapted to accommodate. Elizabeth: I think as well is that as part of learning and teaching research, I think it's important that we do include these technologies or these tools, because like you said, I too get a lot of my professional development from Twitter, but it's that digital literacy that is also around in school today that we're teaching. Actually if we can help students navigate resources like Twitter within the classroom, it then becomes less of a problem outside. Martine: Definitely. Elizabeth: So instead of us shying away from it, we need to be confident in using it ourselves as teachers to be able to then help the students navigate it. I think I was talking to somebody recently about the negativity, and the bullying, and the trolling that goes on, but actually if we had more people on social media that were brave enough to say, "Hey, that's not a nice thing to say." We drowned out the negatives with the positive then it would be a much better place to be. You can only learn those skills through usage. Actually, if we can learn to use it in a safer environment within the classroom then it would stand the students in better stead for the future I think. Martine: I'm in complete agreement with what you just said, and it almost leads onto a discussion about a topic I want to cover in a future podcast episode, which is this misconception that young people today are digital natives. Everyone seems to think, particularly amongst certain teachers I come across, that the kids today, they all know how to do anything online and they're very comfortable with technology. Yes, in terms of navigating an iPhone or some sort of smartphone, they can do that very easily, but they aren't particularly savvy when it comes to social media, and using technology and social media and things like that professionally. It's all about social. Is that something you've come across in your role at all? Elizabeth: Oh yeah, without a doubt. You know? Even to the extent of just good research, there's a lack of understanding amongst teachers that it is important that they check where their sources are coming from. The only way that that can happen is if we encourage teachers to insist on referencing. I know it sounds boring, do you know? I've had one teacher tell me that it stops the flow of the essay or the research - Martine: Really? Elizabeth: It spoils it, you know? For the understanding that actually where your information is coming from is important to the teacher makes the child then understand the importance for themselves. Once you learn how to reference, it doesn't take that long. If you collect your references as you go through, it is part and parcel of academic writing. Whether you like it or not, that's what we're doing at school, we are writing academically. Even the youngest of students, none of them are generally writing for pleasure. You can create the opportunity to write for pleasure alongside doing the research correctly and it should all just flow into it. You find that international baccalaureate students generally tend to be really good at their referencing because it's an essential part of the course. Teachers who teach GCSE and A Level, it's not. A lot of these students are spoon fed, and I get it, I do understand. Teachers are in a very difficult position that they are judged by their outcomes and teaching to the test and all of this, I get it. I do. But we're not doing our children any favours if we are not helping them to take responsibility for where their information's coming from. We talk about recently the fake news and you live in an internet bubble. I find that really interesting, it's something that I'm particularly interested in myself is that we go back to the social media question, is that we tend to follow the people who have the same ideas as us, share the same views, and reinforce what we believe to be true. That's a really dangerous position to put yourself into, that it's safe because you're not going to read anything that you disagree with, but actually, if we don't teach and encourage our students to actually look beyond that immediate understanding to get a more rounded view, then we are going to ... We're in a very scary position where we can be manipulated into believing that this is the only way for the world to work, or this religion is right, or that political party is correct. Actually, you can only get a full view of the world if you actually understand how you can actually access other sources of information that are going to give you a slightly different view. I find it, that to prevent students or not encourage students to actually go beyond that question into Google, we're opening a huge chasm that we might not ever be able to shut. Actually now is the time to take responsibility and start saying, "This is a serious situation and we as teachers and educators need to actually do something about it when we can," and we can do something about it, you know? Teach them to reference, understand plagiarism, understand the fact that you need to give credit for somebody else's work. All of this is about looking at how we behave online and how we gather our information for our own learning. It has to come and start in a school setting. Martine: The idea of living in an internet bubble, as you described it, is just absolutely terrifying. I mean if you don't ever have to challenge what you see, what you read, what you hear, how are you ever going to learn? It's very, very worrying. Elizabeth: Yeah, it is interesting because I think people forget. I think if you don't live in an information world where you're teaching people to find information, I think it's very easy to forget that ... I think we've had recently, sort of Facebook have tried to change it, but where they were feeding you the things that you want to find rather than what you chose to find. I think you need to be a little bit savvy about ... Or understanding that that is actually what goes on. Martine: Definitely. What you said about referencing and how if you do it as you go along, it's not difficult, that is so true. I'm a Google Certified Trainer, and so I use Google Docs for most academic writing activities with my learners, and it is so easy to reference in Google Docs. It really is straightforward. I shared a video on social a couple of days ago that showed how to do it in about 90 seconds. It was a demonstration that took that long, you know? It is easy, simple and straightforward. As long as you know how to do it, then I don't really understand why people wouldn't be doing it, particularly in Google Docs. Elizabeth: Well exactly. If you are a person who uses Word, there's a referencing tab in Word, which is equally as quick, do you know? When you think back to the dissertations we used to write and you'd spend three or four days putting in your references, literally if you're collecting them as you go along, it's a less than 10-second job to create your bibliography. Why would you not use that, you know? Martine: Exactly. Elizabeth: It is so simple these days. Martine: Talking about things being speedy, how can your school librarian save you time? This is a question on behalf of the teachers, how can your school librarian save you time? Elizabeth: That's an interesting question because I had a discussion with somebody the other day and the things that I thought teachers would understand was time-saving. Turns out to be not so. Martine: Right. Elizabeth H.: Let me explain. Schools' Library Service provides what we call project loans. Teachers can email us and say, "I'm doing Victorians next term with my year six students. I have three or four higher learners and I have about two that will need lower level books." We put together a nice little box, we deliver it to the school, which then lands in their library and they go and collect it and they start using it. That is time-saving. Martine: Yes, I would think so, yeah. Elizabeth: If you a