Global Action on School Library Education and Training by Barbara A. Schultz-Jones Dianne Oberg

Author:Barbara A. Schultz-Jones, Dianne Oberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Kyoto City Board of Education

The Kyoto City Board of Education includes 166 elementary schools, 73 middle schools, seven combined junior high/high schools, 10 high schools and eight comprehensive support schools.

In the basic policy of school education in Kyoto City, the school library is positioned in the curriculum as a Learning Information Centre and Reading Centre. The policy also says that “using the newspaper systematically as a source of learning information will broadly enhance public interest in society.” The new role of the school library is stipulated as a Learning and Information Centre where the necessary information is gathered and stored for easy use. The role of the Reading Centre is to form the habit of reading to nurture a rich mind.

Teacher librarians are allocated to all schools that have more than 12 classes. Some teacher librarians work full-time in their schools, while other teacher librarians serve concurrently as subject teachers. As the teacher librarians work as classroom teachers and teach subjects, the time they can spend on activities related to school libraries is limited.

All teachers in elementary schools and junior high schools are expected to participate in a specialised research committee and publish a research paper once a year. Most teacher librarians belong to a school library research group, where they attempt to solve problems by exchanging information with others based on practice at their school. Kyoto City has allocated two full-time teacher librarians in two school libraries that are part of the research programme to help teachers and students make proper use of the libraries. They will work full-time for two years and then go back to their regular teaching jobs.

The Board of Education also wants to place a school librarian in all elementary and junior high schools. However, due to budget limitations, a school librarian has only been placed in each junior school district (serving a number of elementary schools and one junior high school), where they support all school libraries in this region. Unfortunately, because the school librarian’s time at each school is extremely limited, there is still not enough learning support.

As the qualifications of the school librarian were not yet established, the Kyoto City Board of Education set the qualification requirement for school librarians in this project as having a basic knowledge of the library, with a librarian or teacher librarian qualification preferred. The Board of Education regularly conducts training for school librarians including: preparation of the school library, book talks, reading aloud, Bibliobattle (a competition to introduce a book), preparation of the school training (utilisation of the school library), advice on selection and disposal of books and preparation of book lists. Future training topics include updating selection and disposal of materials to ensure suitable learning content as well as coordinating teaching guidance to class students by the class teacher and school librarian.

The Board of Education conducts joint training for teacher librarians and school librarians once a year. School libraries are expected to be utilised in learning activities, but it is difficult for teacher librarians to do two jobs, in the classroom and in the school library.

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