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

Author:Barbara A. Schultz-Jones and Dianne Oberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2015-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Step 2: Competence Criteria of a School Librarian

Having presented its school library definition, the expert group was given a new task by the board of DIK: to define competence criteria for school librarians. At present, there is no specific training programme for school librarians in Sweden. Undergraduate and graduate studies in librarianship are more general. With a bachelor’s or master’s degree in Library and Information Science (LIS), you can work as a librarian in all kinds of libraries, (e.g., public libraries, school libraries and university libraries). You get a degree in LIS, and then you specialize through your work experience and short courses.

Librarians in the field have requested specialized training programmes, with the aim of getting an education better fitted to the actual skills requirements in professional work. However, among policy- and decision-makers in the educational field, there is no general consensus that a school library should be staffed with a formally trained librarian. Hence, if a school’s library is staffed at all, it is commonly staffed by a teacher or a library assistant.

One of the expert group’s ongoing missions is to convince the National Agency for Education that it should include school librarians in its statistics on “pedagogical personnel”. Currently, the Agency refuses to include school librarians in these statistics. In effect, this means that the responsible government agency consciously makes school librarians invisible in the statistics used by researchers in the educational field. It is therefore no surprise that researchers generally fail to see the important role played by school librarians in the students’ learning processes.

The group began its search for competence criteria by taking stock of members’ day-to-day professional practice. This resulted in a long list of the tasks typically performed by a school librarian. The next step was to condense and structure the contents of the list into a short-list of essential skills required by a school librarian. By its very nature, this was not a simple task.

Just as the expert group had done in its work to define “school library”, we used the IFLA School Library Manifesto and Guidelines, as well as EU’s key competences, when structuring and trying to formulate the essential competences of a school librarian. This part of our work resulted in the following criteria, which are not exhaustive, but seen as central to the work done by a school librarian. A school librarian has:

– the ability to motivate further learning – learning to learn;

– instructional and relational skills to be able to tutor/supervise individuals and groups in individual and collective learning processes;

– digital competence with a focus on information-seeking processes from a user’s perspective;

– knowledge about and ability to use methods for mediation and communication of content;

– the ability to match media and content to students’ individual needs and circumstances; and

– the ability to overview present and potential learning resources and to organize and make information retrievable.

It is worth explaining why we chose these competence criteria.

The first criterion – the ability to motivate further learning, learning to learn – has its origins in the EU’s key competences for lifelong learning.

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