The Gold Standard: Librarians are teachers and their subject is information literacy

This story originally appeared in the fall/winter 2021 issue of Harker Magazine. The original version of this story is published on issuu.

A strong school library program results in higher student achievement, including test scores and subject mastery. That’s what 30 years of research has shown – and these correlations aren’t explained away by student-teacher ratios, teacher qualifications, or demographics. These benefits are why The Harker School has such a deep commitment to its library. The Harker library program is the school’s pedagogical backbone, an integral and essential part of the entire TK-12 academic program.

Harker librarians are teachers and their subject is information literacy. Using the library’s extensive resources, librarians collaborate with teachers in every grade and in every subject, whether reading stories to first graders, showing middle schoolers how to search a database or teaching upper school students proper citation formats. They meet with individual classes and are available for drop-in meetings with individual students.

Librarians also serve as a resource for teachers. They guest lecture, they team- teach classes, and they serve as teacher consultants.

Harker librarians promote literacy: Besides author visits and book clubs, programming includes the award-winning Re-create Reading Day, the student-run Book Blog and the teacher-founded Tournament of Books. Students of all ages say they love to pick librarians’ brains, browse the stacks and curl up in one of the many comfy reading spots the three libraries provide.

“There’s no more important time to have a library,” said Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs. “Our students are bombarded with a wealth of information and they need to know how to make sense of it. The strength of the library is really with the personnel and what they bring to our program. Our librarians are true experts in information literacy.”

“Our curriculum is about enabling students to become information literate, to be critical thinkers, to form habits of mind,” said Lauri Vaughan, Harker’s award-winning published library director since 2018.

With the advent of the internet and Harker’s upper school expansion, an outstanding library program was the central goal of Sue Smith and Enid Davis, Harker’s visionary former library directors. “The women who preceded me created this quietly awesome program that ranks nationally,” said Vaughan, who has worked at Harker for 15 years. “If there was an Olympics for school libraries, I think we’d get the gold.”

What is information literacy?
Harker’s library program focuses on four areas: information literacy, pleasure reading, robust resources and curricular collaboration. The keystone is information literacy, defined on the library website as “the ability to effectively find, evaluate and use information across all media and disciplines.”

“Information literacy is the difference between absorbing what a teacher is telling you versus finding something out for yourself and translating that into your own lesson,” said senior Ann Ryan, who plans to study chemical engineering in college. “You need to be able to understand what different sources are telling you, even if you’re not going into academics after graduation.”

Information literacy takes skilled, trained professionals to teach it – “information evangelists,” Vaughan calls them. At a time when many schools are laying off librarians and turning their facilities into media centers, Harker’s program has a staff of 12, including six librarians with master’s degrees in library science. Many have education degrees and general classroom experience as well.

The library curriculum at Harker extends from transitional kindergarten through grade 12, said Meredith Cranston, campus librarian for the upper school. “We scaffold these skills in ways that are developmentally appropriate, given the age level of the students, to introduce, reinforce and master these various skills of information literacy.”

Using college-level frameworks, she said, the goal is that by the time students graduate, they are research-ready, which means they are ready to pursue independent learning in universities and colleges. “We’re always thinking, what do we want our students to know, and understand and be able to do by the time they graduate? What kind of mindset do they need for information- literate thinking?”

It starts in the lower school, where students are introduced to the importance of finding and evaluating sources, paraphrasing what the sources say and citing where they got their information. Cranston’s 6-year-old son James, grade 1, looks forward to going to the library every Friday, he said. He likes the train books.

“My favorite thing in the library is just the whole library class,” he said. “I like that I get to hear stories and then go get a book. It’s just like a map and you travel around the world in stories.”

When Cranston and the other first graders were learning about animal homes – nests, burrows, caves – Kathy Clark, campus librarian for the lower school, showed them how to find information in databases and books.

“What we want them to do is understand how to take notes, how to pull the information out of these sources,” Clark said. “We don’t say, this is a database. We say, here’s another source of information for you. And it’s always a source that we trust. We’re not sending little ones out onto the open web to try and navigate.”

The rudiments of citation begin early as well, she said. “You have to give credit where you found your information. In first grade, it’s just simply, what’s the title of the book you got some of your information from? Because you didn’t just make it up.”

These skills become increasingly sophisticated through the lower school. They are built on in middle school so that by the time a student gets to the ninth grade, they are fine-tuning their citations and taking quizzes in paraphrasing. As they progress through the upper school, students have learned that librarians are resources who can help them do deep research and produce original work.

What does it mean to be a teacher librarian?
All this wouldn’t be possible without collaboration between librarians and subject teachers.

“Our classroom teachers talk the talk when it comes to information literacy, and they walk the walk in terms of collaborating with us on inquiry-based learning projects,” said Cranston. “It’s across the curriculum. Generally it originates with a teacher saying there’s some aspect of their course that students aren’t getting. They want students to dig deeper and learn more.”

That was biology teacher Kristen Morgensen ‘93’s experience when she was getting ready to teach her eighth graders about cystic fibrosis. As a microbiologist she was excited about teaching the topic and she wanted to get her students excited too. That’s where Bernie Morrissey, campus librarian for the middle school, came in.

Morgensen had started with the idea that her students would make posters. Morrissey suggested turning the poster topic into a question: “Which topic that we’ve studied so far this year is most useful for understanding cystic fibrosis? Why?” The assignment went from a general report to making an argument for one of three possible answers: diffusion and osmosis, genetics and heredity or DNA structure and mutations.

“That’s huge, because that’s science, right?” said Morgensen. “Claim, evidence, reasoning. I got some great, great projects, because they had to argue it. I had the idea and Bernie revamped it and made it what it is.”

The students learned the same information about the disease, Morrissey noted. “But this was at a much deeper level, and I think in a more interesting way. They’re more engaged with the material. It also helps emphasize the cumulative nature of studying science, the way scientific knowledge builds on other knowledge. These kids are super lucky to have two teachers essentially planning this experience for them. That’s pretty rare.”

Librarians also serve as co-teachers with subject teachers. Amy Pelman, upper school librarian, plays a prominent role in English teacher Brigid Miller’s popular Graphic Narrative class. Her contributions include a lecture on the history of the form and an introduction to the class research project.

“I couldn’t teach this class without her,” Miller said. “Amy is ridiculously well-read in general, and when it comes to graphic novels, she’s read everything. Plus she’s really happy when she gets to talk about this form and that passion spreads to the students.”

What are electronic resources and digital archives?
Whether finding a book to read or doing research, Harker students have 24/7 access to college-level online resources, including e-books, audiobooks and some 90 subscription databases – a searchable online collection providing access to scholarly journals, newspapers, images, movies and more. By the 10th grade, Harker students are proficient in navigating these resources, as well as NoodleTools, which they’ve been using since the fourth grade. NoodleTools is an online research management platform with three different levels that helps students build citations, take notes and organize their sources.

The electronic collection is maintained by Qi Huang, electronic resources librarian, who is also deeply involved with the Harker Digital Archives. Harker’s physical archives, an unusual collection for a school, go back 125 years. The school began digitizing it about five years ago. Nearly 16,000 pages have been scanned so far and they include yearbooks, newsletters, brochures and flyers. The earliest item in the digital archive so far is a 1924 student newspaper called The Jolly Cadet.

Recently launched, the site can be viewed online by the Harker community. Vaughan is already getting queries from teachers who want to use the archives for their classes, such as reviewing the newspapers over the years to see how students felt about different topics.

“We’re excited to make available anything that can bring to life a sense of what it was like to be a member of the Harker community during any particular time period,” she said, noting that the archives, both digital and physical, figured prominently during Harker’s 125^th anniversary celebration in 2018-19. “We have a long and rich history with interesting and fascinating people.” The school also manages a separate photo archive with historic photos dating back to 1893, to which the community also has access.

Three-way collaboration: Teachers, librarians and students
These electronic resources are endowed in part by the Near/Mitra research program, which is a key way that Harker librarians work with upper school students. Every spring, eight to 10 juniors are selected from 40 to 50 applicants – about a quarter of the following year’s senior class – to pursue a non-credit, year-long research project. Near scholars explore United States history while Mitra scholars research humanities topics. Each student is matched with at least two mentors: a subject area specialist and an information specialist.

A visit from librarians to her junior year English class inspired Ellen Guo ’20 to write a Near scholar paper she titled “Bi Means of Queer: A Bisexual View of Sedgwick’s ‘Closet.’”

The librarians had taught the class about critical theory. The assignment was to select one and use it to analyze “The Scarlet Letter.” Guo chose the lens of queer theory.

“I got super interested in queer theory and I started looking at the literature,” she said. “My research project evolved into a theoretical angle about HIV/ AIDS and its impact on our understanding of bisexuality and homophobia.”

During the process, she met several times a month with her mentors, Cranston and upper school history teacher Donna Gilbert, who in 2009 stewarded the original Near scholars program with Sue Smith. “Ms. Gilbert helped me out with parsing through the historical context of the stuff I was researching,” Guo said. “And if there were sources that I needed that weren’t easily accessible, Ms. Cranston was great about providing them.”

Now a sophomore at Columbia University, Guo is on an engineering track but she’s still drawn to theory. “Perhaps more important than the actual content of the theory were the skills, specifically from Near/Mitra, that I developed,” she said. “As somebody who’s always considered herself a STEM person, being able to think in a way that’s very different from how I usually think is one of the greatest things that I took from Near/Mitra.”

Working with these students is incredibly rewarding, Cranston said. “Every year I think this is just such a wonderful and rich and unique experience, and nothing could ever top this. And then the next year again, it is special and rich and unique.”

As is the entire library program. Every 17-year-old today is a creator of information, said Vaughan. That means they have tremendous power – and tremendous responsibility.

“It’s about being part of the information community on every level, whether we’re talking about journalism, sharing a good book that you’ve read, writing an academic paper, publishing a book or being interviewed on television. How do you professionally, ethically, intelligently and creatively participate in the exchange of ideas and information? That’s how we want to empower our students.”

July 3, 2022Tags: Harker Magazine