What Library Schools Need: SLJ Celebrates 50 Years

The future of library education can be told as part love story, part visionary perspective, and part practical plan of action. It should begin with what we love about youth services and continue with a stretch of our collective imaginations to tell the best possible stories to those who will follow in our footsteps. Of course, all storytellers must make listeners or readers believe. But even the most imaginative stories must have a solid grounding in reality. We must get the facts right with solid, up-to-date research, without delimiting the power of the well-told tale. Without a vibrant image of an ideal, we set our sights too low and fail to do the best for graduate students, and ultimately, for the profession. We need the courage to take imaginative leaps to what appears improbable or even impossible while translating those leaps and bounds into practical and reliable steps toward excellence.

Since the essence of story is enjoyment, the most important thing we can do to improve library education is to make sure it is filled with the joy and excitement of true learning. Too often we accept what writer bell hooks calls "the ever-present boredom and apathy" that pervades graduate education. Teaching is a performance art, with an artist (teacher), a script (knowledge of subject matter), and an audience (students).

We need to embrace new ideas about teaching as well as new directions in librarianship to encourage library school students to engage in a dialogue that will empower them in their work with young people. An obvious example is the use of new information and communication technologies, which enable us to teach and learn in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. Among the resources with enormous potential for translation, transition, and adaptation for library education for youth are the following: Macromedia's Breeze, WebEx Communications, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. We might also consider more innovative uses of courseware, such as eCollege, WebCT, and Blackboard, that are already tied into the academic infrastructure. These technologies can assist us in transforming our vision into a practical and fiscally responsible reality.

Unfortunately, some confuse innovative teaching with a lack of serious commitment to subject matter. Those accustomed to what hooks calls the "banking system of education (the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that can be deposited, stored, and used at a later date)" need to know how to teach and learn in active, energized, personalized, and joyous settings.

I have a radical suggestion for improving library education. Faculty should learn to practice what we profess. We often stand in front of silent note-taking students in sterile classrooms talking about active, empowered learners engaged in personalized or cooperative inquiries in resource-rich environments, using analytical and synthesis skills to go from data to information to knowledge. We talk about engaged learners taking ownership of their work, not as consumers of others' prepackaged ideas. What we are doing, however, belies our words. We need to go beyond talking about good educational practices to really make them happen. Students in professional education should be encouraged to select from many alternatives to compose personal knowing, that is, to analyze, restructure, and reconfigure existing knowledge to address current and future needs. More importantly, they should be encouraged to challenge faculty and each other in rigorous intellectual debate and to consider the "what ifs" of the future of the profession. Perhaps we might inspire them to test the validity of their ideas and decisions in computer modeling and other simulations or employ computer gaming techniques that challenge them to shoot down ideas that do not meet the test of quality and practicality.

The power of story takes us from the actual world into an imagined one. As performance artists, faculty must take library school students on that adventure. My vision of library education includes classrooms that model ideal learning environments. New meeting, training, and presentation technologies used in the business world—such as PowerPoint presentations with voice-over, video, Web conferencing, video conferencing, animation, white boards, online chats, screen-sharing applications, and student polling—should be analyzed and adapted for professional education. All of these technologies use standard Web browsers, are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, can be retained in a searchable archive, and are available either live or on-demand to accommodate students' schedules. These capabilities allow us to bring distant scholars and practitioners into classrooms to interact with students. Their use, however, will require innovative budgeting and an infusion of research money to purchase software and to pay honorariums to outside participants.

Increasingly, virtual library education is becoming the norm. Online learning environments can compensate in part for what is missing in actual settings. Both campus courses blended with virtual components and complete online courses offer learning opportunities not necessarily available in classrooms. Professors can create resource-rich educational environments and provide for alternative learning styles impossible in classrooms constrained by limited time slots and facilities. Online students can access the richest resources, visit libraries and museums, and bring the best minds, leading professional colleagues, and young people into the classroom through videoconferencing or something as simple as a telephone conference call. It is not the specific method or medium that is important but the kind of learning partnerships that bring scholars and real-life situations into exciting, cooperative, problem-solving education.

E-mail and online discussion boards keep us in touch with colleagues who share similar problems and concerns and with distant professionals who expand our interests and knowledge. The online stories we tell each other alert us to new ideas and practices and confirm, challenge, extend, or illuminate our professional beliefs.

Most good stories begin with character, and library educators should be aware of an extensive cast of characters who influence our work. Chief among those characters, although often seemingly beyond our reach, are national, state, and regional officials who control funding for education, social services, and cultural institutions. Certainly, political and economic factors and the funding for programs have tremendous influence on young people and libraries. Current debates about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), its underlying assumptions, and the funding to support the law amply demonstrate this point. Many library professionals who remember the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 and the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 consider it a travesty that NCLB was called a "reauthorization of the ESEA, the major federal funding for schools." The original programs had tremendous impact on library collections and services because they provided significant funding for libraries and even library education through the NDEA institutes.

Library educators must encourage students to be informed and enter into a dialogue about current educational legislation because those students will have to respond to similar issues in the near future. Academe Magazine began a January 2004 article on intellectual freedom with the statement: "College and university faculty do not always pay as much attention as they should to the plight of their secondary school colleagues." Role-playing or simulations in professional education would enable students to experience both the confrontational and intellectual aspects of such issues.

It is time for a new activism among those who serve youth in school and public libraries. The American Association of School Librarians, the Association for Library Services to Children, and the Young Adult Library Services Association do excellent work, but they are too limited in their memberships and too isolated from each other and from library education. We need to come together to organize a series of state and national working groups, including professional associations, library educators, public officials, parents, teachers, school and public library administrators, practicing professionals, and young people. Together, we can set a new cooperative agenda for library education and library services to youth. Part of this process would include an ongoing electronic dialogue for those who are unable to attend actual meetings. This inclusive group would take the lead in setting and implementing a practical plan of action; initiating fund-raising; and creating a public-service media campaign led by people such as Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Laura Bush, and Teresa Heinz Kerry. We must assure that there is No Professional Left Behind, but we must also secure adequate funding to realize our vision.

If I could empower youth librarians and library educators with one trait, it would be passionate advocacy. We graying (or already grayed) members of the profession must seek and recruit young library educators who more closely represent the populations we serve. We should acknowledge that education and librarianship are political positions, in which its members must actively lobby for schools and libraries so that young people can take full advantage of the opportunities these institutions offer.