Teacher and librarian perspectives on information literacy, and the secondary-school library’s relationship to information literacy in the classroom

This article reports on the quantitative data from a 2017 survey of secondary-school teachers and librarians in Aotearoa New Zealand. Findings suggest that librarians and library services are not seen by teachers or librarians to be centrally involved in the development of information literacy (IL) skills in students, and that teachers may lack full awareness of what services school libraries offer. There was mixed evidence for the idea that teachers and librarians share a definition of IL, and our findings suggest that, while both groups value IL skills, particularly in academic contexts, they don’t necessarily see those skills as promoted by The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and the National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA). We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings and provide recommendations.