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Strengthening teacher–librarian partnerships

Lisa Emerson and Senga White
Abstract: 

This article addresses the question: What would it take for collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships to flourish in Aotearoa New Zealand secondary schools? We provide a three-part model that explores how professional expectations and local (school) conditions can influence whether the school librarian is siloed or integrated within a school. Our analysis is based on Patricia Montiel-Overall’s 2005 categorisation of teacher–librarian partnerships. The article concludes by discussing how change can be effected in the role of the library in schools, arguing that school managers and teachers can take steps now to provide the local conditions to enable teacher–librarian partnerships in the interests of student learning.

Journal issue: 

Strengthening teacher–librarian partnerships

Lisa Emerson and Senga White

Key points

Collaborative teacher–librarian relationships impact positively on student learning.

School librarians are marginalised and underutilised for learning purposes.

Identifying changes to environments and relationships can integrate librarians into learning.

Change is possible when teachers and senior leaders become champions of their library services.

This article addresses the question: What would it take for collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships to flourish in Aotearoa New Zealand secondary schools? We provide a three-part model that explores how professional expectations and local (school) conditions can influence whether the school librarian is siloed or integrated within a school. Our analysis is based on Patricia Montiel-Overall’s 2005 categorisation of teacher–librarian partnerships. The article concludes by discussing how change can be effected in the role of the library in schools, arguing that school managers and teachers can take steps now to provide the local conditions to enable teacher–librarian partnerships in the interests of student learning.

1. Introduction

How would it affect your teaching to discover that you have a resource in your school, hiding in plain sight, which could deepen the research and understanding of your senior students in any discipline and impact on their level of achievement? Teachers in our research—in subjects as varied as senior chemistry, physical education, history, and Māori performing arts—worked with this resource to deepen their students’ research and writing, with significant impact on student learning.

We are talking, of course, about the school librarian.

Mounting international, and now national, evidence (White, 2012) demonstrates the positive impact of collaborative teacher–librarian relationships on student learning. Integrating the librarian into the classroom through teacher–librarian partnerships has been shown to impact positively on student engagement through improved assessment outcomes (Williams et al., 2013), the achievement of curriculum-based learning outcomes (Gildersleeves, 2012; Hughes et al., 2014), as well as students’ information and disciplinary literacy capability, and attitudes to learning (Garrison & Fitzgerald, 2019).

However, there are constraints to replicating these successes more widely in our New Zealand schools (Emerson et al., 2018, 2019). And, despite the evidence of benefits to student learning and growing awareness of the importance of developing critically literate students in a world awash with misinformation and disinformation (Head & Eisenberg, 2010; Wineburg, 2016), there is also evidence nationally (e.g., White 2012) and internationally (Everhart, 2014; Hutchinson, 2017; Mahwasane, 2016) that school libraries are marginalised and even in decline.

In this article, we address the question: What would it take for collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships to flourish in Aotearoa New Zealand secondary schools? Based on our research, we suggest an answer to this question through a model of collaborative practice that categorises partnership connections, explores professional expectations and understandings required to enable successful partnerships at a local level, and suggests teachers and senior leaders can influence the extent to which the school librarian is integrated into school-wide curriculum planning and teaching to benefit student learning.

2. Overview of the research

As part of a comprehensive 3-year New Zealand study, we investigated the impact on information and disciplinary literacy skills of senior secondary students by intentionally integrating information literacy into pedagogy and the curriculum through collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships.

The research supporting this study included a national survey of teachers and librarians (2017) and multiple 2-year action research case studies involving teacher–librarian partnerships in six mid–low decile schools (2018–2019). The details of this research are provided elsewhere: the survey in Emerson et al. (2018, 2019), and Macaskill and Greenhow (2021); and the teacher–librarian partnerships in Johnstone et al. (2021), Cross et al. (2021), and Kean et al. (2021). We provide here an overview of our key strategies for enhancing collaboration between teachers and librarians in schools.

Our survey enabled us to understand perceptions of the role of the school library and librarians, and confirmed the international findings, showing that New Zealand schools tend to underutilise and marginalise them (Emerson et al., 2018, 2019). We then formed multiple case studies of teacher–librarian partnerships in six provincial secondary schools, integrating librarians into the teaching team for 2 years. We conducted intensive professional development for our teachers and librarians using the IL Spaces model of information literacy (see Figure 1), to conceptualise information literacy as foundational to disciplinary knowledge in a wide range of disciplines (Emerson et al., 2021).

To guide our thinking and actions, we adapted Montiel-Overall’s 2005 model of teacher–librarian collaboration (see Figure 2) and were able to establish what interactions or indicators help develop a productive, mutually satisfying professional collaboration, where disciplinary content learning and information literacy skills instruction are integrated to improve student achievement.

Montiel-Overall characterises collaboration as:

a trusting, working relationship between two or more equal participants involved in shared thinking, shared planning, and shared creation of integrated instruction. Through a shared vision and shared objective, student learning opportunities are created that integrate subject content and information literacy by co-planning, co-implementing, and co-evaluating. (2005, p. 5)

We saw this as a realisable ideal, keeping in mind the model had to work within assessment-dominant environments, where disciplines are largely siloed and finding opportunities for educators and librarians to negotiate collaborative partnerships is always challenging. Our aim was to shift our teacher–librarian relationships from co-ordinated (Type 1 or 2) to collaborative (Type 3 or 4). As a result of our 2-year partnerships, all but one of our 14 collaborations enacted through eight subjects successfully moved from co-ordinated to collaborative. We combined our findings from these partnerships with the results of our survey and key literature on teacher–librarian relationships to develop a model that defines the enablers to shift co-ordinating relationships between teachers and librarians from co-operative (siloed or “as needed”) to collaborative (shared or integrated—see Figure 2).

Figure 1. The IL Spaces model of information literacy

Figure 2. Types of teacher–librarian collaborative relationships
(adapted from Montiel-Overall, 2005)

3.A model of teacher–librarian partnerships

Our full model of the factors that enable the shift to collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships categorises factors at the national, local (school), and interpersonal level (the partnership itself) and is provided in Emerson et al. (2021). Here we focus on the local and partnership factors—things that schools and teachers can do to shift the role of the librarian and more fully integrate information literacy instruction into the senior curriculum.

3.1 Local factors—what the school can do

The local (school) environment has a major role to play in enabling effective teacher–librarian collaboration. Mardis (2017, p. xvii) comments:

Despite the countless models and studies of collaborations between classroom teachers and school librarians, the consistent conclusion seems to be that the particular school context dictates the presence of any style of collaborative culture. School librarians have not often been able to establish collaborative relationships in environments where working together is not valued or supported.

Similarly, D’Orio (2019, para. 7) comments: “The principal is more responsible for a quality library program than anyone in the building.”

This was confirmed by the qualitative data from our surveys where multiple librarians described attempts to initiate collaborative relationships with teachers or departments being limited by an unsympathetic environment (Emerson et al., 2018). Others spoke of attempting multiple methods to engage senior management, without success. In one of our partnerships, the proactive, highly trained librarian, who played a very active role in initiating and sustaining successful collaborative partnerships with multiple teachers in a range of disciplines, had her role seriously constrained by a new principal with a very conservative view of the role of the library.

But, equally, school management can facilitate a view of the librarian as a valued information expert with a role to play in the delivery of the curriculum. To promote successful collaborative teacher–librarian relationships in their school, senior management can:

communicate the value of the library as an information space, and promote collaboration

actively involve library staff in staff meetings and curriculum planning, with the librarian being recognised as possessing a set of unique professional skills and the library being viewed primarily as a place to learn and research

make connections between literacies, research within the curriculum, and the expertise of the librarian

put in place employment conditions for library staff that enable them to contribute as an information literacy expert in the life of the school (e.g., requirement to be trained, hours of work beyond school hours).

The latter point is critical. One librarian comment in our survey summarises this:

As support staff, I have limited hours, and attend staff meetings etc. in my own, unpaid time. Although I am a NZ qualified librarian, I am sometimes seen as ‘less’ than a teacher and treated as ‘parent help’. I am sometimes not included in staff emails or updates even though I am ‘staff’. I would like to be kept in the loop as to what topics are coming up so I can plan. I have to ask every month—I am not automatically included in the overview ... Librarians should be included in the planning of all study topics—usually I am kept in the dark—not deliberately but just overlooked.

A key role for senior management is to change attitudes and beliefs about the role and capability of the librarian, the role of information literacy in the disciplines, and the information literacy capabilities of students. Attitudes and beliefs, especially important in the local context, are notoriously difficult to shift (Martinez et al., 2001). Our survey showed that librarians work hard to shift attitudes and beliefs to enable collaboration, often without success. Instead, principals and senior leaders need to be instrumental in shaping attitudes and beliefs to enable effective collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships and ensure librarians are viewed as educational partners in their school community (Baker, 2016; D’Orio, 2019).

While senior management are best positioned to enable collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships, senior teachers may be able to effect change from the bottom up. We observed from our case studies that, when a single teacher or small group of teachers worked collaboratively with librarians and then promoted this style of working with their peers, there could be significant uptake from other teachers, with a consequent change in attitudes, beliefs, and practice (Garrison & FitzGerald, 2019). This was demonstrated in one of our schools when a highly motivated senior teacher promoted teacher–librarian partnerships to his peers, resulting in long-term positive changes to the role of the librarian in the school (Johnstone et al., 2021).

3.2 Partnership factors—what teachers and librarians can do

The personal and professional attributes of individuals within a teacher–librarian relationship are critical to the nature of the relationship. Our survey suggests that, although librarians are more likely to be the initiators of collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships (Kammer et al., 2021), the most critical party is the teacher, with many librarians commenting that they are unlikely to achieve effective partnerships without active teacher interest:

It still comes down too much to individual teachers—some are good at collaborating with the library and some just don’t still. The barriers are the teachers who don’t understand the value of what a librarian can give them and the necessity of students learning information skills at this stage of their lives. (Librarian, survey participant)

The critical factor is the nature of teacher engagement. Our case studies suggest that, when a teacher views the librarian as support staff, and the teacher is the sole determinant of the role the librarian can play in relation to student learning (e.g., the librarian is there to promote reading, find resources for me), full utilisation of the librarian’s expertise is unlikely.

But in teacher-initiated partnerships where the teacher is open to learning about information literacy and recognises or is open to discovering the expertise of the librarian, Type 3 or 4 collaborative relationships are highly possible, even in a school environment that does not support such partnerships. The nature of partnership then drives the purpose of the collaboration, process and structure, and communication strategies. One of our teachers commented on beginning a dialogue with his school librarian:

When an opportunity came up to work with L, our school librarian, in the area of information literacy, I jumped at it. I could see straight away the potential for her to help out in areas in which I am not strong: for example, using databases … Our first step was to sit down and have a chat about how it would work. I gave [the librarian] a copy of the standard and the assessment and she explained what she could do to help out. The ideas she had were far beyond what I had considered. Clearly her expertise was far greater than I had imagined. She had resources on reliability, on referencing, had lessons prepared on finding sources, using databases, and tips on how to search to get more relevant results. (Kean et al., 2021, p. 157)

This teacher, coming into the relationship open to the librarian’s expertise, was able to extend his view of the possibilities through open conversation and then work together with the librarian in the classroom.

In successful Type 3 or 4 collaborative relationships:

relationships are defined by mutual respect, understanding, and trust

there is a willingness to learn and engage in professional activities differently and a fluid approach to responsibilities

the purpose and process are co-created, clear to all, and communicated well

partners recognise and share responsibilities, knowledge, and design in a mutually respectful environment.

A next-steps approach for schools

We return, then, to our initial question: What would it take for collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships to flourish in Aotearoa New Zealand secondary schools?

The current national conditions for libraries in New Zealand schools default to co-ordinated teacher–librarian relationships, where the librarian is siloed or just contacted on an “as needed” basis. To effect a systemic national change, there would need to be the political will, requiring multi-factorial stars to align. While we advocate for this, in the meantime change is possible at the local level through school leaders and teachers initiating professional collaborative partnerships with their librarians and developing the culture that allows them to embed and thrive.

There are strong reasons to do this. Our research demonstrates that collaborative teacher–librarian relationships impact on outcomes for students—a matter of vital importance to schools. All our teachers reported more student engagement with assessment tasks, better critical thinking, and improved engagement with information, and many raised their success rates for the National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA):

In previous years, students had often come up with great topics and then struggled to find relevant information. Consequently, they had to dumb down their topics to access relevant information, and their engagement dissolved. This … cohort was able to access the relevant information. The topics were a lot wider and the research was a lot deeper. Where students had just been scraping over the threshold for an Achieved, they were now demonstrating solid success at this level. Where students had previously been just making it to Merit and Excellence standards, they were now smashing it out of the park. In essence they were delving much more deeply into more complex topics. (Kean et al., 2021, p. 158)

Given the evidence relating to the impact of teacher–librarian collaborations on student outcomes, school leaders and teachers can effect local factors to encourage teacher–librarian collaboration. Here are some achievable steps our research suggests can be catalysts for change.

1.Teachers can initiate conversations with their librarians, asking their advice on how they might deepen their students’ engagement with information for a specific standard and allow the librarians enough time to demonstrate possibilities.

2.A senior leader can champion the school library and librarian, engaging the librarian as an information expert. A whole-of-school approach to information literacy is recommended (Whitehead, 2009).

3.Librarians can run professional development workshops (Baker, 2016; Clephane, 2014) that demonstrate the information literacy expertise they can provide and resources available to staff and students and include hands-on opportunities for staff to engage with these resources in a discipline-specific way. The Information Literacy Skills Framework (White, 2021) can be used to illustrate how information literacy skills can be integrated into the curriculum.

4.When collaborations do take place, senior management should be advised (Kammer et al., 2021). Positive outcomes of such collaborations should also be communicated to senior management as part of the endeavour to shift attitudes and beliefs about the potential contribution and role of the library staff.

We know that teacher–librarian collaborations impact student outcomes. We need more evidence of exemplary collaborative practice in New Zealand secondary schools, using our model (Emerson et al., 2021) to shift the conditions that keep our expert librarians siloed and silenced. We need more case studies highlighting how information literacy skills can be incorporated into lesson plans to alter teacher perceptions about the benefit of time spent in collaboratively planning with a knowledgeable para-professional librarian (White, 2018, p. 9). We have expertise in our schools that can make a difference to our teachers and students: let’s start this mahi together.

Nāu te raurau, nāku te raurau, ka kī te kete o tātou.

With your knowledge and my knowledge our basket will be full.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the TLRI for their funding of this research, and Dr Rose Hipkins in particular, who has been an invaluable mentor for this project. We would also like to thank Dr Angela Feekery and Mr Ken Kilpin for their contributions to this article—and acknowledge the work of all our wonderful team. As researchers, teachers, and librarians, they have all brought their varying expertise and open minds to our mahi and have stepped out of their professional comfort zones to find new ways to work together. Ngā mihi maioha, lovely people—ka pai!

More information

More information about our project can be found on the IL Spaces webpage and in a new book just released by NZCER Press: Emerson, L., Kilpin K., & Lamond, H. (Eds.). (2021). Literacy across the divide: Information literacy as the key to transition.

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Lisa Emerson (corresponding author) is director of Teaching and Learning for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey University. She researches in the fields of academic, scientific, and information literacy and was the principal investigator on this project.

Email: l.emerson@massey.ac.nz

Senga White is an information knowledge specialist and educator. She is currently a research librarian in Invercargill and has a long history of leaderships in libraries in schools.