SLLC Snapshot

Beaver Creek Elementary is a high English Language Learner (ELL) inner city school in a lower socioeconomic area located on the Surrey/Delta border.   It has a dual-track Punjabi immersion program serving grades five, six and seven.  It draws five hundred students from multi-family homes having one or more basement suites, an Aboriginal complex and low-income government subsidized housing.  Many rental homes have extended families living in two to three rooms resulting in shared accommodation between family members.  Because of the lack of space, few children at this school own books personally.   As well, few attend the Public Library and therefore the school Student Library Learning Commons (SLLC) is their only exposure to the world of libraries and information tanks.

The school relies on the role of the teacher librarian (TL) heavily to accomplish the many challenges this school is faced with.  The role supports most learners through research, reading strategies, Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) and coding activities.  The SLLC is a place where students come to access print or digital resources, work in small groups or use the available technology, as there is no longer a designated computer lab.  The TL, Jane Kamimura, is a leader in demonstrating new skills to students and teachers and has had a long-standing relationship with the school.  In previous years at Beaver Creek, Jane had also worked as a classroom teacher and an early literacy intervention specialist teacher.   The SLLC program seeks to collaborate not only with students and teachers, but with the larger community as it hosts a preschool every Wednesday morning and has to be physically transformed for this to happen.  The TL wants to build community relationships, supports this program and travels when necessary to classrooms to help accommodate this goal.  Although the SLLC has few other connections to different groups of people, this relationship demonstrates its ability to cooperate within a larger group context. (Bundy 2002)

The Beaver Creek SLLC works hard on it’s own to promote literacy in the school community and has few relationships with other organizations to help accomplish this.  It promotes few programs offered by the Public Library due to the high ELL nature of the school.  The TL is able to make use of a few services the public library offers including the yearly visit promoting the Summer Reading program and the Reading Buddies program for students in grades two to four, who need extra practice reading.  As Jane has extensive experience in early literacy intervention she is able to help make personal connections for the families who need the support.  Once per year Beaver Creek hosts it’s own community program to draw families in for a night of reading fun called “Reading Nights”.  Children get to participate in a variety of reading and story telling activities and at the end of the event, get to choose a book to take home.   

Clientele regard the Beaver Creek SLLC as a friendly and welcoming space to be in.  Jane is a friendly person and makes people feel comfortable and welcome.  She opens the library when possible in the mornings, afternoons and lunchtimes for those who need a space to be or a place to work.  She also likes the students to have choice when it comes to seating arrangements, purchasing resources and furniture arrangement.  Her few monitors feel a sense of ownership when they get to help make these types of decisions.  Sometimes she purchases teacher requested material if she believes it will benefit the students as well.  Colleagues know she is available to co-plan and teach and she spends most time available collaborating with teachers.  She finds out what is happening in the classroom and chooses activities to do with her prep classes that will enforce the learning happening.   Jane is reliable, hardworking and her colleagues know and appreciate this about her.  Collaboration opportunities as Lambert writes, are meaningful and are working well for the students and the teachers at this SLLC. (Lambert, 2013)

With regards to advocacy of the SLLC program beyond the library walls, the TL promotes the use of the school website, digital resources, e-books and catalogue to her students by teaching them how to access them from home.  Like Lambert, she also notices students begin to use them independently at home or in the classroom after she has had the opportunity to share them one or more times.  She curates and updates the library website and promotes it’s use to the staff and students.  She includes many useful links to encourage further reading and research opportunities such as Tumble Books, Surrey Public Library, digital resource login info, bibliography template, dictionary website, internet safe teens, coding, top reading lists etc… If there are any changes, Jane communicates them to staff and students regularly.   She promotes new resources by introducing them to students and teachers and does book talks to promote student advisory.

The TL feels the budget is satisfactory now that many digital resources are district funded, but she is well aware of the aging collection with which she is faced.  Much replacing is necessary especially in the animal sciences and technology section and much weeding has yet to be done.  She receives 20-25% of the school learning resource budget and not much extra is earned through other revenues such as book fair proceeds.  They have had to go without due to the lack of parent participation in the Parent Advisory Committee.  The TL uses an excel spreadsheet to manage her budget expenses.  Most of her resource purchasing is done through United Library Services, Kids Books and Strong Nations.

The TL uses student request, replacement needs, journal publications, good literary blogs, publication company curriculum book lists and websites to help her make decisions about purchasing.  A dollar amount for each area is not yet defined as it is only her second year in the position.  She hasn’t utilized certain resources available to TL’s in the district that support her understanding of budget and purchases, but once she has, she feels she will have a better understanding of how she needs to allocate her funds in the future.  Jane is working towards purchasing missing or new books from popular series in both fiction and non-fiction that the students enjoy reading.  When making decisions on weeding materials, she deletes resources that do not support current research about including non-fiction text features for comprehension, are inauthentic, inaccurate, uninteresting, old, or uncirculated.  Many teachers use the Reading and Writing Power programs so she wants to buy books that support them in non-fiction text features as well as in curriculum content.  Her goal is to create a balanced collection by seeking to address as many different types of interests and backgrounds as she can. (IFLA School Library Guidelines, 2015)  The SLLC has a large collection of dual language picture books that helps support this goal.  In order to determine authenticity of aboriginal resources she consults the Aboriginal Resource Centre catalogue before purchasing.  When managing circulation, the TL oversees resource check-out but completes check-in on her own.  Resource Based Learning was a new term for her and I don’t believe she understood it’s full meaning as she said her use of it was limited but when I learned of the various ways she incorporated information literacy, I felt it’s presence was there.

This TL has a lot of work mostly in her own hands as she hasn’t much help in the way of extra personnel.  Johnson’s paper discusses how Library programs need good support of two types, clerical and technical and this one has neither. (Johnson, 2012)  Without clerks, techs or parent volunteers, Jane struggles at times to get things accomplished in a way she would like.  As a result the SLLC suffers from the loss of additional proceeds it could be earning from hosting book fairs as I had mentioned earlier.  She has had a difficult time recruiting reliable monitors this year for some reason.  Luckily she has much assistance from one of the learning support teachers that has an adjoining office to the library and is also a tech-savvy individual, as is the TL. 

Although the layout of the SLLC is open and inviting it has it’s challenges.  It’s location is in the centre of the school with hallways on either side.  A problem with it’s design is that some of the walls do not meet the ceiling and it can be loud at times as noise travels over them when classes are passing by.  One length of the room has a sliding glass door that can be opened all the way and is a versatile feature, but can also be distracting at times when people are walking by.  The TL appreciates the amount of space and the open concept design of the SLLC, but she is also faced with a lot of work covering up bookshelves and moving things around in order to accommodate the Wednesday morning preschool class, which is right in the middle of her week.  Lastly, the SLLC is jammed with unused teacher resources on it’s shelves that she wishes to relocate immediately. 

The Beaver Creek SLLC was the recipient of a learning commons grant of

$25 000.00 in 2011 and was able to purchase twenty iPads, six Mac Books, an Apple TV, projector cart and large screen.  Unfortunately some of the Mac Books were distributed to classroom teachers and she is working to regain them for the SLLC purposes.  They were also able to apply for a renovation at that time but were unaware of this.  Jane would like to pursue this avenue now as she feels it would benefit their challenges of trying to be many things for many people and to make those weekly changes a little more seamless for her.  

The TL uses technology purposefully in the SLLC either for research, class projects or as a way for students to create story responses.  She feels that because she doesn’t find her students to be tech-savvy, she is able to stay ahead of them in this regard.  With the additional coding resources given to each Surrey School, she is able to use these materials to give students additional learning opportunities during collaboration blocks.  Although her students are able to use personal devices well for pleasure (Prensky, 2001), they lack communication and digital research skills necessary in the classroom.

The TL at Beaver Creek is forward thinking and proactive when it comes to professional development and leadership.  She completed her library diploma years before she became a TL.  She serves on the school reading committee, Surrey Teachers Library Association, is trained in early literacy and math intervention.   She was a part of the committee who applied for the learning commons grant even though she wasn’t the TL at the time.  She takes part in as many workshops as possible that are designed to teach TLs new skills.  She has taken part in robotics training, Discovery Education, and an inquiry project on non-fiction reading strategies to name a few.  These are all good examples of how her key position enables her to teach others in her learning community. (Dees, Mayer, Morrin, Willis, 2010)  She often pulls classes in without a moments notice ready to collaborate or help teach a concept.

The SLLC at Beaver Creek is working towards promoting literacy information, communication and technology skills to students, staff and school community.  Her greatest challenge is lack of time to teach fundamental digital research and word processing skills to students as she only sees them once per week and it is not enough time to have them transfer these skills into their classroom work.  For this reason most of her early intermediate prep class time is devoted to teaching these skills which is appreciated by teachers greatly.  Her awareness of TL supports is increasing and she will be working towards creating a budget that meets the needs of her students both today and tomorrow.  Jane has clearly demonstrated to me that her experience with her position and her knowledge in key areas proves valuable to the Beaver Creek school community and the SLLC.