Collaborating With Teacher Librarians to Support Adolescents’ Literacy and Literature Learning

Abstract

The author explores teacher librarians’ ideas about teacher collaborations around literacy and literature learning, roles in collaborations, and the characteristics of good collaborations. Productive and strong collaborations between librarians in schools and their teacher colleagues can enhance students’ learning experiences and outcomes. Semistructured interview data were collected from teacher librarians at 25 schools. The author reports on teacher librarians’ identification of a range of barriers to collaboration in contemporary literacy‐learning contexts and explores the multiple roles that teacher librarians may adopt in collaborative relationships, identifying 11 characteristics of strong collaborations as identified by teacher librarians, which encompass diverse interpersonal qualities and professional activities. Findings offer ideas to enhance the quality of teacher–librarian collaboration, improving literacy outcomes for adolescent students.

School Librarians as Literacy Educators Within a Complex Role

“…There is, however, interest in how teacher and school librarians may collaborate with their classroom teacher colleagues for educative purposes, including to promote literacy and literature (e.g. Merga, 2019b). While there is mention of aligning literary texts with curricular purpose, the emphasis in library-based reading instruction may be predominantly on fostering reading engagement, similar to Cremin and Swann (2016) findings around voluntary reading groups in schools.…”

Practices and Barriers of Inter-Professional Collaboration with Teacher-librarians and Teachers: A Content Analysis

“…Craig (2013); Farmer, ( 2007 Teachers' workload. Craig's (2013), Lo and Chiu (2015), Merga (2019); Willis, Bland, Hughes, and Burns (2013).…”

“…Merga (2019) reported that collaboration with secondary school teachers could pose a barrier because of heavy teacher workloads prevented the kind of relationships necessary for collaboration. In support of Merga's (2019) experience, Lo and Chiu's (2015) findings revealed that if practicing school librarians also had heavy classroom teaching loads, the librarians tended to feel distracted and unable to focus their efforts in the core library duties, quality library services, and the associated information literacy skills instruction. However, Lo and Chiu (2015) also reported that "an appropriate small amount of classroom teaching would enable the school librarians to better understand the students' learning needs as well as the new changes in the curricula" (p. 9).…”

“…Inter-professional collaboration is seen as a best practice approach to integrate the school library into the schools' curriculum. As pedagogical practices emerge to meet the needs of the dynamic society, information professionals have recognized that teacher-librarian and teacher collaboration is a key component of the teaching-learning process and a critical tool in the advancement of student learning (Merga, 2019). Inter-professional collaboration allows educators to use their specialized knowledge and unique skills together for the benefit of students.…”

Sustainability of Lesson Study on The Lesson Study for Learning Community (LSLC) Program in Batu City East Java Province

“…Development of Lesson Study (LS) is based on the didactic situation theory which has the hypothesis that teachers' professional knowledge is developed through action, interaction, formulation, validation, and didactic institutionalization in their learning environment (Wood, 2018). LS reveals a collaborative collaboration among the teachers and other education activists (Chenault, 2017;Gutierez, 2015;Merga, 2019), in which it focuses on the teacher professional learning and students' learning (Coenders & Verhoef, 2019;Purwanti & Hatmanto, 2019;Uştuk & Çomoğlu, 2019). The scope of the LS more leads to ontology on the learning difficulties (Norwich & Jones, 2012;Rappleye & Komatsu, 2017).…”