The benefit of having a school library with librarians who upskill continually cannot be overstated. Education Gazette hears from school librarians about how their role has changed to support teaching and learning.
Librarian Beverley Harrison at Lindisfarne College supports ākonga to navigate online content and filter out misinformation.
Research tells us that school libraries and library staff can have a big impact on student achievement, positively affecting reading test scores and attitudes to learning.
To stay relevant, and to support schools in a world where change is the only constant, library staff access regular professional development.
Beverley Harrison is the school librarian at Lindisfarne College, a state integrated school for boys in Hastings. She says the essence of the school librarian’s mahi is unchanged, but that the environment of information and research is unrecognisable from even 10 years ago.
“People think of librarians as operating in beautiful, quiet libraries, surrounded by books, but that’s not our job. Our job is about people. And when people come in with queries, whether it’s a teenager looking for information or staff wanting help with their professional development, we respond.
“In that regard, the work hasn’t changed at all, but what has changed is the resources that we have available to us. Keeping up is a challenge, and you must cast a critical eye.”
“One of the most important jobs I do is curating information for students to make it more accessible to them. Author Neil Gaiman described librarians as ‘knowledge navigators’ because information was difficult to find. He said it was ‘like a flower growing in a desert – you had a long way to walk, but a librarian could take you to the flower. Now it’s more like flowers growing in the Amazon jungle and you’re trying to find a specific flower’.
“We are still looking for the flower, but the environment in which we’re looking for it has changed dramatically. We’ve got to keep up to date with technology and resources so we can find the information our community needs.”
Beverley says recent PLD she has accessed through the School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (SLANZA) has been especially helpful. The course, A Bit Sus, is targeted directly at school librarians who want to know in a limited timeframe how best to support ākonga as they navigate the internet.
SLANZA offer a number of opportunities for PLD and networking, but what is especially important is that it is created for school librarians, by school librarians.
“The online environment is extraordinarily challenging for young people,” says A Bit Sus creator, Mandy Henk.
“They are up against highly trained, well-paid, and well-organised disinformation campaigns led by both state and non-state actors. It’s also very challenging for the adults around them. There is an incredible risk of young people being led down dangerous rabbit holes and even into radicalisation.”
Mandy says New Zealand is not well set up to do the necessary “mitigation work”.
“Unfortunately, while there are useful policy solutions that need to be implemented, they are not ones that New Zealand can do alone. It requires international coordination and cooperation for that to happen.”
Mandy says education, one of the levers available to New Zealand, has been shown to be very effective.
“Finland has a population that’s been subject to highly coordinated and intense Russian disinformation campaigns for a very long time. They invested very heavily in education starting in kindergarten and they’ve seen that that’s helped them to create a population that is resilient to this.
“But they took a lot of time and a lot of money to make that happen and unfortunately, we are going to have to do the same.”
Mandy is the chief executive at Tohatoha, an organisation working to counter the spread of misinformation in ways that rebuild trust, social cohesion, and support the spread of evidence-based interventions.
“If you think about what happened in the US, for example, and you look at the way in which you’ve had specific media outlets penetrate, and radicalise folks, that’s what we’re really worried about.”
The first cohort to dive into A Bit Sus, 15 school librarians from across the motu, completed the 10-week course online during term 1, exploring “best practices for supporting youth and schools in countering misinformation and preventing its spread”.
The course includes an escape room activity designed to have participants personally experience various misinformation tactics and thereby realise their own vulnerabilities.
Interactive puzzles address key issues such as misleading data, deepfake images and videos, and social media bots.
Mandy says the appeal of the escape room is its capability for improving young people’s awareness of the spread of misinformation.
Course participants were greatly surprised by some of the lessons.
“We covered all sorts of things such as what misinformation is, and the difference between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. I hadn’t heard of malinformation until I did this course,” says Beverley.
Misinformation is when people put out or pass on information that is incorrect, but they do it for reasons that are not malign. Disinformation is when it is passed on for malign reasons, to deliberately mislead people, and malinformation is when the information is correct, but it is passed on with malign intent. An example of this would be circulating a sex tape with the intent to discredit or embarrass; the content is real or true but the reason for circulation is malign.
Participants also looked at what makes people vulnerable to misinformation, for example, confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of existing beliefs.
Strategies for combating misleading and malign information were discussed, for example, debunking and prebunking.
“Debunking is proving the misinformation wrong, but it has been proven to be very ineffective because once people have taken on ideas, they are very reluctant to discard them,” explains Beverley.
“So prebunking becomes important, when you give people information and make sure that your message is clear and out there so that when the misinformation comes along, they say, ‘Ah-ha, but I’ve heard about that already’.”
Another technique that the librarians found to be very powerful is lateral reading, the act of verifying what you’re reading as you’re reading it. This is in stark contrast to vertical reading, in which the reader gathers information from one source only and assumes it to be reliable and valid.
Julia Smith, librarian at Kerikeri High School, says learning about vertical reading “completely flipped my idea of web evaluation on its head”.
“The use of lateral reading to verify credible resources and authors made complete sense in this digital age. I had to immediately alter my teaching of information literacy skills to incorporate lateral reading, algorithms, and misinformation. It’s a fascinating topic made more relevant given the protest that was unfolding in Wellington at the time.”
Delivery of A Bit Sus was funded by grants from the New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme, InternetNZ, and the US Embassy in New Zealand.
There are many other opportunities for school librarians to upskill. This year, the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (LIANZA), and SLANZA established a new tertiary grants project. This is designed to encourage more qualified library and information professionals working in the sector, and attract younger people into tertiary training opportunities in libraries.
Rachel Esson, national librarian, Te Pouhuaki National Library says the grants are an exciting opportunity to address skills gaps, particularly in mātauranga Māori and digital skills.
“I’m looking forward to seeing a wide range of people, from different backgrounds and experience, take up these grants and bring their perspectives to our workforce,” she says.
The grants are available to cover tertiary qualification fees and other costs to help people get a new library and information qualification. This includes qualifications relevant to public, school, tertiary, national and special libraries.
For more information on the tertiary grants, visit librariesaotearoa.org.nz(external link).
For more information, and to register for the second cohort of A Bit Sus, visit tohatoha.org.nz(external link).
SLANZA provide opportunities for school library and information professionals to develop their professional skills and network across the motu, in a way that is expressly relevant to the school and kura environment. 
Utilising SLANZA and LIANZA PLD, school librarians can access online training, professional registration, national conferences and networking, and study grants.
SLANZA offer yearly study grants to members that cover the cost of one tertiary paper or course. More information is at slanza.org.nz/study-grants(external link) SLANZA members also benefit from a partnership with Open Polytechnic and receive a 10 percent discount off all library qualifications and currently two papers are offered fees-free. Email jsmith@kerikerihigh.ac.nz for more information.
Created by school librarians for school librarians, SLANZA Connected online learning modules are popular with members. Three free modules are run a year with up to 60 participants in each cohort. This year's topics of study are Gender and Sexuality in School Libraries, School Library Advocacy, and The School Archivist.
SLANZA Whakaohoohoo National Conference, which migrated online because of pandemic restrictions, received an unprecedented 530 views of the presentations.
Twice a year, the SLANZA online magazine, Collected, is published, showcasing the best library programmes and practices within Aotearoa, written by school librarians for their colleagues.
At a regional level, SLANZA offers professional development events at least once a term.
LIANZA provide opportunities for library and information professionals to be involved in professional development, and many of these are free events.
During 2021 and 2022, school librarians have been able to access LIANZA’s evaluation and impact programme which supports library professionals to work out what exactly needs to be evaluated, how to measure what matters and ways to communicate effectively about the impact their library makes for their school or community.
Esther Casey, a teacher librarian at Sylvia Park School, used the opportunity to research what difference the school library made to ākonga.
“The project aimed to find out which of the resources, services and programmes in our school library, Te Puna Ngoi, make the most difference in the target aspirations of hauora (wellbeing) and pakirehua (inquiry).
“The intended outcome of this project was to inform my planning and to be able to tell an evidenced story of the benefits of our school library to our senior leadership team and board.”
Esther engaged two focus groups of students in Years 4–6 who gave the initial rounds of data for the project, then drove development of the evaluation tool to use with senior students.
Together, Esther and ākonga learned that the three things from Te Puna Ngoi that make a difference to most students’ hauora are:
The three things from Te Puna Ngoi that make a difference to most students’ pakirehua are:
Other professional development events include online events, with recent examples including a webinar called the Power of Picture Books, the LIANZA Children and Young Person network (held every two months), and a webinar about neurodiversity and dyslexia in libraries.
LIANZA also offers professional registration so school and other library and information professionals have a process where their PLD can be recognised.
Chief executive Ana Pickering says registration shows peers and employers that library and information professionals have demonstrated a commitment to professional standards, and to developing and enhancing competence.
The LIANZA conference, held every two years, is another PLD opportunity for school librarians. It is the largest gathering of library and information professionals in Aotearoa New Zealand, bringing together more than 500 delegates from New Zealand and around the world. The next LIANZA conference is in Ōtautahi Christchurch next year.
For more information about LIANZA support and resources, visit lianza.org.nz(external link).
Support for school libraries and librarians is also available from Read NZ Te Pou Muramura. Previously known as the NZ Book Council, this is a small arts organisation dedicated to promoting reading for pleasure.
Read NZ Te Pou Muramura runs programmes and campaigns to research reading habits and barriers to reading, to advocate for the importance of reading, and to encourage New Zealanders to read.
They offer rich programmes to schools. One of these is ‘Writers in Schools’ in which authors and illustrators are matched with a teacher, classroom, or school. These visits happen year-round across the motu, and schools can request different sorts of writers such as poets, journalists, adult novelists.
Another is ‘Writers in Communities’, standalone projects lasting a term or longer, within a school or cultural community, and often the result is a book of published writing from the community.
‘Hooked on NZ Books’ welcomes readers aged 12 to 19. They are supplied with a book written by a New Zealander, and they have one month to submit a review. Readers are then supported with the editing process before the review is published online.
‘The School Library’ also delivers new books supplied by publishers to teachers and school librarians who supply a short review. These are compiled and published in a bi-monthly newsletter.
For more information, visit read.nz.org(external link).
BY Education Gazette editors
Education Gazette | Tukutuku Kōrero, reporter@edgazette.govt.nz
Posted: 12:20 pm, 10 August 2022
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