You’ve been there, right?

It’s finally Friday night, you're utterly beat, and you’re looking at that stack of marking, while checking your online course calendar for those screaming deadlines. And in a cool, measured response you…

….Turn on the TV and settle down to watch Under the Tuscan Sun. As you are reaching for that buttered popcorn however, you realize that although you have put aside your course, it has not put you aside. You recognize that the reoccurring theme of the movie is presented through the metaphor of building a train track, which we first see when Martini consoles Frances, who is overwhelmed by her impulsive decision to buy a run down Tuscan villa. He encourages her with his story of risk and faith:

Between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. It is an impossibly steep, very high part of the mountains. They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come.

Likewise, the School Libraries Worldwide Journal along with Valenza & Johnson’s articles are a call to both faith and risk. Valenza & Johnson criticize a “lack of urgency” in education’s collective response to the social, economic, and technological shifts that have created new learning tracks. They imply that education communities have neither the faith nor the vision to commit to travelling down these tracks, let alone design the blueprints for building new tracks. They call for a response to an emerging digital divide that reveals gaps in students’ abilities to interpret and create quality information.

Asselin & Doiron suggest engaging students in their preferred learning environments while responding to their need for higher of literacy skills. The track-building is going on at a furious pace and while students have travelled far down those tracks, they are slowed down by their forced layovers at the ill-equipped school “stations” that are unable or unwilling to respond to their literacy needs.

Todd also calls us educators to “harness momentum” rather than “fight it”. For example, he suggests that while students’ use of social networking sites is increasing, schools are reluctant to tap into their educational value.

The last four articles of the journal are how to suggestions of tools for building the tracks down which school library trains could be rolling. Second life libraries, free Web 2.0 tools, open sourced journals, embracing popular culture lit and video games are explored as means to engage both digital natives and immigrants in the “knowledge commons that intersects with and bridges the digital and print terrain” ( p.30).

Implications for Teaching & Learning

So we have been given a crisis to consider, and some possible tools from which we could form customized solutions that respond to our own particular educational environments. Valenza recognizes the changing role of libraries to be both politically and economically driven and consequently calls her mission statement a manifesto, or a public call to action. Valenza’s manifesto did not incite this revolution; rather it is a response to a revolution that is already underway. And so it is with us educators.

So how might we respond? To be honest, my first sense was panic. Oh my gosh, build our own tracks for our local journey or get derailed onto a siding or worse, get left behind at a station that is about to be torn down.

After reading through the “how to” section of the journal however, I realized that there are so many ways to respond that we might be well served by initially taking a reflective pause. Implicit in Valenza’s call to action, is a call to leadership, which must begin within a framework of self-knowledge and a clear understanding of one’s capabilities and resources for an effective response to the crisis.

So where do we start?

While Valenza calls for both a shift in our thinking and for action, she does not cite one station from which educators must embark. But there is a call to a mindset to be shared by more than one solitary traveler. We need to assess what are the needs of our own educational communities and determine how can our skills and passion for new literacy can help meet those needs. We can individually advocate for a shift in thinking by demonstrating the potential of Web 2.0 tools within our own practice.

But ultimately the demand must come from our consumers. It is at this juncture where we may we well served to heed Seth Godin’s call to “train people to take intellectual initiative”. We must ask students what they like, what they have, and what they need. This is the economically driven part. But it is from this perspective that we can gather like-minded teachers, parents and students and encourage them to gain fluency and skill as we share applications that are initially personally satisfying to the users. This could be done through class or school websites, open houses, professional development days and our local Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium. As demand increases, the lobby for resources strengthens. This is the political part.

Therefore it is within our educational leadership roles that we may be able to collectively explore possible vision and mission statements for our schools that reflect a lived practice within the context of a response to a need. The goal of new literacies as suggested by Asselin & Doiron is transformative, seeking personal and social action. And if this task seems daunting for one lone traveller in a tech-challenged school, then consider this possible application:

Today my classmate Ruth, posted twitter lists for Haiti news. That prompted me to scan today’s Edmonton Journal. On the front page I saw the article about a local young woman, Sarah Wallace, who is staying in Haiti to help. I showed it to my daughter who had attended Bible school with Sarah’s brother. She then copied the story into her Facebook. In two weeks I could start my Semester Two Social Studies students with our own Haiti project. Sarah’s Facebook and Ruth’s postings can be my initial resources.

We will lay the tracks from there.

This is how track is built.

And we will choose to believe the train is not far behind.











References

http://informationfluency.wikispaces.com/You+know+you%27re+a+21st+century+librarian+if+.+.+.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1340000334/post/250011225.html
http://schoollibrariesworldwide-vol14no2.blogspot.com/
sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/.../the-future-of-the-library.html