Every journey starts from ‘home’ and mine has been a small alternative school for over a decade as a parent and casual relief teacher then as teacher-in-the-library. I was not raised in the Australian school system nor did I ever teach in its mainstream (having come from Canada).
When I began in the library, I received no written role statement, just asked to take on a part time position to sort out the library problems. My start was a bit ‘tabula rasa’.
There had not been a librarian at the school for 3 or 4 years. The previous librarian was a parent (trained lib) who did it on a voluntary basis before taking on the role of school council president. Hundreds of resources were not placed on the school catalogue. The teachers bought resources and kept them in their classrooms or stacked them in the library office in boxes where they were often forgotten.
I took my role from what I saw the needs of the school were at that time. The school needed:
- Information resource access assistance (especially with the catalogue and the Internet),
- Literature promotion,
- Collection maintenance,
- Information technology assistance
Most of my time in the beginning was spent managing the library with very little put into the teaching aspect of the role. I do wonder if this has made my role at the school more difficult for my collegues to understand, accept and utilize.
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