Discussion - Librarian/Library/Learning Commons Role in the 21st Century School

Marc Crompton

I hope that I'm not stepping on toes to be the first to chime in here, but one of our course readings has prompted a string of questions in my head that I would love to get some feedback on.  The reading that I'm talking about is:

American Association of School Librarians. (2009). Empowering learners : Guidelines for school library media programs. Chicago, Ill.: American Association of School Librarians. 

I've written two blog posts on Empowering Learners so I won't go into too much detail.  Please feel free to visit my blog to follow through more fully.  I will say that I found the book to be a great relief in that it lends much greater clarity to my current role heading up a 8-12 library in a private school in Vancouver.  The job description that I inherited was very vague.  Given the history of the particular job in the school, the circumstances of my hire and the rapidly changing role of school librarians in general, this is not overly surprising.  The detail that Empowering Learners goes into helped me to clarify what I am doing right and where my weaknesses might be.  This I truly appreciate.

The big questions that came up in my mind are addressed in my blog but I would love to address here as well.  The first question(s) revolve around the degree with which school librarians and schools in general adhere to the AASL guidelines.  I am probably safe in saying that I may be the only person in my school that has read the document.  I certainly am not held accountable to it in any way.  Are there schools, districts or states that have elevated the guidelines to policy?  I know that we don't have a parallel document in Canada (nor a parallel organization any more) so I am unaware of it being used as policy anywhere.

My second, and more interesting question is more about the role of the Library/Learning Commons in general.  Empowering Learners often speaks of the Librarian being on a school administrative level.  This makes me wonder where the line between the role of librarian and school administrator lies.  This relates the building itself.  I have been involved in a school building master plan committee that is working with an amazing education building design firm.  Many of their example buildings tend to focus around commons areas.  My question to them was where the library function fits when the entire school is based around commons spaces.  One of the concepts that we discussed was that the library becomes ubiquitous in the same that information is ubiquitous.  The concise version of the question becomes where are, or are there, walls in a Learning Commons/21st Century School Library?  While walls restrict, they also help to define.  The more a school librarian's role is everywhere in the school, the harder it becomes to define the role.  I'm very curious to hear other thoughts.