PNLA Quarterly, Vol. 62 No.4 Summer 1998

School Library Media Center: A Place For Learning

The library program must serve as a catalyst in building a learning community in the school that nurtures and provokes students to make meaning as they develop concepts and strategies that will last them for a lifetime.
-Barbara K. Stripling, American Association School Librarians

American schools need strong community support in meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century. Many citizens claim that schools just do not work. Others insist that we need to get back to basics since reading and writing are the most important skills for students to have. We daily learn that funding sources needed for library positions, library collections and libraries are declining with budget shortfalls.

Educational restructuring is often requested from the public to ensure that learning is worthwhile, meaningful, and significant. School librarians can be found involved in change for school reform. This is done if there is a clear vision of what variables cause authentic achievement in students.

In a recent School Library Media Quarterly article, Stripling (1995) suggests three elements are essential in improving learning through library programs and teaching activities:

1. The learner constructs or produces, rather than reproduces, meaning or knowledge. Students need to acquire a knowledge base, be taught to use facts to draw conclusions, and create a new paradigm.
2. The learner pursues disciplined inquiry. Students must apply a process for learning that is suitable - research process to learn historical concepts, or study scientific method to understand science investigations. Librarians must collaborate with teachers in facilitating the process for learning. Students cannot achieve unless taught how to learn. Librarians must teach information literacy into every aspect of the curriculum.
3. The learner discovers value in learning beyond school. Librarians can participate in designing assessment products that help define what is learned. Librarians must provide physical access and teach intellectual access to information beyond the walls of a library building. In the Parent Education Campaign of the American Library Association statements are made that the Internet is the most exciting tool for learning since the printing press. School librarians can help parents and children learn to use this technology and make wise choices. It isn't the technology but how you use it that makes a difference. That's why it is important that parents teach their children to make wise choices, whether it's about books, movies, TV or the Internet.

   Student achievement is very important to the public. School librarians need to work not only with every teacher but with parents as well to design learning tasks that require deeper understanding, intellectual conversations, shared learning, and connections to the community and world beyond the school. The School Library Media Center can be a place that richly complements student achievement goals, but it must be well endowed with new and current resources, adequate manpower, and decent electronic ramp support.

   Literature Cited

   Stripling, Barbara K. 1995. Learning-Centered Libraries: Implications from Research. School Library Media Quarterly, 23(3):163-70.

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