Education librarians meeting and curriculum collections

Education librarians at academic institutions across Melbourne have begun meeting once a semester to share and discuss what they have been doing over the period. Tomorrow’s meeting is also going to focus on curriculum collections. By this we mean the type of material student teachers might use for professional practice, including school textbooks, children’s books of various kinds, audiovisual material, lesson planning material and so on. See the kind of material in our Curriculum Resources guide.

Some of the issues include: the question of whether it is the Library or the School itself is the most appropriate place to hold such material; whether the material is housed separately or incorporated into other library  collections (such as the general book collection); the types of material collected; how material is selected and acquired; how online learning objects are dealt with; how the role, function and importance of such collections has changed over time.

If you have any comments on any of this please let me know.

New libguide for VCE/VCAL program

We have just created a new libguide listing and linking catalogue entries for texts that support the VCE/VCAL programs at Carlton campus.

Copyright management service joins Library

It was recently announced that the Copyright Management Service will join the Library as of January 2009.

An article in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education refers the growing role of libraries in scholarly communication . The Library already has the Digitisation Service, of course, and we are also involved in the development of a research respository for RMIT. The Copyright folk will be a great asset to the range of services provided by the Library.

Diploma of VET Practice

Last night I gave a session to VET teachers undertaking the Diploma of VET Practice. It was only to be a short session and it needed to at least cover some of our key databases for material on instructional design, e-learning, problem-based learning, needs assessment.

One of my aims was to relate various skills learnt to aspects of “information literacy”. So we talked about the need to analyse a research topic and develop some search expressions, know what resources are available via our Search it listing, be able to search a couple of key resources and modify searches in light of intital results, use the advanced features of various databases, and access and manage the information. Along the way, there were questions on the best ways to keep up-to-date with current information, utlising Google Scholar and so on.

I was keen to emphasise the range of skills and knowledge needed to undertake the search process.  We hope that more teachers will involve us in helping their students with these skills also. As would be expected from a group like this, it was a great class and real pleasure to teach.

Q&A — Rachel Patrick

Thanks go to Rachel Patrick, new lecturer in teacher education, for agreeing to be this month’s Q&A subject.

What are your teaching/research interests?

Teaching interests:

• Anything to do with teacher education – the core subjects
• Social justice, difference and equity in education
• Indigenous education
• Socio-cultural contexts in education, and how education works (or doesn’t)
• Professional responsibilities and teaching ethics

Research interests

• Anything to do with teacher education – pre-service and early career teachers
• Teacher knowledge and identity formation (how teachers learn, how they make sense of their professional encounters and how professional identity forms)
• The roles and responsibilities of teacher educators in relation to (student) teacher knowledge and identity formation
• Equity, difference and social justice, how teachers negotiate the minefields, and how to challenge (student) teachers’ assumptions without alienating them
• Educational policy, in particular how (student) teachers negotiate educational reform in practice
• Post-structural and feminist approaches to research.

A favourite educationalist/author/theorist and why.

Multiple favourites – here are some:

• Brian Davis and Dennis Sumara on complexity in teacher education (as opposed to trying to simplify it)
• Ian Stronach and Deborah Britzman’s discussions of teacher identity formation as a negotiation of contradictory discourses, policies and practice
• Maggie MacLure for her deconstructions of “identity” and of “discourse”
• Laurel Richardson’s “writing as nomadic inquiry” as a process of data analysis
• Russell Bishop’s deconstruction and challenging of deficit theorizing of Indigenous students
• Paulo Freire for shaking up the status quo and challenging teachers to think beyond the “banking” method of teaching/learning.

Where do you do most of your teaching preparation/research?

At home

How do you find out about newly published research?

Journal and book alerts and colleagues.

Are professional networks important to your research/teaching? How?

Extremely important. I like to sort out my thoughts by talking, so I find professional conversations invaluable for exchanging ideas about teaching and research, and for getting creative inspiration (as well as having a good laugh at times). I find that all kinds of networks trigger off research and teaching ideas, and expand my knowledge of what other research/teaching is going on. I find it’s the best way to find out about similar (and different) interests and opens up avenues for getting my ideas out there and building collaborative relationships. One of the wonderful things about living in a big city like Melbourne is that there are so many opportunities to attend all sorts of lectures and workshops on current educational issues and thought.

Describe your personal library.
Very depleted at the moment, having just moved country, but … lots of fiction (my escape) and feminist SF. I’m exploring Australian authors at the moment and filling up my shelves again. I also have some biography and some favourite educational publications, as well as a great collection of books about music.

Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica?

Wikipedia

Something you’d like your students to know and understand about the Library?

Librarians are great at tracking down hard-to-find stuff, so ASK if you get stuck.

Favourite journal?

Don’t have one – I draw on lots of different ones, mostly to do with teacher education.

Something you’d like to change about the Library?

I’ve only been here a short time, so I’ll get back to you on that one.

Education revolution on Australia Talks

Radio National’s Australia Talks program on the education revolution is now available online. As they say on the website:

If you compare the performance of Australian schools with other countries in the OECD between 2003 and 2006, Australia declined in both absolute and relative terms in reading literacy. Over the past six years there has been no improvement in the percentage of Australian students who are less than proficient at maths.

In response, the government has promised report cards for schools, a computer for every student and incentives to encourage the best and brightest to pursue teaching as a career path. So are these measures revolutionary? What does it take to make a real difference in our classrooms?

Enhancements to the ERIC website

ERIC have just announced some updates and new features to their website, including

• RSS feeds, which will alert you when new items are indexed that meet your search criteria.
• an update to their downloadable journal list, which now includes 825 titles.
• an update to their thesaurus, with the addition of 40 new subject terms.
• seven new tutorials for first-time users.

This is the free online version of ERIC. The Library also subscribes to ERIC through CSA and ProQuest. Part of the advantage of searching via these other platforms is that we are also able to provide “find it” links to full text content held on other resources to which we subscribe. These find it links also take you back to the ERIC website, particularly for ERIC documents. In addition, the CSA version also divides results according to peer reviewed and other material and provides some citation information. CSA also provide good search tools, which allow you to do things like access the search history and set up alerts and RSS feeds.

Anyway, the content provided by the website underpins the products to which we subscribe. Their new RSS feed is actually a little easier to use than our subscribed database because it is not necessary to create a user account and login. They also continue to digitize their backfile of ERIC documents.