The Many Hats of the Teacher-Librarian

Sheree Haughian is an elementary-school teacher-librarian in
Orangeville, Ontario.

The Many Hats of the Teacher-Librarian is a collection of five essays
written by graduate students during a summer program in 1994 at Memorial
University of Newfoundland. The papers emphasize the role of the
teacher-librarian as instructional consultant, information specialist,
and agent of change. As the new millennium approaches, the
teacher-librarian as protector of the print collection is facing
extinction.

Of course, in some provinces the very role of the teacher-librarian is
seriously threatened. The educational market is following a dangerously
bearish trend in 1996, and the optimism and commitment to cause evident
in these essays seem both ironic and liberating. Perhaps the papers on
the role of advocacy or on instructional development contain just the
language necessary to help convince slash-and-burn politicians that
physical access to information, delivered by technicians, is worlds shy
of intellectual access. The capacity to retrieve relevant information
and to use it in an appropriate and meaningful way has little to do with
a student’s ability to cruise the Internet. It is effective teaching
that illuminates knowledge—on computers or while using quill and ink.

Aimed at an academic audience, the essays are written in the tedious
format of educational research, which cites a plethora of past opinion
before coming to the point; they are, therefore, not likely to become
stimulating bedside reading for much of the educational community, let
alone for the general public. But for teacher-librarians who are
desperate to validate their very important role in the development of
literacy, this collection offers both comfort and support.