Philosophy

My Vision

“The best thing we can be teaching our children today is how to teach themselves.” – David Warlick

I wrote the following statements to encompass all levels of academia, however, I believe that with a mild revision that replaces “school” with “community”, and replaces “student” with “patron”, these statements sum up my personal beliefs of a library’s purpose:

• The school library will instill a confidence in students to use their own inner problem-solving skills through research techniques and self-discovery combined with personal goal setting.
• The school library will enhance literacy and fluency from the youngest ages to the life-long learner by instilling the student’s sense of ownership and empowerment towards reading and absorbing new information.
• The school library will leverage its central and universal position within the school to provide a safe zone for exploration and inquiry.  Mistakes will be celebrated. Discoveries will be recorded and shared.

These lofty visions might look something like what I personally observed in the maker-space sessions created by a friend of mine at an elementary campus.  One station was entitled, “How was it made?” and simply had, among other things, an old laptop and basic kid-friendly tools that happened to fit the size of the connecting pieces of the laptop. No instructions.  The librarian used focused inquiry to trigger the curiosity of the Kindergartners.  When they suggested that one solution was to take the laptop apart and investigate it, she said, “Yes”. Within three sessions a group of a few Kindergarteners had figured out how to unscrew all the exterior casing, pull the keys off to see the circuits underneath, and were doodling schematics of the interior hard-drive and wires.  As a simultaneous exploration, a couple of students more geared toward journalism skills documented the efforts with photos and video.  Their cinematography eventually became a video that was shared on the internal broadcasting for the school. The students’ inquisitiveness was rewarded and therefore it grew.  The following year now, First Graders, these students were producing hypotheses about how plant bulbs would grow in the library’s garden viewing boxes. They documented data on growth rates to check if their hypotheses were right. They followed through. I love to be instrumental in stoking the fire of creativity and inquiry in young people and helping share the results with the world.

For over a decade, I have been a teacher in one form or another. In my work, I frequently endeavor to employ hands-on education and learning through service. I make efforts to provide opportunity for both to the youth I teach and mentor. I believe enthusiasm is contagious and so I am not afraid to let my personal excitement show. This translates into planning time in the classroom for thought-provoking discussions allowing students to make multiple and various connections. I encourage students to recognize their strengths and play to them to uplift their areas of opportunity to improve. Information is experienced in diverse ways. There is no one way to discover, but there are proven methods for everything that have already led to success. Thus, I set high expectations for students to learn those methods before they attempt to reinvent the wheel.  I am highly process oriented. I believe the established processes are more important at the beginning to help recognize connections in the learning so the learning can expand. I challenge my students to push outside their comfort zone and to give a try to something that might scare them at first. As students gain knowledge and skill I enforce high expectations for their effort to produce work which demonstrates understanding and mastery.

My personal passions leak into my professional work. When making things, I prefer to use found objects, natural materials, and recycled items. This makes me very good at problem solving in the moment and creating things with very few resources by using what I already have and upcycling. I value items with a history. Poetry and Music definitely hold power in my education and creative processes. I hold sustainability in high regard and make strong efforts to create win-win scenarios where one person’s trash is another’s treasure. I believe in social equity, environmental rights, and the power of place. Place can be where you are, and it can be what you make of where you are. Both are powerful. I believe libraries are power-filled places.

I was raised by a Librarian and it shaped who I am.  By the age of eight, I knew not to ask my librarian Dad how to spell any word because the only word he would spell out for me was “DICTIONARY”.  Thus, I realized I had the power inside me to look up information.  The value of information was represented in many aspects of our family life, from travel planning to family game night.  My sister and I were expected to participate in checking itineraries for vacations, complete tasks like calculating hiking distances based on location write-ups from periodicals using maps and a ruler, and most importantly to ask questions.  Yes, I graduated High School before the birth of the internet and GPS.  Game night sometimes involved Trivial Pursuit as an open book endeavor using our well-supplied family reference library.  Points if you could FIND the answer, not know it.  By college (the first time around) my boyfriends were often intimidated to join me at family parties because all our family friends were librarians, teachers, and computer professionals.  These influential adults in my life could peg the unintelligent ones in a heartbeat.  Even so, they were always polite, accepting, friendly, welcoming, inquisitive, resourceful, and willing to share.  These are qualities I was nurtured to expect from educators and analytics-types, and especially from librarians. My family culture established a solid foundation on which I still stand today.  These qualities are what I believe Libraries and Librarians should be made of, maybe with a little sugar and spice, snails and puppy dogs thrown in for good measure.