President's Message
Members,
It is hard to believe that it is January and the second semester at my high school starts on Wednesday. I am not sure where the first half of the year went, but I know that each school year seems to fly by at a faster pace. I hope you had a great first half of your school year and are ready to make 2018 an amazing year for your library program.
I would like to update you on some of the exciting things NJASL is working on in 2018. Many of our efforts tie into this year’s NJASL Conference theme of “Promoting Powerful Partnerships”:
NJASL has been invited to join the Future Ready School- NJ Advisory Board. We are excited to be given a seat at this table and look forward to making sure our library voices are being heard. We will be meeting with representatives from FRS-NJ and the NJ DOE on 1/30 to discuss our roles and this new partnership. I am also happy to announce that Ewa Dziedzic-Elliott, Media Specialist at Lawrence High School will be our NJASL delegate to the FRS-NJ advisory board.
Beth Raff and Melinda Roberts have joined our NJASL Board to co-chair our Student Liaison committee. I am excited to work with them as we try and strengthen our student member ranks.
I am also happy to announce that Gabrielle Casieri will be taking over the Standards committee in June. She is stepping up early to work with Amy Rominiecki and our AASL liaison, LaDawna Harrington on getting information on the new AASL standards out to members and county groups. Look for more information and PD to come from NJASL this spring!
We are looking to strengthen our presence at the NJEA conference. If you are interested in presenting at NJEA, proposals are due by 2/15. http://njeaconvention.org/interested-in-presenting-at-the-2018-njea-convention/
We are continuing to work with the NJDOE on a new Digital Citizenship standard. Susan Akers, our NJASL NJDOE liaison, and I are co-presenting on March 2, to the NJ Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. We are happy to work on this team effort with our NJDOE colleagues.
I am honored to be representing NJASL at ALA Mid-winter in Denver and hope to come back with great ideas from the other state affiliates.
Thank you to all the members who have volunteered to be on a task force for Future Ready Schools NJ. We have NJASL members on all task forces and your advocacy is essential to make sure future ready school have future ready librarians. Please continue to support the NJASL Advocacy challenge by posting on social media on the first Friday of the month. I know there are amazing things happening in libraries all across the state, so please be sure to participate!
Finally, I hope to see you at our upcoming NJASL Spring membership meeting and EdCamp.
Check out this link to register for this amazing day of PD on March 3rd.
http://www.njasl.org/SpringMtg
Hope to see you in March!
Lisa Bakanas
NJASL President
Villy Gandhi Leadership Training Scholarship
All NJASL members are invited to apply for the Villy Gandhi Leadership Training Scholarship. Villy Gandhi scholars participate in the AECT Annual Convention in Kansas City, Missouri on October 23 -27, 2018.
AECT- Association for Educational Communications and Technology- promotes scholarship and best practices in the creation, use, and management of technologies for effective teaching and learning. AECT is an International affiliate of NJASL. Learn more about AECT at AECT.org
To become a Villy Gandhi Scholar, you must be a certified library media specialist currently employed in a New Jersey school library media center. The scholarship will be based on these criteria: the applicant agrees to attend an AECT Fall Conference, attend NJASL Board of Trustees meetings and implement for NJASL at least one idea obtained at the AECT Conference attended. The scholarship provides up to $1,000 to help cover transportation, lodging and registration fee for attending this AECT event. After attending the event, the person will write an article for Bookmark describing their experience, assist at the AECT Booth at the NJASL Fall Conference, participate on some of the School Media Technology Division Board calls and prepare a webinar or similar form describing your experience at AECT.
To apply, provide the following information: name, home and school address, home and school telephone number, grade level responsibility, number of years as a SLMS, resume, and a short biography. To this cover sheet, attach supporting evidence of qualifications for the award. These should include statements on experiences in educational media, statements regarding volunteer experiences with NJASL and its affiliates and information on pertinent materials the applicant may have published or produced. There are 3 questions to answer and applicants should provide 2 letters of reference. It can be from administrators, and/or supervisor and one from a colleague will also be accepted.
The deadline for this application is March 15, 2018. The recipient will be notified by May 1 and a Plaque will be given at the NJASL Fall Annual Conference in December, 2018.
Please send the completed application by EMAIL to Leslie Blatt at MrsLes@aol.com
A Letter from AECT President Eugene Kowch
This month I would like to share with you AECT President Eugene Kowch’s Reflections on attending our Conference in November. Eugene and I have had many conversations over the last 2 years about Library Media Specialists in Schools and he was very excited to attend our Conference (it was his first official trip after becoming President less than a week earlier). Every year we invite the AECT President to co-present the Villy Gandhi Leadership Training Scholarship and for AECT to see who this State Affiliate is. Eugene kept telling me over the 2 days how he was amazed at what he saw so I asked him to let the organization know how he felt and that is what you are reading. NJASL has been affiliated with AECT for over 40 years and AECT has been supportive of our field in many ways over the years. This is a long entry but I think it is worth reading to see how we, NJASL, impresses someone very new to who we are!
Reflections on the NJASL 2017 Conference from AECT President Eugene Kowch, University of Calgary, Canada
When asked to reflect on the 2017 NJASL Conference, a flood of ideas and recollections came to me. The NJASL experience was a new context for this former engineer, school teacher, principal, and deputy superintendent of schools. It was new as well for an education leadership professor and especially for this new President of AECT. Focused on partnerships with a multitude of school media librarians, authors, storytellers, researchers and policy people, the emergent convention themes that come to mind for me centre around three pivotal features: (1) warm professionalism, (2) historied professional community and, for me, (3) new sensibilities about the proper leadership of library partnerships in a digital world.
Warm Professionalism:
I was taken by the depth and breadth of presentations, keynotes and sidebar discussions I had at NJASL 2017, part of a very good program that appeared to be ‘organized by the Swiss’ in its perfection. I was part of rich conversation about common experiences around libraries and pedagogy guided by a (very) strong professional ethos guiding people who are passionately engaged in governance and in-school library design and development. Everything I witnessed amounted to robust discussions among both seasoned (and new) professionals who are navigating a complex world. This is a world of diminishing traditional forms of resources and supports forming against the foreground of increased accountabilities, new media and the critical importance of reading with the shifting role of the school librarian in every size school and district. Powerful narratives about the survival of traditional libraries and contemporary libraries provided ethical frames for pondering the future and well-being of libraries with experienced, caring professionals in the rooms. I saw ethics of caring guiding (Noddings, 2006) a range of robust discussions from publishing to technology configuration to state and district policy making – all where caring for things and objects seemed to come second to caring about learners, teachers and people whose relationships make schools more than ‘systems’. As a Chair of an Education Leadership, Policy & Governance department in a large Faculty of Education I realized that here, more than in many contexts, warm professional ethics are guiding school librarian-led change with an eye to integration and support for everyone. I also realized that outdated stereotypes of school media technologist potentials must be eliminated in broader education thinking, to be replaced by a new voice and sensibility that is emerging in New Jersey and, I believe, everywhere but with too much “quiet!”.
Historied Professional Community:
The sound influence and legacy of programs like those offered by Rutgers University resonated in much of what these librarians, storytellers, NJASL leaders and government officials discussed. As well, it was clear that NJASL members mentor their young professionals well while continuing deep relationships among and across school systems - the mark of a profession with potentials to develop and to adapt to challenges we’ve seen necessary in New Jersey K-12 education. I saw evidence of emerging new partnerships with state and district officials, and interdisciplinary professional societies connected to school librarianship adding to the sense that both older and newer attendees were learning a lot from each other, and that this is an NJASL tradition. To me, this professional community is a study of change managed with caring and connected individuals coming together to realize new possibilities for libraries in the midst of rapid policy and governance change shaping all K-12 education. What impressed me most was the willingness of school experts, association leadership, policy makers, community groups and professional associations to help each other. In the case of AECT, I noticed a need to support evidence based, research informed pilots and innovations in diverse school media-empowered libraries that want to ‘scale up’ their innovations and capabilities. At AECT, we focus a lot on the design of technology-enhanced teaching and learning environments, and more on leading them with good sense so that learners, of course and professionals also can thrive. There are challenges to designing such communities so that more than the word ‘community’ is touted by leadership scholars. We should be using the evidence from the NJASL expert presentations – a blend of design thinking, IT thinking, experience with reading and libraries and policy -- to design the next history of school media experts in context, I pondered. That development is essential for both learners and library professionals, I think. NJASL seems ready to lead this.
New Sensibilities about the Proper Leadership of Library Partnerships:
As I write this reflection I also realize that warm professionalism and historied community network partnerships in a changing digital world need to be respected and considered in education pedagogy, policy and funding models in far more integrated ways. If we raise funding for facilities, we will need to staff and to sustain those professionals and support systems. If we change storytelling to integrate technology, we need an education leader population with a much more research informed, professional community informed narrative than one that deconstructs libraries from a naieve technological determinist perspective such as ‘Kids have Google now, information is free, who needs a library?’
From my own scholarly and professional practice, I have found that this kind of narrative emerges from an old, old (Aristotle named it) overly pragmatic, technological determinist mindset that believes ‘the magic is in the box’. Librarians are school experts who know that what learners can find between the bindings of a book and within a library/teacher team. Magic is there, but it’s not always an accident waiting to happen. They know that their work is more about relationships and complex taking-up of texts than it is about the availability of printed text for example. Humbled by what I saw at NJASL, I realize that policy makers, learning environment designers and teacher preparation schools need to educate a public in what we knew 40 years ago – that without design thinking, class/library relations, magic and love for everyone involved, computers become instruments of harm for librarians, schools and communities. I left beautiful Long Branch with a walk on the beach, gaining a sense that if AECT and its technology-enhanced learning design thinkers don’t consider more of the enactment of texts, stories, and the people who help learners (and teachers) understand them in a blended digital/conventional space, we’re losing essential parts of schools of the past and brighter education systems for the future. Policy makers and school leaders need similar epiphanies. Soon.
Partnerships between district leaders, government, professional associations, NJASL members and the classroom teacher are more important than ever, I heard, so that we can shape the ideas for change and the better practices I witnessed at the convention. But this is new ground and while I noticed everyone I spoke with in agreement with these basic principles, I thought … but how do we move forward? As Rutgers professors and other brilliant exhibitors were saying at NJASL, its’ about good research and evidence-informed design and good policy in a good community with a professional heart and a lot of experience. That is the best base for new work about sustaining not just librarians, but also the complex adaptive schools of the future (Hargreaves, 2011). To believe that Google can replace librarians or authors, media or special safe places in schools is like believing that learning improves by increasing the number of floors you add to the building. But without professionals, pedagogy and the design we take for granted that leads from reading to learning to better lives, we just add space. The warm professionals, historied community and new partner networks I saw can help the visions I saw in the hearts of everyone at this convention – I am sure of it as I return home to Canada, eternally grateful for seeing what I had not seen – tremendous potential and equal challenge to partner forward. To find what’s slipping through the cracks and to do better. Bravo, NJASL and thank you, from AECT. If we can help, we are already family – give us a call - and thank you again for an A++ learning experience.
Dr. Eugene Kowch
AECT President
BELS Spotlight
A Physical Display for Virtual Books at Park Ridge HS
By Katie Haake, Park Ridge Jr/Sr HS Media Specialist
The bulletin board display was a collaboration between myself and my student library assistant. We were trying to think outside the box for the next bulletin board. We wanted to stay away from seasonal bulletin boards and feature something that we haven't in the past. I had wanted to shine a light on the the e-library collection so utilizing the bulletin board to do so was a perfect fit. The bulletin board highlights the two apps that are available to students and faculty. These apps provide access to eBooks and eAudiobooks. The students use their public library card for school checkouts so we decided to also feature the BCCLS app for their electronic resources.
Our eBook collection goes well beyond books that are in the school curriculum. The goal was for students and teachers to see how diverse the collection really is. There is quite a variety of titles that were chosen - classics, realistic fiction, romance, coming of age, and fantasy. We also included the two books that were read over the summer for our One Book One School program. We wanted students to know they can access those titles at any time. I try and promote eBooks and eAudiobooks every time I talk about the library resources. I also direct students to the media center's tutorial page where there are guides to assist them in getting started.
Since the board has been up, there have been a few people who have stopped in to find out more about the e-collection. When promoting the bulletin board to a small class several students mentioned they read eBooks but always paid for them- it was exciting for them to learn there is a cheaper option through their library. Even those who prefer physical books said they love having the option in case they are in a bind. One teacher said she didn't know anything about eBooks until she was on recent vacation, "We were away on vacation and my daughter needed to start a book for school but she had forgotten to bring the book with her". Her daughter had an easy fix- she would download the book!
Giving the Gift of Reading this Holiday Season
By Peter Richter, Westwood Regional HS Media Specialist, Certified Common Sense Media Educator
The Westwood Jr/Sr High School media center held its annual charity Scholastic Book Fair. The Honor Society students organized the book fair where new books were donated to the Pajama and Books Foundation after purchase by students and staff. The organization is dedicated to bringing new books to needy children and establishing reading programs across the US.
NJASL
Email: bookmark@njasl.org
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