Do you want to know what I love most about Marjorie Livengood Library at The Bush School? I love how kids use it outside of class. We have the youngest children with their caregivers in the morning come in at drop-off to read books and use the date due stamp. We have middle school boys at their 10:00 break playing Minecraft. We have 3rd through 5th graders at lunch recess knitting, learning to juggle, playing Twister and doing jigsaw puzzles. We have kids on computers with typing games, PowerPoint animations and Scratch. They are reading, drawing and folding paper. After school, middle and upper school kids hang out in the Maker Space where they do homework as two boys build a CNC router and a succession of students try out the 3-D printer.
We’ve visualized our school library as a libratory for many years now -- as a place where you can come to get any of your research questions answered -- from how to latch hook to the effect Shirley Chisholm’s candidacy had on the 1972 presidential election.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about technology -- teens and tech, education and tech, and especially libraries and tech. Carolyn Foote, in School Library Journal, exhorts us all to be futurists. Paul Mihailidis lays out a plan for school libraries to morph into more relevant “learning commons.” Now admittedly, I’m not the deepest reader when it comes to theory or even just non-fiction, but it really feels to me like the kinds of steps being advocated are what we have been doing for the past 15 years.
Not that one can rest on one’s laurels in this day and age! Technology and students’ needs change too quickly for that. So as the Head Librarian suggests we think about a new layout of the book stacks or we figure out how to implement a self-checkout model, the one constant is change.
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