Celebrating the work

 This evening’s open dinner was pretty star-studded! From Clint Johnston, BCTF President, to Chris Kennedy, Superintendent of West Vancouver School Board, to the four Angela Thacker award winners, to the Leading Learning Implementation award winning district, Surrey, we heard it all. 

We heard from Clint that TLs are one of the strongest collectives, and that our solidarity has been critical in keeping TLs in school libraries. 

We heard from Chris that despite all of the technological changes in the world over the past 40 years, that libraries remain the strongest gathering spaces, and that the culture building that comes through libraries is unmatched. 

From the Angela Thacker Memorial Award winners we heard first from Rabia Khokar that her love for libraries came from weekly visits to the public library and now she sees libraries as the biggest classroom in the school. Rebeca Rubio reminded us that our work takes courage and to keep up our commitment. Jonelle St-Aubyn celebrated the fact that TLs are challenging the norms and that we are a good in the world for our students. Leigh Border, via recording, shared her thanks for everyone committed to moving Teacher Librarians of Newfoundland and Labrador (TLNL) forward. 

Angela Lapointe received the Leading Learning Implementation Award for Surrey, and spoke honestly about how the support she receives from her administration makes it able for her to better support her TLs. Her district leader, also in attendance, spoke of Andrea’s energy and efforts to connect all 150 TLs in the district. 

Every speaker noted the importance of Canadian School Libraries and the impact of the work taken on by the leadership team; but also, the mentorship, friendship and collaboration of Carol Koechlin and Anita Brooks-Kirkland with them. 

The take away for me tonight? We are a powerful group of innovators, supporters, learners, (this list could go on and on) etc, but we do things best when we do them TOGETHER.

Afternoon thoughts from BCTLA

 After a nice walk from New Westminster Secondary down to the TMC hotel, I’ve got my shoes off and am ready to consider all of the wonderful things from this afternoon’s sessions. 

My first afternoon session was SOGI and the Learning Commons, by Robin Low. I took many of my TL courses with Robin, so it was great to attend this session and see the work that she has done for her middle school students. With recent political events bringing safe spaces and library book selection to the forefront, I was keen to hear her experiences and strategies. Robin eloquently addressed awareness and inclusivity, earning your place as an ally, responding to hate groups, talking with students and setting expectations for the library and school. She shared her “inviting in” day: reminding families that it’s always a good time to come out to your child as an ally. During the hour, several TLs at the session shared their own feelings of vulnerability over book challenges and parent interactions. 

To finish off the day, all attendees had a seat to hear the stories of Ivan Coyote. I see that many have already tweeted about the session, so it clearly had an impact! Ivan left us with a lot to think about, but anchored the talk around our “why.” Our why, but also many other hard hitting questions.

What would it take to make people really feel included?

How much resiliency do we really need to have?

What if we focussed on compassion and welcoming spaces instead of glorifying toughness?

Who has already left our communities to go find a safer, more welcoming place?

How good is government policy if we don’t even have day to day systems in place?

Ivan Coyote is master on the stage, weaving emotional moments with laughter and food for thought, along with calls to action in our schools.  

BC Teacher Librarians Conference - My Morning wrap up

     It has been a long time since I’ve been to a library conference of any kind.  Part of this is pandemic, and part of this is that so many conferences that I've attended have given me a surface skim of something potentially interesting, but rarely did I get that injection of something that ignited a fire in me.  This morning is a story of that rare conference experience that has me fired up.

My first two sessions of my BCTLA 2022 experience have had significant crossover in concept, but with entirely different focuses.  David A Robertson kicked off the conference with his keynote which brought up some wonderful ideas around representation and reconciliation.  A Cree author, he spoke to the need for greater indigenous representation in fiction and separated this concept into indigenous characters and indigenous authors.  It is not new that we need more indigenous authors telling indigenous stories.  His personal stories of the importance of that were touching. It was interesting to hear a call for non-indigenous authors to present well researched and respectfully imagined indigenous characters in their work.  Some of my favourite writing these days presents a world where truly diverse communities are the norm, and a single author cannot represent all communities that their characters come from.  

I then went to Rebeca Rubio’s discussion around Curation vs Censorship.  How is it that we walk that line to support our diverse communities and enact solid policies to be able to do that effectively?  I feel like I’m not alone in allowing other priorities to get ahead of a collection policy review at my school.  In our increasingly divisive society, challenges to books are increasing and the need for solid policy is imperative.  But also, it was pointed out that a good policy makes the selection and weeding process less personal.  A good policy provides a mirror to hold decisions up to and challenges to decisions are less of a personal attack. Choices to acquire or weed are made more thoughtfully and less emotionally.

I am so thankful to both David and Rebeca for reminding me of some important things, teaching me something new, and know that they have already had an impact on my space and my community.

BCTLA Keynote David A Robertson

The auditorium at New Westminster Secondary School is full to capacity with teacher-librarians and others from across British Columbia and beyond. The theme of the conference is Leading Forward. I can't help think immediately of the connection between this idea and our national standards for school library learning commons, Leading Learning. I am biased of course, but to me there is no doubt that innovations in education often emerge from the library learning commons. 

The audience is so enthused to welcome BCTLA conference keynote speaker David A. Robertson. David's work is very familiar to this group. His many award-winning books, including When We Were Alone and The Barren Grounds, have provided windows of insight for readers young and old. David helps us to learn the truth, which is the first step on the path to reconciliation. 

David is starting by talking about representation, or more specifically lack of representation in books of the not-very-distant past, or negative stereotyping in the guise of representation. This is something that we as teachers and teacher-librarians of a certain age should be familiar with. I remember trying to expose my middle school students to Indigenous culture in the early 1990s, and could find precious little. We are so very fortunate now that so many Indigenous authors like David Robertson and Ivan Coyote, who will be speaking later today, are being published. 

I will stop now, because I really, really want to listen more carefully to what David has to say. It is clear that everyone in this room is so very engaged in learning from him – part of that open and honest conversation that ALL Canadians should be having about the truth, on our journey to reconciliation.