Librarians as Learning Specialists: Meeting the Learning Imperative for the 21st Century

Zmuda, Allison and Violet Harada. Librarians as Learning Specialists: Meeting the Learning Imperative for the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008. 128 pp. 40.00 USD. ISBN-10: 1-59158-679-8; ISBN-13: 978-1-59158-679-1. As we enter the 21st century, library media specialists (or, as we refer to them in Canada, teacher-librarians) find themselves in challenging circumstances affected by budgetary cuts, shrinking collections and staff re-assignments. In Librarians as Learning Specialists: Meeting the Learning Imperative for the 21st Century, Zmuda and Harada provide these professionals with the tools needed to defend the important role of the school library and its staff in student learning. Other members of the education community, including administrators, classroom teachers and curriculum consultants, may also find much of the content of this work pertinent. In a little over one hundred densely packed pages, it addresses topics that are relevant to all educators: effective leadership, goal setting, lesson design and learning assessment. The book's organization fits well with how a practitioner might use it. The text is divided into four chapters, each covering a broad theme: the school mission statement, the role of a library media specialist, instructional design, and finally, assessment. Each chapter is then further divided into sections that tackle different aspects of the theme: its significance, predictable problems, collaboration challenges and implications for the library media specialist. A fifth and final chapter, Looking to the Future, deals with the central role school library specialists play in helping students navigate today's digital media landscape. To allow for further expediency in navigating the book and locating the part that answers a practitioner's immediate question, the table of contents provides extensive detail about the topics covered in each of the four sections within a chapter. In fact, the table of contents lists the contents of the book down to the single page. Furthermore, an index provides entry points into the text by both topic and cited author. In the central narrative, as Zmuda and Harada address obstacles faced by education professionals, they consistently demonstrate their understanding of both the practical constraints faced by library media specialists and the needs and priorities of school and board level administrators. They do not shy away from questioning long-standing assumptions and practices and providing alternatives that are more in-line with contemporary theories of learning. …

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