ILI Blog - Week 11 - Collaboration

Questions
What are different types of librarian-faculty collaboration? What are the benefits and costs of such collaboration? Describe an "aha" moment you had this week, if any.

Answers
There are many different types of collaboration that can occur between librarians and faculty or teaching staff (in the case of K-12 education), and at the less intense end are called coordination and cooperation. Librarians can confer with teachers to provide supportive instruction, either as one-shots or during a regular Media time, for units, skills, or projects happening in the classroom (such as practicing applicable technology, research, or digital citizenship skills, or carrying over a class unit theme into storytime and computer programs). Librarians can come to the class(room) to do a lesson or several, based on student needs. The librarian can team-teach with the class(room) teacher during such lessons. At the more intense end, librarian could become a key partner in planning curriculum, and therefore be involved with faculty/teaching staff frequently and become deeply intertwined with what's happening in the class(room) and how well students do.

A benefit would also be the reason to collaborate in the first place - better student learning in terms of information literacy and critical thinking skills. Other benefits include stronger curriculum, better interstaff relations, and higher estimation of librarian/library value. Costs include the amount of time necessary to collaborate (deeply), and could also include less valuing of the library as a space, if the librarian were to be coming to class(room)s a lot to teach and mainly using online sources.