Tag Archives: teaching

Libraries on the Road to Recovering and Revitalising Education

2021’s International Day of Education (24 January) carries a different weight than it has in past years. Although universal access to education is well-established as a human right, as well as a driver of sustainable development, the COVID-19 pandemic has added a new-found urgency, as well as a new set of challenges, to its delivery.

Fittingly, this year’s International Day of Education is dedicated to the theme: ‘Recover and Revitalize Education for the COVID-19 Generation’.

From UNESCO: “Now is the time to power education by stepping up collaboration and international solidarity to place education and lifelong learning at the centre of the recovery.”

Libraries are an essential piece of this recovery.

As the world begins to look towards a post-COVID world, the theme of this year’s International Day of Education is a call to libraries to advocate for – and deliver on – their role in building back better through enabling and promoting learning.

The groundwork is there – libraries are already helping to reduce inequalities in education. One example is through their role in providing access to the internet, which increasingly is becoming a deciding factor in a student’s ability to engage in school.

In so many places already, libraries and their staff are helping their communities stay connected with the resources, support, and tools that are needed not only to recover, but also to revitalise, education, and through it, lives.

Therefore, we are marking this day with some lessons-learned during the pandemic, as well as a look to the future of education – and libraries’ role in it.

COVID-19 and Support for Remote Learning

Since March 2020, IFLA has been monitoring library responses to the pandemic. This has provided a picture of how libraries have continued serving their communities despite physical closures and other restrictions. It has also provided a trove of stories showing how libraries have upheld support for education through challenging times.

You can find many examples to inform your own initiatives on our website.

Shared Stories: Public Libraries in Egypt

Heba Ismail, Secretary of the CPDWL Section and Libraries Technical Manager at Egypt’s Society for Culture & Development has shared a look at how libraries across Egypt have found success in engaging users during the pandemic. Here are some of ways they have supported education at all stages of life during this time:

  • Sharing links to educational resources in science, arts, culture, and heritage
  • Storytelling workshops for young readers
  • Free training workshops for school-aged students to assist with research-based projects, which replace end-of-year exams for most students
  • Online training services on topics including English Language and Computer Skills, conducted via Facebook
  • Participation in a national initiative to provide virtual programmes to train and qualify youth for the labour market
  • Conducting online courses in cooperation with civil society institutions such as the Arab Women Association.
  • Providing COVID-19 and public health information

See her full article online here.

COVID-19 and Professional Development

Librarians are not only the providers of lifelong learning. Librarians must also be recipients of ongoing training and professional development to enable agility in the face of rapid change.

IFLA’s CPDWL Section shared experiences and explored this concept further in their January 2021 newsletter.

Shared Stories: Tips and Lessons-Learned

Rajen Munoo, of the Singapore Management University Libraries, shares a key lesson regarding opportunities that may come hidden in the challenges of COVID-19: “Continued learning and upskilling is the new vaccine in managing our own personal professional development”.

Here are some ways that Section members found they could continue their own continued professional development (CPD) and learning during the pandemic:

  • Attend virtual conferences and webinars. Take the opportunity to discover new topics, such as research data management, open science, advocacy, and leadership. Not needing to travel may help you get approval from your institutions’ leadership to explore new areas.
  • Find opportunities to upskill in areas that support your institution’s digital transformation. This may include building competency in tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Outlook, Blackboard Collaborate, Mentimeter, and Leganto (Ex Libris resource list management system).
  • Get familiar with new formats for teaching and sharing information virtually, such as creating short videos.
  • Focus learning on open access information, such as online databases, repositories, scientific periodical portals, electronic book collections
  • Don’t forget personal well-being. Training in stress management and mindfulness can be helpful for both staff and users.
  • Get involved with mentoring programmes to facilitate knowledge-exchange between professionals at different career stages. Involvement in a national (or international) library association may help connect you to these opportunities.

While enriching librarians’ careers, these skills go beyond personal growth. They can be instrumental in helping library and information professionals meet the challenges of a post-COVID world.

Beyond COVID-19: The Future of Education

Perhaps as much as anything, the pandemic has made the deep inequalities that persist within our societies abundantly clear.

In terms of education, this means that those who are most disadvantaged have also been impacted the hardest.

The UN refers to COVID-19 as the largest disruption of education systems in history. While closures of schools and other learning spaces have “impacted 94% of the world’s student population”, the UN reports that this impact is up to 99%  in low and lower-middle income countries [source].

Pre-existing education inequalities, such as reduced opportunities for those living in poor or rural areas, girls, refugees, persons with disabilities and forcibly displaced persons, have been worsened by the pandemic. These inequalities must be addressed to both recover and rejuvenate global education.

Reimagine Education

One of the UN’s recommendations to prevent further crisis is to “reimagine education and accelerate change in teaching and learning” [source, page 3]. This includes focussing on the needs of marginalised groups, offering employability programmes, supporting educators, and remove barriers to connectivity.

Innovative methods developed during the pandemic to provide services remotely, engage the public online, and connect more people to library services can continue benefiting society in the future.

IFLA stands ready to support the library profession in this work as we look to recovery and rejuvenation.

What can you do?

Advocate! – gather stories of how your library has adapted during the pandemic in order to support education and learning, and how it will continue these services in the future. Share these stories on your communication channels, with decision-makers, and with your local library association.

Learn Yourself! – be sure to take note of lessons you have learned during the pandemic, think about how they can help others now and in the future. Take advantage of opportunities to develop skills that can help you more effectively provide access to information and education.

Start Local! – identify inequalities in learning that exist in your community and align your programmes and services to address them. Look to team up with educators at your school, university, or within your community to amplify and support each other’s work.

 

Helping Teachers Help All Learners: Libraries and Minority Languages

Through providing materials, developing information literacy skills, offering a space for study, and acting as a gateway to lifelong learning opportunities, libraries are a key part of the education infrastructure.

The service libraries provide is universal, but there are cases where they can be particularly important, for example for speakers of minority languages.

For World Teachers Day, this blog looks – on the basis of IFLA’s submission to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues – at how libraries help teachers deliver this right for people who risk missing out otherwise.

Providing the Raw Materials for Learning

The right of children to access information to support them in their development is made explicit in Article 17 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child:

‘States Parties recognize the important function performed by the mass media and shall ensure that the child has access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed at the promotion of his or her social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and mental health’.

This may not always be easy when children have a first language other than the one that dominates where they live. Educational publishers will tend to focus on the main market for works, and curricula can also be concentrated on one language and culture, at the expense of others.

Yet without access to information in their own language, learners can suffer disadvantage, with poorer results leading to fewer opportunities in life. There is a need for additional effort to create, translate, or otherwise get access to materials.

Libraries are well placed to do this. At the local level, public libraries look to ensure that their collections match the make-up of their community, with many having sections in non-majority languages. National libraries can help support this through organising exchanges with counterparts in other countries, or even developing central libraries for different language groups.

Thanks to this work, learners are able to develop their literacy and find information in their own language, helping teachers achieve their goals.

Complementing the Work of Schools

The work of libraries is not necessarily limited to providing materials – they are more than just a storehouse or supplier of books.

The strength of libraries in providing space, and additional – often informal or non-formal – opportunities to learn can also be turned to supporting the progress of non-majority language learners. In this, they complement the work of teachers.

Sometimes, this is a case of simply reproducing traditional library activities such as story-times in minority languages, as happens in Slovakia with Hungarian-speakers.

In other cases, libraries develop structured programmes for reading development, as Helsinki libraries are doing for Russian-speakers.

Elsewhere, they host workshops and lessons for the benefit of all ages, or kit out mobile libraries to help children, for example in refugee camps, to continue their education.

These projects do not need to be organised by libraries alone, but it is clear that their mission – and the space they can often offer – makes libraries a logical platform for such initiatives.

 

While of course teachers themselves are at the heart of successful education, their work is made far easier when they have the support of effective libraries, especially when it comes to working with minority language speakers.

There are many great examples out there of this support at work, making a reality of the right of access to information for learning and personal development for all.

 

Read IFLA’s Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur

The Good, The Bad and (Avoiding) the Ugly: A Way Forwards on the Copyright Directive

Discussions around the European Union’s draft Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market are as tense as ever. Strong divisions have emerged between and among Member States and Members of the European Parliament around controversial proposals for a new press publishers’ right (Article 11) and an (effective) obligation on internet platforms to filter content (Article 13).

These disagreements stand in contrast to the consensus that has emerged around other provisions in the Directive, which will help libraries and cultural heritage institutions in their work to promote innovation, support education and enable preservation and access to heritage.

Such measures, in line with the EU’s own international obligations, cause no unreasonable prejudice to rightholders, and indeed will support creativity and discovery.

The fear must be that a failure to find agreement on Articles 11 and 13 will lead to calls for the rejection of the Directive as a whole. This would be a huge loss for innovation, education and heritage in Europe, and would be hard to explain to Europe’s voters, given the public support for such measures received from all sides of the debate so far.

This blog offers more detail on the situation so far, and sets out the case for avoiding this worst-case scenario.

 

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. ACJ1, CC-BY-NC-SA https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajc1/4684652569The Good – Achievements So Far

The draft Directive already contains a lot of good. Starting from a reasonably positive base in September 2016, discussions among MEPs and Member States have led to improvements in provisions around text and data mining, teaching, preservation, and out-of-commerce-works – Articles 3-9.

If these elements of the Directive pass, EU citizens will:

  • Be able to engage much more easily in text and data mining. This will provide a significant boost to research into Artificial Intelligence in particular, at a time when Europe risks being left behind other countries who have been far more ready to update their legislation.
  • Have more opportunities to learn using digital tools, including in libraries. This will further democratise education, and help ensure that everyone can continue to learn throughout life.
  • Continue to enjoy access to Europe’s cultural heritage into the future, thanks to changes that will give libraries and cultural heritage institutions the clear right to take digital copies of books and other materials for preservation purposes.
  • Gain new access to works which are in-copyright but out-of-commerce, and so otherwise can only be found within the walls of libraries.

This is a good result, in and of itself. It will offer important clarity to libraries and cultural heritage institutions and allow them to fulfil their missions in the digital age. It will break down one of the most significant barriers to realising the potential of text and data mining, a Commission priority since 2012.

Moreover, given the EU’s own international obligations under the Berne Convention, it will not cause any unreasonable prejudice to authors. Instead, today’s authors will benefit from wider discovery of their work, including the rediscovery of works which are no longer in print. The authors of tomorrow will find it easier to read, study and innovate.

This is not to mention other elements of the text on the table that will provide additional rights to authors, including the possibility to reclaim rights and to benefit from greater transparency about revenues made on the basis of their work.

These provisions have enjoyed a large degree of consensus, with agreement relatively early on in discussions between Parliament and Council. Stakeholders from all sides of the discussion have been ready to signal their support for these steps, or at least their readiness to accept them.

 

The Bad – Sticking Points

However, it has long been clear that not all of the Directive is consensual. The two most contentious elements – Articles 11 and 13 – look to create new rights or rules for situations which are arguably specific to individual markets, and indeed individual providers – the situation of newspapers faced with GoogleNews, and of record companies faced with YouTube.

As has been argued repeatedly, the proposals on the table – a new right over very short fragments of text from newspapers, and an obligation on all online platforms to filter content uploaded by users – are likely to make the problem worse.

Not only will they strengthen the hand of the existing dominant players (who are best placed to negotiate with content producers, introduce filters or make payments), but they risk causing major collateral damage, for example to educational and scientific repositories run by libraries.

It is therefore unsurprising that there is so much disagreement about these articles.

Most recently, and just days after the agreement of a new Treaty between the countries, France and Germany disagreed about whether smaller internet platforms should be excused from the obligation to filter all user content for potential copyright infringement.

Even though this particular dispute has been agreed, there are many more still open, underlining how flawed the approach to these articles currently is.

In short, while there is support for effective ways of sustaining high quality journalism and curtailing illicit uses, the proposals on the table are not the answer.

 

The Ugly – The Nuclear Option

There are crucial meetings due in the coming days which aim to find a way forwards. Steps have been made to create some minor flexibilities in Articles 11 and 13, for example to reduce the burden on small platforms, as well as limited protections for the educational and scientific repositories that support open access and open educational resources.

Friends scene. Source: https://devrant.com/rants/1546587/this-will-happen-in-java-when-you-declare-the-class-with-wrong-nameHowever, there are already complaints from some who had previously supported Articles 11 and 13, who are unwilling to accept anything less than the highly flawed original proposals.

Most worryingly, these calls are accompanied by demands to reject the entire Directive.

This would be the worst of all worlds. All of the progress already made to date on Articles 3-9 would be at risk, despite already having been subject to consensus. The years of work that have gone into these would potentially be lost, and with it an opportunity to support clear public interest goals in Europe.

As an election approaches, it would be difficult to explain to voters why a flagship piece of legislation has been sunk, merely because there was disagreement on one part.

It is therefore time to reflect on the value of delaying those parts of the Directive which are clearly not yet mature, and proceeding with those that are. This would allow the European Union to chalk up a useful ‘win’.

Instead of rushed discussions now, a full and holistic discussion on how to achieve these goals, reviewing all relevant policy tools, is needed, and could be a useful job for the next Parliament.