Volume 33 Nº 1 - February 1997

An interview with Judie Dueck, Canada's Teacher-Librarian of the Year

Marjorie Lobban

In 1996 Judie Dueck was named Canadian Teacher-Librarian of the Year, this prestigious award following her recognition as Manitoba's best in 1995.

Judie works at Gordon Bell, a 7-12 high school in Winnipeg's inner city and during my year as an exchange teacher in Winnipeg I worked at a neighbouring school. Both schools are in Winnipeg School Division #1, the province's largest education division. I took the occasion of Judie's award to talk to her about her career and her perceptions of the state of teacher-librarianship in the province and Canada.

Judie's reputation in Winnipeg is formidable, and she is very influential within the library profession. As background to this article she gave me a copy of her annual report for Gordon Bell High School Library. When I had finished reading it I wondered if her year actually had the same number of days and weeks in it as mine. It describes a library program which exemplifies the person behind it - dynamic, focused, energetic and generous. The generosity is philosophical, intellectual and personal. Judie is at Gordon Bell because she believes she can make a difference to the lives of her inner city students, to 'level up the playing field for them', and she goes to extraordinary professional and personal lengths to make that happen. But I also knew she has had a diverse and interesting career, and our conversation started there.

Judie Dueck: I started off as an elementary school teacher, with third grade being my favourite. I called it the 'ah-ha year', the year students moved into chapter books. I love the transition and growth that happens in third grade. Then I had my own children and while they were young I finished my Masters degree and moved into librarianship. When I finished, I worked in Fort Garry School Division for a year.

My husband and I had always wanted to work overseas. We applied to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and were very quickly offered a position. We ended up spending five years in Jerusalem.

The Mennonites have a history of doing relief and development work. In the war of 1948, the MCC was in the refugee camps in Jordan working with the Palestinians who had fled Israel. In 1967 the refugee camps were annexed by Israel. The MCC program has been largely focused on Palestinians because that is historically where their work started - food aid, education, economic development and so on, although there is also an element of promoting dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis.

My first job in Jerusalem was to set up the Peace Resource Center, which became the focal point for journalists, Westerners and others who came travelling through, trying to make sense of the very complicated political situation. We had books, magazines and a number of videos. We also drew on the peace heritage that the Mennonites have in terms of their approach to conflict situations. We did tours of the area - not tourist tours, but political awareness tours, in an attempt to help people understand the very complex situation at the time.

I worked at the Peace Resource Center for a year and trained some local staff to carry on the program. Then I worked as a program director at Tantur Ecumenical Institute. Tantur had a very strong Vatican interest but also Anglican input from Britain. The rector was a Quaker and I am a Mennonite. The people who came to study were theologians, professors of religion and occasionally lay or ordained ministers who would come for three months to a year. I was involved in helping them set up their programs. It was a beautiful place to work, set on the top of a hill overlooking Bethlehem, Jerusalem, an Israeli settlement and a bulldozed Palestinian house. You could see the hills of Moab in Jordan as well. So from the roof of the building you could do a real orientation whether it was religious, political, historical or geographical.

My last job was the most interesting. I was the director of a human rights organisation that was an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, a UN consultative body. There I worked on very nitty-gritty human rights issues: prison conditions, disappearances, deportations, house demolitions. We had the only law library on the West Bank and we translated military orders from Hebrew into Arabic. We offered a free legal advice clinic, took some test cases to court, began a human rights education program, published journals and monographs in three languages and did legal research. Our staff included local and international lawyers and researchers as well as field workers, translators and others. But the essence of the organisation was documenting the human rights violations that were occurring.

When we came back to Canada I thought my human rights days were over. I thought I was into a new phase, but about eight months later I received a call from someone at the UN asking me to come to India to make a presentation on the methodology for documenting human rights violations, which I did. A task force was then formed to further develop my ideas. That was in 1988. I spent the next five years, in terms of my non-teaching activities, heading a task force of about fourteen people developing a very specific methodology for documenting ongoing human rights violations such as torture. Basically what we were doing was taking library principles, the way librarians think about information, and applying those principles to an ongoing active situation, which was tricky. This work was done for an organisation called HURIDOCS, Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems, which gets UN funding. They work on training, methodology, tool development and developing networks. The methodology was published in 1993, funded by Canada's IDRC and the Netherlands government, and was presented at the UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, which I attended. Since then it's been widely translated and adapted.

In 1992 I was appointed to the Board of HURIDOCS. It is a small five-person board and I'm the North American representative. It's really important to me and I will feel a big hole in my life when that's not there. I've found interesting links to what I do at the school level - the organisational library type applications, the training element of HURIDOCS, plus the human rights education. I do a number of units, support teachers, and do co-operative planning and presentations involving human rights. These aspects of my life mightn't appear as if they link, but in fact they do.

I've always felt that education is the bread and butter of my life. I don't mean that in financial terms, but rather that education is one foundation, a stability in my life. My interest in human rights grew out of my educational studies, as my Master's thesis was a work on censorship in schools, which is a human rights issue.

One of the reasons I chose to work at Gordon Bell, when I had the opportunity to teach at several more suburban schools which were seen as 'easier' appointments, was because I wanted a situation where there was a multicultural mix of kids, where there was a need. I really enjoy working in the inner city and with the kids here. And I missed the urgency and intensity of living in Jerusalem. Although you don't get the same intensity, you get the flavour of it once in a while here.

The Intifada started soon after we left Jerusalem and people said to me 'Aren't you glad you got out?' and I said 'Well no, I actually feel kind of cheated.' I don't look like it; I'm a middle-aged librarian with grey hair, but I do like a bit of 'living on the edge' or perhaps I should say 'living where the issues really matter'.

ML: Tell me about Gordon Bell and your role here as an educator and information specialist.

JD: I really do believe that information literacy is one of the most crucial skills that we can teach kids in terms of how to access information and what to do with it once they've got it. I also believe inner city kids have a particular need. Kids who come from well-to-do homes often have other ways - they have computers and internet accounts at home, they have transportation to get to other libraries, they have encouragement from their parents to learn to read early and they have role models at home. I work pretty hard to make sure that here there is at least a little bit of the equalising of the playing field for our kids. I try to create a strong library program in this school, so the kids here will not feel that they don't know how to use a library. If they do go to university they can walk into the information world and know what they're doing. Those skills are important no matter where and in what occupations our kids end up. That's true not only of electronic information, but also of print information, whether it be magazines or encyclopedias or books or the internet.

I think that on the technology side there is a danger of thinking that technology can do it all. I get a kick out of technology and I enjoy technology, but I make a point when I'm working with kids to ensure that it's only one of a variety of sources. I emphasise that the skills that you learn in one are transferable to the other. That's one of the things that people who are more heavily into the technology side of things sometimes miss. Just today I had a conversation with a teacher about the poor quality of some materials on the internet and of the problems of easy, sometimes unintentional, access to pornographic material.

My approach has always been you just teach them the same kinds of principles when they are using the internet that you teach them in terms of access to other materials. You teach them the quality principles: what to look for; how to choose; how to evaluate.

There is not the same notion of building a quality collection such as we do in our school libraries. On the internet that's missing and so are really good, controlled search engines. Kids so often end up with a maze of junk.

My role in technology is important to how I operate in this school. When we were setting things up, it would have been much easier for me just to say 'No, my area's the library' and not to get involved in technology but I didn't want that schism [between technology and information access and use] to develop in this school so when I was asked to do various technology things I took them on with energy. I probably worked far more than I should have, but I think the result is that now when people think of me in this school, they're beginning to blend the two [technology and information specialist]. We have a technology education department, a business education department, a math department that do technology very well. But we approach technology development in a similar way to the library and have merged it together. So I don't think the schism is as broad as if technology had just happened or developed in one particular department.

ML: How do you see this province sitting in the broader context of Canadian school libraries?

JD: Well within the province there's a real variation, because of the large number of school boards. For a time I was a consultant with the Department of Education and I travelled up north and did some consultancy with some of the divisions about their library programs. From that experience I realised that there really is a large variation - I went to some schools where the libraries had been totally dismantled and they now housed kindergartens because libraries are often the prettiest rooms in the school and are carpeted, but the schools didn't have a library anymore. There were other situations where there were more developed libraries, but without programs. They were run largely by technicians so the libraries, though they had a lot of materials, were really study halls. And in some places there were really well developed library programs.

So it's not possible to make blanket statements even about Manitoba, because there aren't provincial programs or facilities. The decision making happens at the divisional level, and now increasingly at the school level. There are even some schools in Winnipeg School Division #1 where they are opting to have the library run by a technician. Winnipeg School Division #1 has had a reputation across Canada for its strong library programs in the past.

ML: What about other provinces?

JD: I think there are parallels happening across Canada. If you'd asked me this question five years ago, I'd have said 'Alberta and Ontario - they're real leaders'. Now, I can't say that so definitively, because I know there are serious cutbacks happening everywhere.

ML: Why do you think that library programs aren't valued?

JD: I don't understand that. I don't know if it's because librarians haven't done a good enough sell job, or because the nature of library work is sometimes tedious, or whether it's because there's a schism developing between the technology-focused people and the information science-focused people.

I liken those with the technology focus to information anarchists, because it's such an uncontrolled approach to information. Maybe, too, some librarians have been a bit slow to get on the technology bandwagon. I don't mean that in terms of them jumping into the technology camp, I mean in terms of influencing how technology happens, ensuring that it happens in some structured way with a philosophy behind it. But coming back to your original question, there are certainly some provinces that are right on the mark philosophically. Many provinces have a strong philosophical commitment to the principles of co-operative planning and teaching, resource-based instruction and curriculums based on access to many types of information. The United States, although there are some good documents produced by the professional associations there, doesn't have as strong an emphasis on co-operative planning and teaching as do some of the Canadian provinces.

ML: We certainly imported a lot of that philosophy from Canada and looked to Canadians as leaders in that area.

JD: And I've thought of Australia as a leader in co-operative planning and teaching. I've read some of your documents on the internet and I admire a lot of the things that are happening there. At the moment, I'd say Australia is ahead in the game. But we have to be realistic about our limitations, we can only operate within the limits of the resources we are given. For instance, I've been extremely fortunate to have very supportive principals. There would be nothing I could do with the collection if I didn't have the money to build it, there would be nothing I could do with the technology if I didn't have the money to acquire it. And most importantly, a teacher-librarian has to have effective support personnel to do the clerical and technical work. Teacher-librarians have to be able to focus on the educational aspects of their role. Although I think I'm probably a self-starter in terms of being assertive in moving ahead in that area, you can't do it without the support of those in your school and in the broader community.

Where are we in Canada at the moment? We're struggling. We're trying pretty hard - the philosophy's in place but the resources and the funding and the limitations are holding us back. But I don't think it's just libraries that have suffered, other programs have also been hit, even core subjects are being affected. Class sizes are bigger, supports for needy students are fewer and we certainly feel that here.

ML: Do you believe that thee thinking in information circles is mirrored by thinking in wider educational circles, or are the two out of step?

JD: Again there's a huge variation there. But I do think that education has hooked on to technology and I don't think they've necessarily made the connection between information literacy (i.e. library programs) and technology, or at least that connection isn't as strong as it should be.

I sat on the Inner City Technology Curriculum Committee last year and we came up with a document that is basically a scope and sequence for technology skills. There were a number of other librarians on that committee. I drew on my library background to make a contribution and I think it was viewed as very helpful to have that input. But whether the connection between what I was doing there and the fact that I am a librarian was made I'm not sure. There's some reinventing of the wheel going on in education circles, and I'm not sure why that is.

I think that the education field can definitely benefit by using the expertise of teacher-librarians, but that view, if it's put forward by teacher-librarians, can be seen to be just self-serving. I guess what we've got to do is find a way to get other people to say it. We can do that by providing services that people need, that really get them in, and that can take a lot of diplomacy and patience.

ML: What do you see as the big challenges for Canadian teacher-librarians in the next five years?

JD: I think, having an influence. The philosophy and the foundation are there, in some pockets anyway, so I think the challenge is figuring how to make an impact in educational circles.

ML: So what do you think are some of the strategies teacher-librarians have to use in order to do that?

JD: The first thing is to be confident in what you're doing. It's easy to become insecure if you feel under attack and lots of librarians and library staff do feel just that way. Another strategy is to know what you're doing and think logically about why you're doing what you're doing, which are just the strategies of effective people anyway. Librarians tend to be fascinated by many things that other people aren't and it's easy to get hooked into those little professional pockets that are so fascinating.

Someone once told me that when librarians go to a party they sit around and they call out Dewey numbers to tell jokes and everyone laughs and no-one actually has to tell the joke because everyone knows the Dewey numbers. The image of the horn-rimmed, musty librarian saying 'Shhh!' is still abroad, and I guess we've got to try to be perceived as whole people with relevant skills and contributions.

I really do believe the philosophy is there, but we still need to find ways to have an impact. Everyone has to do that in their own particular circle, and hopefully the parts will all contribute to a more effective whole. We need strong leadership from library associations. We also need to make sure that librarians are active in educational associations that are not library-connected. And librarians have to be on top of technology. It's a big challenge because it's an awful lot of work, and an awful lot of learning. It can be frustrating - unbelievably frustrating - but, if librarians are the technological, pedagogical and information leaders in the school, then they can make a very strong contribution to education as a whole, to schools in particular and most importantly to students.