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    Reimagining Library Spaces: Transform Your Space on Any Budget
    Reimagining Library Spaces: Transform Your Space on Any Budget
    Reimagining Library Spaces: Transform Your Space on Any Budget
    Ebook210 pages1 hour

    Reimagining Library Spaces: Transform Your Space on Any Budget

    By Diana Rendina

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    About this ebook

    This inspiring book invites librarians to rethink the library space and embrace the changing role of technology, with suggestions on how to transform how students learn in and use these spaces.

    With the advent of modern technologies and the rise of participatory and active learning pedagogy, the traditional school library model is no longer as effective as it once was. Now more than ever, it is vital to cultivate and transform these spaces to create positive learning experiences for students.

    Reimagining Library Spaces addresses these realities, offering the guidance you need to make smart and efficient updates to your library space that encourage the use of technology to improve student learning.

    This book includes:
    • Tips and strategies for transforming your outdated library space on a small budget.
    • How-to’s for addressing the challenges and opportunities brought about by the changing role of technology, including collaborative learning labs, makerspaces and ways to support BYOD.
    • Practical suggestions for finding ideas to improve your space, inventory your library and survey your community.

    Amazing things can happen when school librarians are willing to take the risks and the initiative to reimagine their library spaces with their students’ success in mind. In this book, you’ll go on a journey to reimagine your space so you can make it the best possible library for your students.

    Audience: K-12 school librarians, administrators, district leaders
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInternational Society for Technology in Education
    Release dateOct 14, 2017
    ISBN9781564846389
    Reimagining Library Spaces: Transform Your Space on Any Budget
    Author

    Diana Rendina

    Diana Rendina is a media specialist/teacher librarian at Stewart Middle Magnet School in Tampa, Florida. She has received many awards, including the 2016 ISTE Outstanding Young Educator Award and the 2015 American Association of School Librarians Frances Henne Award for emerging leaders. She’s a frequent presenter on the maker movement at national and international conferences, and she blogs at RenovatedLearning.com.

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      Book preview

      Reimagining Library Spaces - Diana Rendina

      Introduction

      In March 2010, I was fresh out of library school and excited about getting my first real job as a media specialist. After interviewing at several schools, I was hired at Stewart Middle Magnet School, a STEM magnet, Title I school in Tampa, Florida, just fifteen minutes from my house. After finishing all the paperwork on my first day there, the reading coach took me on a tour of the school and walked me to the library. He opened the doors to the media center, and I let out a small gasp: it was a dark, dusty, neglected cave.

      Half of the lights didn’t seem to be turned on, which left the room dim. Shelves lined every inch of available wall space, and they were crammed with musty-looking books. There were large shelving units on the floor as well, packed to the brim. As I walked toward the circulation desk to meet my secretary (whom I would lose to budget cuts the following year), I stumbled around extra desks in the middle of the library. There was stuff everywhere I looked, and I wasn’t exactly sure where my desk was supposed to be. There was even an old card catalog in the back room, and an atlas stand holding materials approximately ten years out of date.

      In the instructional area, there were ten huge, heavy, wooden tables with tons of chairs. It was impossible to walk through, let alone hold a class. Students sitting in the area had their backpacks on the floor or hanging off the chairs; they barely had enough room to squeeze into their chairs. Because there was no wall space, the only place to use a projector was on pull-down screens that blocked bookshelves. (Not that there were outlets to plug a computer or a projector into in those areas.) The tops of the bookshelves were too high for students to reach; they were cluttered with old projects from the art class (which we also lost the following year to budget cuts). The art projects had a thick layer of dust on them—the students who had made them were long out of middle school.

      Figure 0.1 The Stewart Media Center Instructional area circa 2011.

      The walls were dull, industrial beige. The carpet was dingy gray and needed thorough shampooing: there was a large coffee stain in one area, probably from a mishap at a faculty meeting. The video storage room was so tight that it was hard to walk around inside, and the shelves were packed with LaserDisks, vinyl records, and VHS tapes on topics such as the Soviet Union and other out-of-date topics that were no longer part of the curriculum.

      Library school prepared me for creating a collection development plan and a policies and procedures notebook. It taught me how to deal with censorship challenges, and how to teach information literacy skills. It gave me a wonderful overview of current children’s and teen’s literature and gave me a chance to learn storytelling and evaluating materials. But I don’t think anything could have prepared me for the experience of working in my first school library.

      Transitioning the Space

      I didn’t want to rock the boat too much in my first year, so I made changes slowly. I rearranged some of the existing furniture to improve the flow so that we would stop running into things. I removed the unused teacher desks from the middle of the floor and returned them to the district warehouse. I acquired a desk for myself and set up a place for it on the library floor so I could be present with students. There was a teacher work area in the back, but working in there cut me off from students. The room wasn’t ideal for getting work done anyway because it was a pass-through to the teacher restroom.

      I began the long process of weeding the collection dramatically. My first criterion was to weed out any books that students hadn’t been checked out since 1984 (the year I was born). This ended up being several thousand books! The collection had been in such bad shape before I arrived that it was featured in a local newspaper exposé. I got rid of several giant carts of old, musty books and welcomed new ones. My students were ecstatic that there were now books they actually wanted to read in the library.

      It took me several years of weeding to get the collection under control. As I weeded, I shifted books and condensed the collection. I especially tackled reference and biography, which featured up-to-date materials such as biographies of 90s pop stars and Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House. I was able to eliminate several giant floor units. As space opened, I used funds from our bookfair to create a comfy reading nook where the floor units had been. I gradually cleaned up the library, removing the old art projects of past students and replacing them with student-friendly signage to help people find the books they needed. I freed shelf space to create book displays. I got rid of the atlas stand and the card catalog. My students were now checking out books like crazy, but there were still a lot of major flaws in the physical layout of our space.

      The Transformation of 2014

      The major shift for our library occurred in 2014. That January, I piloted our makerspace by putting three bins of K’NEX building tools on our wooden tables. K’NEX are construction toys made up of rods and sprockets of different sizes, allowing for the fast, easy creation of all sorts of projects (knex.com). My students embraced the concept immediately, and we gradually added new tools and experiences. It became clear that we needed a new type of space for this active learning, so I began meeting with a group of students called the makerspace planning committee to discuss our ideal space.

      At this point, anytime I taught a class or hosted an event in the library, our makerspace supplies were put away. My students expressed that they wanted the space to be setup so they could access these materials even when events took place in the library. We talked about how this space would look, what would be in it, how students would use it. As we brainstormed, I worked on DonorsChoose.org projects and grants to fund our ideas, since we had no budget. We started making small changes, such as rearranging our tables and moving our instruction space around. We purchased a small projecting/teaching podium with bookfair funds to free up space when teaching. These experiments helped us plan the bigger changes. I talked with vendors, visited other schools, and looked for inspiration on Pinterest. I shared my findings with my makerspace planning committee and asked for their feedback and ideas.

      That summer, we received a Lowes Toolbox for Education Grant for $5,000. We used the money to buy new, flexible tables and chairs for our instruction space, as well as paint to brighten up the library. We got rid of excess shelving and moved a whiteboard from our copy room into our instructional space. Our principal bought us a short-throw projector that we mounted above the new-to-the-space whiteboard, freeing up space in the instructional area. We also removed the wall shelves in the area that became our makerspace.

      We had painting parties over the summer and got rid of the old furniture. Then we used DonorsChoose projects to fund a Lego wall and a whiteboard wall to go where some of the wall shelving used to be.

      Figure 0.2 Instructional and makerspace area after the transformation.

      The 2014–15 school year saw a complete transformation in the physical space of our library and how we used it. Now we could easily accommodate multiple classes with the makerspace still available. Students could use the library for study, play, research, reading, and so on. This library was completely transformed from the dark, dusty cave I walked into in 2010. It took some hard work and elbow grease, but we got there. Check out the Library Profile on Stewart in Chapter 1 to see more before and after pictures.

      Transformation Is Possible

      I share this story not to intimidate you, but to help you see that YOU can transform your library space. Budgets are strapped everywhere. Librarians are constantly fighting against the stereotypes associated with our spaces and our professions. Some in education, and in society, are questioning whether we need libraries in schools anymore. Transforming our physical spaces to meet the needs of our modern students can help us to show that we are not only relevant but essential to education. In the last few years, I’ve talked with dozens of school librarians with all sorts of spaces, both new and newly renovated, libraries in historic school buildings, and everything in between. We’ve shared our stories about searching for funding, discussing our visions with administrators, involving our students in our spaces, and making incremental changes that have huge impacts. I’ve seen amazing things happen when school librarians are willing to take the risks and the initiative to reimagine their library spaces with their students’ success in mind. I hope that you’ll take this journey with me and reimagine your space in a way that makes it the best possible library for your students.

      Renovated Learning

      Throughout this book, I refer to my blog, Renovated Learning (RenovatedLearning.com). I began blogging consistently around the same time that I started my library transformation, and I documented the process, including the development of our makerspace. If you want to see more details of my story, I’d recommend looking there. On my blog, I’ve also curated resources related to makerspaces and learning space design, many of which I reference in this book. I’ve added a page specifically focusing on resources related to this book, including links to all of the books cited here. If reading this book makes you eager to dive deeper into learning space design, or leaves you wanting to know more about day-to-day specifics of a transformed library space, make sure you check it out.

      Learning Spaces and the ISTE Standards

      While it may not seem like it on the surface, there are many ways in which transforming your physical library space can connect to standards and transform student learning. In each chapter, you will find a box discussing how the contents of that chapter relate to one or more of the ISTE Standards for students, educators, and administrators. One of the most relevant standards for this book is ISTE Standards for Students 1b, which states that students build networks and customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process. .Throughout this book, I’ll be addressing the importance of student voice and student choice in your library space. This will be seen in focusing on flexible, modular furnishings that students can reconfigure easily to suit their needs. It will be seen in creating a variety of learning zones, such as small

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