front cover of Collection Management for Youth
Collection Management for Youth
Equity, Inclusion, and Learning
Sandra Hughes-Hassell
American Library Association, 2020

With a renewed emphasis on facilitating learning, supporting multiple literacies, and advancing equity and inclusion, the thoroughly updated and revised second edition of this trusted text provides models and tools that will enable library staff who serve youth to create and maintain collections that provide equitable access to all youth. And as Hughes-Hassell demonstrates, the only way to do this is for collection managers to be learner-centered, confidently acting as information guides, change agents, and leaders. Based on the latest educational theory and research, this book

  • presents the argument for why collection management decisions and practices should focus on equity, exploring systemic inequities, educational paradigm shifts, developments in the information environment, and other key factors;
  • lays out the theoretical foundation for developing and managing a library collection that facilitates learning, supports the development of multiple literacies, and provides equitable access to an increasingly diverse group of young learners;
  • touches upon current competencies and standards by AASL, YALSA, and ALSC;
  • uses a learner-centered and equity perspective to cover core issues and criteria such as selection and removal of materials, budgeting, and cooperation among libraries;
  • shows how a business viewpoint can assist the learner-centered collector in articulating the central significance of the collection to learning;
  • discusses how library staff can work collaboratively to create policy and negotiate budgets; and
  • includes customizable tools and templates, including a Stakeholder Contact/SWOT Analysis, Decision-Making Model for Selecting Resources and Access Points that Support Learning and Advance Equity, and Collection Development Analysis Worksheet.

This resource will be as useful to current school librarians and supervisors, youth librarians in public libraries, and educators as it will to LIS students.

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front cover of Coming To Terms
Coming To Terms
A Theory of Writing Assessment
Patricia Lynne
Utah State University Press, 2004

In a provocative book-length essay, Patricia Lynne argues that most programmatic assessment of student writing in U.S. public and higher education is conceived in the terms of mid-20th century positivism. Since composition as a field had found its most compatible home in constructivism, she asks, why do compositionists import a conceptual frame for assessment that is incompatible with composition theory?

By casting this as a clash of paradigms, Lynne is able to highlight the ways in which each theory can and cannot influence the shape of assessment within composition. She laments, as do many in composition, that the objectively oriented paradigm of educational assessment theory subjugates and discounts the very social constructionist principles that empower composition pedagogy. Further, Lynne criticizes recent practice for accommodating the big business of educational testing—especially for capitulating to the discourse of positivism embedded in terms like "validity" and "reliability." These terms and concepts, she argues, have little theoretical significance within composition studies, and their technical and philosophical import are downplayed by composition assessment scholars.

There is a need, Lynne says, for terms of assessment that are native to composition. To open this needed discussion within the field, she analyzes cutting-edge assessment efforts, including the work of Broad and Haswell, and she advances a set of alternate terms for evaluating assessment practices, a set of terms grounded in constructivism and composition.

Coming to Terms is ambitious and principled, and it takes a controversial stand on important issues. This strong new volume in assessment theory will be of serious interest to assessment specialists and their students, to composition theorists, and to those now mounting assessments in their own programs.

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Creating Contexts for Learning and Self-Authorship
Constructive-Developmental Pedagogy
Marcia B. Baxter Magolda
Vanderbilt University Press, 2000
In her thoughtful and innovative new book, Marcia B. Baxter Magolda writes of "bridging the worlds between educator and students." There is perhaps no task more fundamental to effective teaching and learning. All too often a distinct gap develops or cannot be overcome between instructor and student, one that leaves each struggling to understand the other's position. The professional quest for principles of structure and process that can help close this divide is both evolving and unending.

This book is intended to help college faculty create conditions in which students learn to construct knowledge in their disciplines and achieve self-authorship. A significant, and often overlooked, dimension mediating learning and self-authorship centers on learners' ways of knowing, or their assumptions about the nature, limits, and certainty of knowledge. A learner who assumes that all knowledge is certain expects to hear answers from an authority figure; in contrast, a learner who views knowledge as relative expects to explore multiple viewpoints. By taking a constructive-developmental approach, Baxter Magolda demonstrates how students' ability to construct knowledge is intertwined with the development of their assumptions about knowledge itself and their role in creating it. She shows how the structure of constructive-developmental teaching hinges on three principles: validating students' ability to know, situating learning in students' experience, and defining learning as teachers and students mutually constructing meaning.

Unlike most of the literature on the subject, this book takes abstract pedagogical principles and translates them into practical methods. By observing four semester-length college courses in mathematics, zoology, human development, and education and intensively interviewing students and their instructors, Baxter Magolda provides much-needed, concrete principles that will lead to valuable improvements in the classroom environment. With an enhanced level of understanding of the teaching-learning relationship, professors will be able to teach better, and students will be able to learn better, thus preparing them to meet the demands inherent in adulthood and preparing them to take an active role in creating a better society.

Those actively involved in higher education, whether college faculty or students in graduate programs, as well as anyone focused on education in general will find much of interest in this book.

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