findingEducation’s Digital Teachers’ LoungeTips and insights from the findingEducation team.

FindingEducation met Rachel Borchardt, a science librarian at American University, at the 2010 Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, D.C. She and Jason Puckett, the instructional technology librarian at Georgia State University, gave a presentation about podcasting.

This week, we chatted with Borchardt over the phone about why she loves teaching, how her library is taking information literacy to the next tier and what podcasts can do for libraries.

Along with Puckett and Anna Van Scoyoc, a librarian in Mercer County, N.J., Borchardt hosts the monthly podcast Adventures in Library Instruction. “All three of us left [Emory University] to work in other libraries. We miss each other a lot, and we all enjoy bouncing ideas about teaching off each other. So Jason thought, ‘Hey, why don’t we start a podcast?’”

Borchardt earned her master’s degree in library science at the University of Pittsburgh, then worked for three years at the Emory University library in Atlanta, Ga., before coming to American University.

She tweets @butternutsquash.

fE: What preconceptions did you have about librarians before you became one?

RB: I thought that we would just sit at the desk all day and answer questions, which I was really excited about. I had no idea that you would spend so much time in meetings and at your cubicle working on other stuff.

I also thought there would be a lot more introverts. So it surprised me when I went to graduate school and everyone I talked to was super outgoing.

fE: What made you choose to become a science librarian?

RB: I worked in a science library my freshman year as an undergraduate, and I really liked it. After college—I graduated with a degree in neuroscience and psychology—I worked at a cognitive psychology lab at Carnegie Mellon doing MRI research for a couple of years, but it wasn’t really my thing. Being a science librarian seemed like a good way to be involved in science, without having to do the same thing everyday.

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Tags: Educator Profiles

Geeta Rajan always knew she wanted to be a teacher. As an English teacher at St. Mark’s Public School, Meera Bagh in New Delhi for the last 16 years, Rajan has focused on making her instruction relevant to current issues while reaching out in a global environment. Through ePals, she’s involved in the Global Coalition Project, started by Bill Reilly in 2001. Right now, her students are working on a low carbon diet project with a school in Singapore. Last year, her students attended a Climate Camp in Copenhagen through an organization called Bright Green Youth.

“For me, my students are my inspiration,” she told findingEducation. “My organizing committee is designing a poster for Earth Day, and they won’t let me sleep until I approve of the changes, additions and deletions. We will have a good end product and that makes me happy, being part of kids’ excitement. I love their energy. And when I see them charged up, I get charged up too!”

fE: What inspired you to teach?

GR: I have always loved teaching. I spent a lot of my time with a neighbor’s family, which had three sisters who were older, and all were teachers. I also used to play teacher to the smaller ones in the neighborhood. I liked the writing on the blackboard, the use of chalk and then making lines to walk kids to their music classes. And if they weren’t around, I used to just act all by myself. Height of passion it was!!

fE: Why did you want to teach English?

GR: The three sisters—Shyamala, Kamal and Jaya—always used to get nice English books and magazines for me, hence I fancied English

fE: Describe some of the projects your students are involved in right now.

GR: Right now we are doing projects on climate change and sustainable development. We are planning eco cities for the future. The students will be ready with their presentations by April 23, when they will finally be judged by noted scientists. The purpose of the project is to encourage youthful ideas on preparing a more livable city. No pollution, more comfort, less diseases.

And we are sharing our information (with other schools) on a low carbon diet that focuses on how students can eat more nutritious food. No junk food. The students are doing this project with a Singaporean school.

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Lauren Pressley is the instructional design librarian at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. In addition to her role as a librarian, Pressley is an author, a blogger and a frequent presenter.

Pressley was named a Mover and Shaker by School Library Journal in 2009, and was sponsored by the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Board to participate in the American Library Association (ALA) Emerging Leaders Program in 2007. She also recently developed a very popular toolkit of short videos (two to three minutes long), which answer patrons’ frequent questions.

In a phone interview last week, Pressley told findingEducation about the impact online networks have had on her personally and professionally. “As a quiet person … I’ve been able to find my voice online,” she said. “It’s opened up a lot of doors that wouldn’t have been open to me otherwise.”

Learn more about Lauren Pressley at Lauren’s Library Blog.

fE: This past fall, Michael Porter and David Lee King published a collection of librarian essays for a project they called Library 101. In your essay, you describe the disappointment you felt after taking a personality test that listed librarian as one of the last possible careers for you to consider. What did it suggest you do instead?

LP: It actually said I should practice law or be a “professional philosopher.” I have no idea what that means. So the thing that is sort of interesting to me about that test is that all the qualities that it said that I had that would have made me a poor fit as a librarian were because they were assuming that the person needs to be really rigid and rule-following and not necessarily friendly. But the things that make me good at my job are actually the very things that that test thought would make me bad.

It’s indicative of how the field has changed, that people have such a clear idea of what librarians were and make assumptions based on that.

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Photo courtesy of UNESCO.
Paul Diamond, center, on the beach outside of Praia, the capital city of the Cape Verde Islands, showing teachers how to use simple tools such as broom sticks to measure wave heights.

This week, findingEducation spoke with Paul Diamond, codirector of the Sandwatch project, a UNESCO project supported in great part by the Denmark Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sandwatch aims to make communities more aware of their marine and coastal environments.

Dr. Gillian Cambers, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) formally established the Sandwatch program in 2001. Diamond joined a few years later and helped expand the program’s reach by building a Web site, and holding teacher trainings sessions on various island and coastal countries.

Born in Scotland, Diamond was raised in Canada where he studied archeology at the University of Toronto. He then spent several seasons in Belize at dig sites before crossing into the technology field. He helped IBM build computer labs throughout the Caribbean. Recognizing the need for technology instruction, he began teaching on the small island of Virgin Gorda before moving to Saint Kitts and Nevis, south of Puerto Rico.

In his work for Sandwatch, Diamond helps teachers create grassroots environmental projects in their schools and communities. As the senior technical director for the Nevis Historical & Conservation Society, Diamond keeps a watchful eye on the island’s beaches and historical grounds, while teaching students about biodiversity and technology.

fE: What attracted you to teaching?

PD: I did some teaching when I was in Toronto, but I didn’t really get into any teaching until I came here. I came originally to build computer labs for schools and quickly found out that governments would spend a lot of money—millions of dollars—to put in a computer lab, but then they wouldn’t give a few thousand dollars to train teachers how to use them. So very often, modern, state-of-the-art labs sit idle.

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Remy de la Mauviniere/AP
Nationwide strikes in France hobbled public services from transport to schools, Tuesday, March 23, 2010.

The headlines have been full of news on the unemployment rate in France; above 10 percent, France has an even higher unemployment rate than the United States. How has the recession affected education in France?

As early as November 2008, thousands of people protested against education reform plans, especially plans to cut thousands of teaching jobs, Euronews reported.

By January 2009, the economic crisis had forced the French government to make job cuts, and announce reform plans for primary and secondary education. In response, thousands of teachers went on a one-day national strike. Job cuts were at the top of strikers’ list of grievances, along with “the end of teaching hours on Saturday mornings, which means they have less time to do their work,” The Guardian reported.

Massive job cuts in the education sector will certainly sound familiar to educators in the United States. But what about an emphasis on food and culture? This may be where the French education system differs most profoundly from the American system.

“While the country is cutting public programs and civil-servant jobs to try to slash a debt of about $2.1 trillion, no one has dared to mention touching the money spent on school lunches,” Vivienne Walt wrote for Time magazine in February.

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Tags: Schools Around the World

Santiago Llanquin/AP
Students are detained by riot police officers during a demonstration to demand reforms in the Chilean education system in Santiago, Wednesday, May 13, 2009.

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that Chile was pulling “out of its first recession in ten years,” and needed to make improvements in income distribution, market competition and education, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). OECD charged that the quality of public education at the primary and secondary levels needed work in order to help Chilean children “reach OECD standards in learning outcomes.”

Encyclopedia Britannica provides an overview of the education system in Chile.

In 2008, Andrea Arango, a research associate with the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, outlined “The Failings of Chile’s Education System: Institutionalized Inequality and a Preference for the Affluent.” According to Arango’s report, the Chilean government favors the privatization of education in the country. As a result, only wealthier students have access to quality education. Meanwhile, the system “offers inherently unequal opportunities for students from low-income families, who consistently experience sub-standard educational achievements as a result of an ongoing bias in favor of privatization measures.”

Following Saturday’s 8.8-magnitude earthquake, however, Chile may be hard-pressed to improve its economy or its education system. An estimated 2 million Chileans—one-eighth of the entire population—have been affected by the earthquake, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported on Tuesday.

Aid began to pour into Chile after the country’s president, Michelle Bachelet, asked for help. Though most countries have responded with medical personnel and supplies, drinking water, electrical generators, mobile bridges and other essentials, the European Union said it would send “‘an assessing mission’ to look at damage to hospitals, schools and other facilities,” Catherine Ashton, an E.U. foreign policy chief, told AFP.

At a time when rescuers are frantically searching for survivors, it’s too soon to account for all the missing, injured and dead, or properly assess the full extent of the damage to buildings such as schools. Unlike Haiti, which suffered widespread structural damage due to a lack of building codes, in Chile, “building codes are strict,” the Associated Press (AP) reported.

Still, Bachelet estimates that one million buildings have been damaged, while Education Minister Monica Jimenez told AP that several “[k]ey structures in Santiago” were badly damaged.

Public schools were set to reopen on Monday, after summer vacation, but now are scheduled to reopen on March 8.

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Tags: Schools Around the World

Sayyid Azim/AP
Some of the hundreds of parents and children line up to register at the Buru Buru 1 Primary School in Nairobi on the first day of the year Monday, Jan. 6, 2003, eager to capitalize on the electoral promise of free primary education made by newly-inaugurated President Mwai Kibaki.

Last week, we spoke with Alex Grossi, a young man who helped start the Kenya School Libraries Program, a nonprofit that collects books for libraries in Kenya’s schools.

Education in Kenya has been in the headlines quite a bit recently. On Monday, tennis star Serena Williams arrived in Kenya to open her second Serena Williams Secondary School, this one in Eastern Province, Kenya. Williams is a global ambassador for Hewlett Packard and has been on several charitable missions to the region.

On Tuesday, ABC7news.com reported on Kenya Dream, a class project at Cupertino High School. Students there adopted the Nthimbiri Secondary School in Kenya three years ago, with the aim of raising $100,000 for the school. So far, the students have raised $50,000.

In January, Ashley Seager reported for The Guardian on a new program to bring education to nomadic groups in Kenya. “My view is that people should not have to choose between their lifestyle and an education,” Mohamed Elmi, the minister for northern Kenya, told Seager. Now, 91 mobile schools have opened in the country, mostly in the north and east. Children begin lessons at 5:30 in the morning, study for a few hours, and then tend to grazing animals or gather water for the village. They may study again in the evening.

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Last week, findingEducation interviewed our second anonymous teacher blogger, Mr. B, also known as Bronxteach. Mr. B writes the blog, “Is Our Children Learning?” He also teaches third grade at an unnamed school in the Bronx. Prior to that, Mr. B taught fourth grade for two years at another public school in New York.

When asked why he’s such a tough critic of his own teaching abilities, Mr. B told findingEducation, “I’m doing this because I want the kids to be able to go to college … I just feel like the stakes are really high. I honestly think it’s life or death. That’s how important a good education is for these kids.”

fE: What made you decide to become a teacher?

Mr. B: Towards the end of my senior year of college, my roommate at the time had already been admitted to NYC Teaching Fellows. So he told me about it and I applied. It made sense to me because I’d already done a lot of work volunteering, doing after school tutoring, mentoring and things like that. I thought I would go in and make a difference, so to speak, and then move on to whatever else I found.

fE: Your first year of teaching was a difficult year. Do you think that if you went back and taught the same students that you taught then, you would have a better handle on them now?

Mr. B: Oh definitely! Throughout the year other people would say to me, “Oh, you have just such a tough, such a horrible group.” But I held myself responsible. You set the tone for the environment and the student will get away with as much as you let them get away with. I think it would be a much safer, calmer environment now, but I can think of at least three students who definitely would have been a challenge in any classroom.

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Saurabh Das/AP
In this Jan. 19, 2010, photo, a teacher helps children as they learn to use computers at a private school in New Delhi, India. Private education in New Delhi was once a luxury reserved for the upper class. But with government-run schools largely a shambles and the rapidly growing Indian middle class suddenly flush with cash, the demand for private schools has exploded.

The 2008 movie “Slumdog Millionaire” brought attention to the plight of children living in the slums of Mumbai like no other film has. In an economically struggling country with a caste system that makes education difficult to obtain for the poor and lower classes, what is the state of primary and secondary education in India today?

According to a 2005 paper prepared for the National Center on Education and the Economy, India has the second largest education system in the world, after China. In 2004, estimates put 32 percent of India’s population of more than one billion under the age of 15, creating a huge burden on institutions to meet the demand for education.

Even though primary and middle school education is mandatory in India, only 50 percent of children between six and fourteen attend school, the book, “India: A Country Study,” reports. According to figures quoted in the National Center on Education and the Economy paper, males in India finish an average of just 2.9 years of schooling and females only 1.8 years.

Several factors make obtaining a public education in India a challenge. Indian law prohibits children from working in factories, but it does allow children to work in restaurants, households, cottage industries or in agriculture, according to “India: A Country Study.” School attendance varies widely by region and gender, and the quality of instruction varies depending on region and whether the school is a state-supported public school or a fee-based private school.

The caste system still plays a role in India’s primary school system today. As the National Center on Education and the Economy explains, traditional Hindu education catered to the needs of Brahmin boys who were taught by Brahmin teachers; Brahmin is the highest caste group in India. “[E]ven today, the vast majority of students making it through middle school to high school continue to be from high-level castes and middle- to upper class families living in urban areas.”

The Web site Educational Videos provides a glimpse of early education in India, while Explore offers photos from a variety of Indian schools and organizations for children.

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Tags: Schools Around the World

Alex Grossi.

While studying international development in Kenya as part of his final semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Alex Grossi was inspired to find ways to improve the educational opportunities for students there. After returning to the U.S. and graduating from college, he and a few friends created the Kenya School Libraries Program.

FindingEducation interviewed Grossi, now living in Oregon, over the phone last week. “I never went to Kenya with the intention of doing something like this,” he said. “The opportunity just happened upon me and I couldn’t really say no.”

The Kenya School Libraries Program is slated to have 22,000 books delivered to 12 or 13 schools in Kenya by the beginning of the next school year. The organization’s next fundraising event—a dinner, raffle and silent auction—will be held in Denver, Colo., on March 1. The auction will include original artwork from the Maasai tribe of East Africa.

fE: How did the Kenya School Libraries Program get started?

AG: During my time in a place called Maua, which is in central Kenya, I got to know a principal and a librarian. The principal’s name was Nick Nyagah and the librarian’s name was Eliphas Kimathi. They spent a lot of time talking with me about development and where they saw their country going.

We realized that the excessive amount of [educational] material we have in the U.S could be easily transferred to places like rural Kenya. In essence, the plan was not to build libraries but to furnish them.

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