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 Diane DriessenIf books are to be the center of the school curriculum then a quality school media center and a certified media specialist are essential. Diane Driessen has been a school media specialist in Upper Arlington, Ohio for the last 20 years. She is currently in her eighteenth year at Wickliffe Alternative School. Wickliffe is a school with 21 multi-age classrooms that offers parents an alternative to traditional schools. Children with disabilities are included in each of the classrooms. The goals of the school are “to foster intellectual growth, curiosity, and excitement in learning through Progressive Education practices,” and “to build a school that respects diverse people and ideas, encourages democratic decision making, and values responsible actions in school and in the broader community.” Although the school must abide by state and national guidelines, and proficiency tests are administered regularly, the curriculum is developed around themes such as “life cycles” or “courage” and content is explored through children’s literature.Diane sees her role as a service provider and states that her goal is “to provide authentic and integrated experiences with books for her patrons,” always with an end goal of fostering the love of literature. Diane is considered a valued member of the instructional team and, as such, she collaborates with teachers, parents, and children in various ways. The district provides her with a clerical assistant so that for much of her day she is free to work in classrooms, interact with children in the library, or offer instruction. When she visits a classroom she might model a book discussion with two other teachers or offer suggestions for doing library research. Children come to the media center as a class on a regular basis, but Diane welcomes smaller groups who come in during the day to look for books or to work on school projects. She finds that these informal visits often lead to cross-age interactions that are beneficial to all. One of her main delights is to run small discussion groups with children of various ages. For these groups she often begins by giving children several possible books to choose from. She previews each one and gives children time to look through each book. Children then each choose a favorite and negotiate until everyone agrees on the book they want to read. Anyone whose favorite book wasn’t chosen is always free to take that book out on their own; but the group consensus leads to group engagement. Diane feels strongly that when children have a choice of reading material they have an investment in reading it. Then the group decides how many pages they want to read before each meeting (usually, at least twice a week). Her goal during discussions is to lead the children back into the book to explore it more fully, and when discussion is finished she often asks children to create a project that they can then present to classmates. This, she feels, invites other children to want to read the book. Diane also enjoys planning school-wide and district-wide projects. She collaborates with the music, art, and physical education teachers to offer “Friday Connections” where these special teachers can offer something to all the children in the school. These weekly experiences surely led to a yearly experience called “Arts Off Campus,” where all the children in the school (except kindergarteners) have a chance to visit and explore four different community-based art organizations in one day. Wickliffe’s commitment to the arts in learning has paid off with a national grant and a collaboration with Harvard University on a project called “Making Learning Visible.” Many times during the year, Diane works with the district’s four other elementary media specialists to plan special events and celebrations. A yearly project called “Good Books, Good Times” grew out of the desire to promote the April’s National Library Week. Each year the five media specialists choose a theme, write a script, and design sets and costumes that are meant to get children excited about books. One year the five librarians chose a geography theme that included dramatizations of books that represented different regions of the U.S. and a performance of their Precision Book Cart Drill Team. These five specialists also collaborate on planning a yearly author visit to the district. Each year a different librarian takes responsibility for planning the details of the week-long visit, with each author or illustrator spending a day at each of the schools. Diane explains that this is often a way for teachers and children to get excited about their own literary talents and to learn about books they may not have known about. This type of district-wide connections led to a project with Carol Collier, media specialist at Upper Arlington’s Barrington Elementary School. In honor of Ohio’s Bicentennial in 2003, Diane and Carol developed a web site featuring some of the many Ohio authors and illustrators for children (see http://school.uaschools.org/greensview/ohioauthors/index.htm). Diane and Carol had so much fun with this project that they traveled the state filming and editing “Literary Ohio,” a forty-minute video of interviews with selected authors such as Will Hillenbrand, J. Patrick Lewis, and Edith Pattou. Diane, whose formal training includes a Ph.D. from Ohio State, can’t think of anything she would rather be doing than working in such a stimulating job. Her long and careful nurturing of happy book experiences for children, teachers, and parents is certainly one of the reasons why her school has continued to be a model for literature-based learning that inspires us, and that we can all aspire to. |