The Little Things – a conversation with Barbara McGuigan

One of the things you've mentioned about having all of those roles, your role as head teacher admin gives you the chance to get in there and advocate for yourself rather than having to go through someone else.

And I think advocacy... is so important for anybody working in a school setting.

What message would you share with school leaders about the importance of qualified library staff in remote school communities? So

in a remote school, it is, I mean, obviously I think my job's amazing, but the opportunity to have someone as support.

So when I first started teaching as a cooking teacher and computer teacher, I was the only person in my faculty at the school.

I started out, there were no other TAS teachers there.

There was no, I'd replaced the cooking and the computer teacher.

And I was a new teacher.

And who did I have that could support me with things? Tell me what resources we had, how to do things.

And my teacher librarian said, Hey Barb, I came across this resource that I thought might be useful for you.

As a teacher librarian in a small school, you could be the only other person who can support someone in their subject.

Yep, headteachers support their faculties, but if you are supporting someone whose syllabus and subject is completely different to your syllabuses and subjects, your help is not as well-rounded.

As teacher librarians, we're trained to research.

We're trained to find resources.

We build these networks with each other where we can reach out to another teacher librarian in another school and say, hey, my CAFS class is doing this and we have no resources.

What textbooks do you use? What website do you use? What resources have you got? Because as the only person in a faculty who especially if you're new, which a lot of people coming out to these communities are new and young teachers, you don't have that network already built in or that in-school network to work with.

Like in a larger school, you'd have a faculty, you'd have a handful of English teachers, you'd have a handful of maths teachers.

We have one qualified maths teacher who supports other staff who are teaching maths.

but is the only maths teacher in the school.

So the ability to be able to provide support to that person, not because I am a maths teacher, but because as a teacher librarian, I look at maths resources to help resource curriculum.

I look at the maths syllabus and see what I can do to support.

I talk to other teacher librarians.

It's

being a voice for the community, isn't it? For the school community and having that oversight of what everybody's doing.

Yeah.