Collaborating With Teacher Librarians to Support Adolescents’ Literacy and Literature Learning

Abstract

The author explores teacher librarians’ ideas about teacher collaborations around literacy and literature learning, roles in collaborations, and the characteristics of good collaborations. Productive and strong collaborations between librarians in schools and their teacher colleagues can enhance students’ learning experiences and outcomes. Semistructured interview data were collected from teacher librarians at 25 schools. The author reports on teacher librarians’ identification of a range of barriers to collaboration in contemporary literacy-learning contexts and explores the multiple roles that teacher librarians may adopt in collaborative relationships, identifying 11 characteristics of strong collaborations as identified by teacher librarians, which encompass diverse interpersonal qualities and professional activities. Findings offer ideas to enhance the quality of teacher–librarian collaboration, improving literacy outcomes for adolescent students.