IASL conference opens in Portugal

The 35th Annual conference of the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) was opened today in Lisbon by the Minister of Education for Portugal who declared that School Libraries are an absolutely indispensable component in the implementation of policies of inclusion, full time or extended schools and enabling citizens to meet the demands of the Information society.

She spoke of a joint Ministry of Education / Department of Culture programme to develop school libraries. Over 1,800 new school libraries have been created in the last 10 years, and the Minister noted that the results of this could be felt throughout all phases of education. This had been achieved by the effective administration by local authorities, to whom the school libraries were accountable, and funding from National Government. The Minister concluded by noting that the main challenge to be addressed was to ensure that Portuguese school libraries would become dynamic spaces, central to teaching and learning.

Dr. Isobel Veiga gave the opening lecture, on the National Reading Plan for Portugal, followed by a very challenging keynote address by Dr Ross Todd, who spoke on the conference themes of Reading, Knowing, Doing, the Multiple Faces of Literacy. In speaking of the crucial and transformational role of school libraries in the reading - knowing - doing cycle of creating 'deep knowledge' he spoke of recent research identifying two types of information seeking - the Additive approach (stockpiling facts) and the Integrative approach (interpreting facts to establish personal conclusions and reflecting on these). Ross challenged delegates to reflect on two issues:

1. How do we get students to engage in tasks and own them, so they are doing it for themselves, not for their librarians or their teachers?
   
2. The critical nature of the instructional intervention of school librarians in ensuring that students gain the skills required to construct new knowledge, not just to gather facts.

The Conference continues till Friday with many major keynote speeches, workshops and research papers. Delegates from around the globe are already reflecting on what they have heard and constructing new knowledge to take back to their own countries.