NEXUS: A School Based Approach to
creating a Centre for Advancing
Learning Excellence.
Suzanne Downes
Director of Nexus
The Hills Grammar School
Australia
Tania Maley
Research Librarian
The Hills Grammar School
Australia
Stephen Liseo
Head of ICT Integration
The Hills Grammar School
Australia
The restructuring of the Library at The Hills Grammar School in 2007, has provided a
broader concept that links and connects the whole school community (students,
teachers and parents) through research, knowledge and learning involving a wide
range of collaborative practices and information communication technologies. A
deliberate renaming of both the Library to NEXUS and the title of the Teacher
Librarian 7-12 to Faculty Liaison Teacher Librarian was necessary to intentionally
shift the mindset of staff away from the traditional Library paradigm to reflect the
collaborative nature of the newly established centre and to provide the catalyst for
change.
ICT Integration; collaborative practices; learner-centric teaching
Introduction
The Hills Grammar School, located in Sydney’s northwestern suburbs, is an
independent, K-12, co-educational, non-denominational school with an enrolment of
approximately 1200 students. The school’s mission is to be a national leader in co-education,
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,at the forefront of educational endeavour, where each student is encouraged to strive for
excellence in scholarship, personal development and citizenship.
In moving towards this realisation, a review of our K-12 Library was conducted in
2006 to measure the strength of our school library as compared to other competitive leading
independent schools in Sydney. The findings highlighted the falling use of the facilities and
resources in our library by both senior school (Years 7-12) students and staff and a real need
to move forward to meet the ever increasing challenges of education in the 21st century. Some
research suggests that the impact of the school library diminishes as students move through
high school (Burks 1999; Lance 2001b). As a result, the unique opportunity arose to make a
positive intervention designed to enhance student learning and raise the profile of the school
library. At the start of the 2007 school year, with the Principal’s full support for the initiative,
the Library Department was restructured to include specialised Information Technology
services, by combining the expertise and provisions of the existing Library with those of the
ICT Department. This new vision, to replace the old Library paradigm, involved the
establishment of a centre, NEXUS, to focus on new ways of learning, knowledge creation
and research skills while maintaining library services as a component. The programs
currently on offer within NEXUS include:
K-4 Library Program
Information Literacy Years 5-12
Information Technology Integration Years 7-12, including Multi-Media
Professional Learning K-12
Scholarship Program Years 7-12
Careers and Tertiary Awareness
Online Learning
As the school library research builds, we see strong and compelling evidence that
school libraries are engaging places in the lives of our students, and at the same time we see
challenges ahead where much needs to be done. These challenges take us beyond traditional
notions of the 3 R’s (reading, writing, and numeracy), as long standing conceptions of
information literacy. They focus our thinking on building a knowledge-based society, and the
understandings and actions that will enable our students to get there. The challenge for us is
to shift the emphasis from information centric to embrace a powerful vision of knowledge
centric. This is a whole school approach with support needed by all stakeholders to ensure the
best learning opportunities are provided for our students. This paper focuses on exploring the
pedagogical challenge presented: how can we achieve this?
Rationale
In order to facilitate curriculum practices which establish closer connections and
collaborative practices between Library services and classroom teachers, NEXUS has
integrated ICT into teaching programs to strengthen resource-based enquiry learning by
promoting active learning through students’ confrontation with information resources. This
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, integrated approach allows us to guide students meaningfully through their information
inquiries to develop deep knowledge and deep understanding of their topics.
Information communication technology (ICT) provides unprecedented opportunity for
collaboration, autonomous work and cross-curricular projects. The knowledge economy
dictates that we, as educators, need to continually remain informed of new technologies and
their implications in the educational environment. We are entering a new interconnected,
networked world where more and more people are gaining access to the Web and its ever
growing body of knowledge. Its effects, in an educational context, inspire and challenge us,
as teachers, to think differently about our classrooms and the potentials of the new digital
technologies in terms of pedagogy and curriculum. Research acknowledges the work of the
classroom teacher is greatly enhanced when they can collaborate with an information
specialist in their planning of curriculum and associated assessment tasks. A major
component of this ICT Integration program has been the professional development and
training of staff in the planning, preparation and presentation of lessons using blogs, forums,
wikis, podcasts and many of the emerging Web 2.0 technologies. Liseo has been able to
measure and monitor the levels of skill development and subsequent integration of ICTs into
program development of the participating staff at The Hills Grammar School. Teachers have
to be prepared for questions relating to students’ ICT use and those that related specifically to
the subject content whilst applying Information Literacy elements to their work. This increase
in knowledge, skills and understanding shows direct transference into the variety of new
learning opportunities these teachers can now provide to cater for the diverse range of student
abilities and learning styles of their students. It also underpins all teaching and learning
programs as teachers see ways to directly link ICT integration to syllabus outcomes and
assessment tasks. It is this shift in thinking that has been so exciting and rewarding. From the
outset, it was recognised that in order to be successful, we had to take a collaborative
approach to teaching and a constructivist approach to learning. There is no doubt that
constructivism has had a marked impact on teaching and learning practice. This theory
suggests that in learning, students build on what they already know and actively immerse
themselves with a range of resources.
To support the notion of strong collaboration, the job description and subsequent title
of our traditional teacher librarian (Teacher Librarian 7-12) was intentionally restructured to
typify the more contemporary and evolving role of faculty liaison. Through this partnership,
our newly titled Faculty Liaison Teacher Librarian is in a better position to identify
opportunities for learning and improve access to information. The shift from a content-based
education to an outcomes-based education also moves the focus from what students have
been taught to what they have learned in terms of knowledge, skills and understandings.
These changes in approaches to teaching and learning have required school librarians to
adopt a more outcomes-focused practice and a focus on information literacy as opposed to a
collections-based practice. Incorporating the role of Head of ICT Integration into the
traditional Library paradigm has led the shift away from the stereotypical input such as,
isolated library skill sets, selection of general resources, audiovisual facilities towards more
meaningful input into user needs through information literacy and inquiry, multimedia and
the development of new digital literacies, collaboration and curriculum integration. Students
need to be actively involved in discovering and constructing their new understandings to
meet both the curriculum outcomes and content standards.
To provide this collaborative context for the delivery of educational programs and to
address the falling use of the Library by senior school students and staff, students in Years 7-
9 were allocated a mandatory fortnightly lesson in NEXUS as either an additional English
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