Supporting pre-service teachers to develop a love of children’s literature at the University of Chichester.
they are challenged as teams to create a classroom display on a topic. They are encouraged at this point to sign up to be- come book reviewers for the newly-pub- lished books arriving in stock. This gives them some great new books to share with their placement classes and increases their knowledge of newly-published chil- dren’s authors.
Events and book awards
The Library Service and the Institute of Education have jointly run several pro- motional events such as LGBT History Month sessions encouraging students to use books with LGBT themes in the class- room, shadowing the UKLA book award shortlist, and collaborating to produce a Classroom Resources promotional film, which can be viewed at
www.chi.ac.uk/ search/course-search/academic-life. A Classroom Resources page on our VLE is used to provide information about the collection and send announcements such as information about shortlisted titles for children’s book awards, a promotional book of the month and targeted emails for the students going on placement.
Learning from each event As I continued to work with Rebecca Webb, Co-ordinator for Primary English at the University of Chichester, we dis-
40 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
covered that building links with students was crucial. We have different roles with- in the university and different relation- ships with students so we capitalised on this to bring them together. We also wanted to build positive relationships with our alumni, allowing us to nurture the sense of community for which the University of Chichester is renowned. By hosting an event on cam- pus it would encourage local schools and alumni to make the most of the Univer- sity on their doorstep and the knowledge of the staff involved.
UKLA/OU Teachers’ Reading Groups The perfect opportunity to do this was presented to us at a free informal “ChiUniTeachMeet” when one of the presenters talked about the Open University/United Kingdom Literacy Association (OU/UKLA) “Teachers as Readers” partnership groups. The groups are based on the research from a two-phase OU/ UKLA project examining children’s and teachers’ reading for pleasure.3
The research
revealed the transformation that teachers who read and readers who teach can make to children’s reading lives. The Research Rich Pedagogies website encourages schools to get involved and change reading practice. “Teachers as
Readers” groups have been created nationally and Rebecca and I both felt that this was something the University of Chichester could offer to students, alumni and local teachers.
The first event The first event is always the hardest! Thankfully we were able to use the resources available at the University of Chichester. The marketing department were happy to design and produce flyers and posters and these were displayed at the university and sent to local schools. They used social media and photographs to promote the event from the university Twitter account @chiuni, and I used the library account @chiunilib and my own @ ruthellenclark to invite attendees to the event listed on free event website, Eventbrite. We thought carefully about the num- ber of attendees we wanted to have and the venue for the meeting. We decided to cap the numbers at 30 and we set up refreshments and café-style tables within the Classroom Resources collection of the Learning Resource Centre. We displayed prize-winning books on the table as con- versation starters, voted for our favourites and talked about the aims and objectives for “Teachers as Readers”. The first event was fully booked, a mail- ing list for subsequent events was
September 2018
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