By Matthew Hoekstra - Richmond Review - January 25, 2008
‘Gulpin gargoyles!” “Hold your hippogriffs!”
Since Harry Potter managed to slap a literacy loving spell on many ordinary muggles, Carole Wilson has been preparing more proverbial potions to keep the love for reading alive in children.
Wilson is a teacher-librarian. While matching students with the right resources for their projects is one of her key roles, she’s also passionate about literacy, and passing that on to students.
An elementary and intermediate school teacher in Richmond since 1977, Wilson landed at Tomekichi Homma Elementary after stints at McKay, Mitchell and Lord Byng elementary schools.
She grew up in East Vancouver and loved reading—“anything and everything”— from an early age. She studied education at University of B.C., where she also played basketball for the Thunderbirds.
Like reading and teaching, basketball still remains an interest. Children’s books are her favourite—it helps in recommending appropriate titles to students—and Shattered by Eric Walters (donated to all Richmond schools by the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire) is her current suggestion.
While in university, she didn’t consider becoming a teacher-librarian. At that time, books were checked out through a clumsy card system, demanding a host of clerical work. But in recent decades, the job has become more of a teaching position that happens to be in the library.
She’s not just a keeper of books, teacher-librarians help bring the curriculum alive and sort through a wealth of new resources the Internet brings. She focuses on helping children analyze, evaluate and access the best information, and wade through an information explosion that any given social studies topic can yield.
Sunday is Family Literacy Day, which promotes the importance of reading and learning together as a family. While the basic definition of literacy is the ability to read and write, Wilson says it’s taken on so many new forms in the electronic age.
“You’re going to read forever, in a variety of ways and in a variety of formats. But if you don’t like to read in today’s society, whether it’s reading images, or the newspaper or contracts, you’re in trouble,” she says.
While teaching students at Homma’s library (named after longtime Richmond educator June Chiba), Wilson reflects on the power reading has on the human spirit through a few simple words from Confucius: “Words are the voice of the heart.”
How has the teacher-librarian’s role changed?
“The teacher-librarian has the great power being in the position that they can connect kids and parents with great fiction, with non-fiction, electronic resources, television programming. The spectrum is much wider than it was 25 years ago. It’s not just go get a book or an encyclopedia.”
How can parents instill a love for reading?
“The best way is to model reading for your kids, with your kids. Have conversations with your kids about the issues that are going on in the world—current events, news, the Olympics, the tsunami—because whatever happens anywhere in the world, we find out about it almost the instant it happens. How do we interpret all that?”
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job? “To help inspire the love of reading in kids, and to have those conversations with kids that help them to make sense of how reading is important.”
What’s the most challenging aspect?
“Teacher-librarian time has been cut. Budgets have been cut, not just for libraries but for other areas. It’s challenging because of the expectations and the demands on the teacher as well as the teacher-librarian continue to increase. So it’s easier for children to go online at home and print off something on their topic than it is to go to a library. They both have value...but I think (my role) is to help kids...choose the best resource for what they’re doing.”
