|
Why do you ask? 9. Learning A: School assignmentsLiterature, culture and societySchool work generates topical questions. Nineteen out of twenty questions concern specific subjects. The demand is primarily directed towards literary, cultural and social topics. More than a third of the questions relate to fiction writers and their works. Another fifty percent concern society, history and culture. Only 14% deal with science, technology or data. The literary curriculum is intensely Norwegian. Ninety percent of the fifty named authors are Norwegian. Only a handful of foreigners are admitted to the canon. We find three great writers for children and young people: J.R.R. Tolkien (Great Britain), Astrid Lindgren (Sweden), and ever popular Roald Dahl - Norwegians consider him half native. We also meet two not-so-famous names: horror writer Kate William and Toeckey Jones, who writes in several genres. Tolkien, Lindgren and Dahl are typical teacher choices. William and Jones have probably been chosen by the pupils themselves. Toeckey Jones, by the way, is the pen-name of creative writing teacher Todd Kingsley-Jones. The strong position of Norwegian literature among the cultural subjects has a simple explanation. The great number of questions simply reflects the great weight given to Norwegian language and literature within the school curriculum. Once we leace the world of fiction, the outside world is much more present. The names pupils mention include, in fact, only one Norwegian. During the Second World War, Wanda Hjort Heger collected information on Norwegian prisoners in German prison camps, which saved many lives during the chaotic collapse of Germany in 1945. The full portrait gallery, ordered by year of birth, contains 13 persons (Table N). Table N. Non-literary persons mentioned by Norwegian pupils.
Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02. Science, technology and dataPublic libraries tend to be more comfortable with literature and culture than with technology and science. Librarians are usually great readers of fiction. They may be interested in other narrative genres, like biography and history. But it is rare to find library staff with a similar commitment to the literature of science and technology. They take James Cook, Georges de la Tour and the prophet Samuel in their stride. But questions on ball lightning, LAN networks or glasses and ceramics cause apprehension, Culture is close to their hearts. Science is foreign and outside. This is not a question of universality versus specialization. Librarians can have a broad cultural background without reading the research literature in narratology, structural linguistics or Elizabethan studies. Issues, findings and disputes soon percolate into more accessible media. People who never read a research report are still culturally aware. Librarians could, in the same way, build a broad understanding of science without reading the technical literature. Magazines like The New Scientist - or Norway`s Apollon, and a string of excellent books on popular science, have presented the newest results and debates in accessible form for decades. Authors like cosmologist Stephen Hawking, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter write for the public as well as for their peers. There is no external barrier to scientific awareness. It is the mind set that gets in the way. Table O. School hours and reference questions. Cultural and scientific subjects, Norway 2000-2002
Source: Questions - Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02. Hours = Hours in Upper primary (grades 8-10) and in Secondary school (based on subjects required for access to higher education). Rates = Questions/Hours (percentages). The "volume of trade" in scientific questions is low. The reason lies partly on the demand side. Schools spend fewer hours on, and require fewer projects in, scientific subjects. The distribution of hours between culture and science subjects is about 70 : 30 in the upper grades (8-10) of primary school. It is the same for the compulsory subjects in secondary school. But the distribution of questions does not correspond to the number of school hours, however (Table O). Science, technology and data contribute 14% rather than 29% of the questions. If a certain number of teaching hours generates 120 culture questions, it would only produce 50 science questions. When pupils contact the service, science subjects are strongly underrepresented. As a consequence, cultural subjects are slightly overrepresented. Our data do not allow us to go further. We know that science subjects generate fewer questions per school hour. But the causes escape us. Teachers and librarians, demand and supply, are both involved in the learning process in libraries. To understand the role of the schools we must look more closely at the classrooms. Do science teachers encourage problem-based learning? To understand the role of the libraries we must look more closely at the responses. Do librarians encourage science-based questions? Are libraries less oriented towards science subjects. Are collections and reference skills weaker in the scientific than in the cultural area? We do not know. In this article we study questions, not answers. A preliminary survey (Høivik, 2002) suggests that responses to STD questions are less confident than responses in the field of literature, culture and society. Public libraries are certainly cultural institutions. But they may be cultural in a narrow sense: strong on humanistic and weak on scientific culture. Standard questionsThe school questions are ordinary. Public libraries are not invaded by hordes of budding geniuses. Typical school assignments generate manageable questions:
The queries repeat themselves from year to year, and are largely the same throughout the country. The elementary steps in central school subjects are similar wherever you live. There is no royal road to mathematics and no Norwegian road to modern languages. Since the subjects are uniform, and the user groups large, it is possible to create standard information resources on the web. This will happen soon. The demand for educational sources on the web is permanent, strong and predictable. The question is not when, but who? The technology is in place. But who will deliver and how will they be paid? Will our public libraries join forces and provide school-oriented portals. Will the teachers - and they are many - organize such services? Or will commercial firms - in publishing, media or private education - manage to find business models that make school-oriented reference a viable proposition? |