Love Your Library

A treasure trove of resources

Over the past few weeks, the Library focus has been on curating resources to support teaching and learning. We have reworked the Library Homepage to enable easy access to ABC Education, EBSCO Science Reference Centre and Explora, the EBSCO Humanities platform, LibGuides, TROVE (the link to the National Library of Australia), ABC News, ClickView and “How to Reference with APA7”. We have started working on our first series of LibGuides for the new Psychology ATAR course of study and will be expanding the list to include other subject areas soon. Students and teachers can access these resources from the Oliver link on the SEQTA homepage.

I have been working with the EBSCO Science Reference Centre to build the Psychology LibGuides and have found the amount of information particularly useful. I have also looked through the Humanities resource site and found that is also useful. For example, looking for resources on visual literacy, I found these good articles; Visual Literacy in an AI – Driven World, Teaching Media Literacy Using Graphic Novels and Integrating Cross Cutting Concepts and Literacy Strategies to Support Visual Literacy. All these resources are very applicable to our teaching and learning needs.

We have welcomed new titles into our fiction collection. From a collection of short stories, I Am The Mau & Other Stories by Chemutai Glasheen to Swarm, by Jennifer D. Lyle, these books are exciting additions to our fiction collection. All the books are on display, clearly tagged as “New Books.” Furthermore, we have uploaded over four hundred e-books from the Gutenberg collection. This is a curated selection from the 70,000 free books provided online by Project Gutenberg. Most of these are classic titles outside copyright. We have also added teaching resources. Reading Australia includes work units created by teachers for teachers. The different work units introduce classrooms to a selection of local titles that range from classics to contemporary award-winning novels.

Puzzle Club has five keen members who meet on Tuesday afternoon. While our two Lego Clubs are carefully focussed on their long-term projects, Philosophy Club is tackling some big questions. Students from Years 7 to 12 attend Philosophy Club. They are keenly interested in each other’s ideas and thoughts. Last week I sent them information on CRISPR technology to initiate a discussion around ethics. As has happened in the past, the students quickly highjacked my topic and we found ourselves engrossed in a discussion about the difference between “bad” and “evil.” Does one start bad and become evil? Or is one evil from inception? What exactly do we mean by evil? The wide-ranging discussion, led by the students, included a tutorial on the importance of history delivered by a young philosopher. For a teacher, it is a real privilege to sit with young people each week listening to them quest through difficult concepts and abstract thinking. We are fortunate to have young people who do ask questions and think seriously about the world.

As for my own reading, I have taken on a slow read. The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, isset in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. With intertextual references to The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, this is an interesting spy novel. As the novel follows the protagonist on his journey as a refugee spy in America I was reminded of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s story of the blue frog and what is lost or gained in translation for the exile. While Greene’s novel explores the journey of the coloniser as they negotiate surviving the collapse of the colony, Nguyen’s novel examines the infiltration of America by the refugee/spy.

As we edge closer to first semester examinations the Library becomes increasingly important to our students. Legendary Learners provides space and support for senior students looking to work on revision or seek help with their subjects. Subject teachers and St George’s Grammarians (pictured above) are available to assist with examination preparation after school until 7.30pm on a variety of days.

Together, let us read.

Dr Annette Pedersen

Library Coordinator