UC Berkeley

Room to Read: Tracking the Evolution of a New Secondary School Library

by

Marjorie Cummings Goodin

Doctor of Philosophy in Education

University of California, Berkeley

Professor P. David Pearson, Chair

The purpose of this study was to examine and describe the evolution of a new school library, one that was a site for learning and practicing literacy in collaborative ways. By tracking the construction of school library resources and programs at a secondary school where no library existed, I was able to explore the processes and elements of library formation as it impacts the literacy environment. My hunch was that by improving the available resources in a distributed library, the opportunities for access and choice, and by developing the library dispositions of the students there might be observable changes in students' reading attitudes, engagement and achievement at the school. These library dispositions include developing habits of mind and attitudes that guide student thinking and intellectual behaviors, and that may be measured through actions taken to access library resources and to read independently.

In this study I viewed the school library project as an intervention--one that sought to develop a culture of reading and information use with adolescents--by attending to access, choice, motivation and engagement in reading, and by collaborating with amenable content area teachers on instructional supports. My initial research concerns included how library dispositions are taken up in a school, or not, as a distributed library was developed on site; what barriers and benefits of building library resources and instructional connections to students and content area curricula might be evident; and how increased access to resources might impact the attitudes about reading and reading achievement of a focal group of students. The design research approach allows an examination of the impact of the library as intervention (the product) as it is engineered and adapted with input from the school community (the process).

This dissertation argues that the school library exists in an academic Third Space animated by constant tensions: in the ideological space between traditional in-school instructional goals and out-of-school learning priorities, in the curricular space between explicit curricular requirements and independent learning desires, and in the physical space between facility competitions for access to group learning space versus individual learning space.