Library: the commons

In the past week I've read about the idea of a "commons" on two fronts. David Loertscher in the pages of the School Library Journal proposes a library revolution; leveraging the library's "neutral" standing within the school to become a "commons:" specifically, a place to experiment with and share best practice - a forum for progress in teaching and learning.

And then there was the article in the New York Times Magazine about Lewis Hyde and his pursuit of our nation's historic "cultural commons." He is working to identify the boundaries for sharing ideas, art, "gifts" in order to regain the balance between private and public "property" - that whole copyright dilemma in the Internet age.

I think the second article helped to convince me that the proposed "library revolution" wasn't just another marketing slant to sustain libraries for their own sake. Teachers' reticence to share the "property" of their teaching methods might very well be a reflection of our current private/public wrestling match about what we owe the greater community - in this case our school and colleagues.

Hyde argues that our founders were as much laborers within the cultural commons as persons of free-standing genius. Although they cherished the idea of private property, they valued the notion that they had "an almost sacred moral requirement to contribute to the public good."

In the coming weeks and months, I will be trying to nudge my library from its niche as a clearinghouse for showcasing student work to a place that necessarily hosts the dialogue between the teachers that created those opportunities for achievement: a commons that does not currently exist in our school but that may very well impact whether we thrive and succeed as a school.