While volunteering at a high school library for my
practicum, I observed a class doing a project on Spanish speaking
countries. Each student was required to
chose a country and create a brochure on the country. The brochure was to include demographic,
historical, cultural information and images.
The school librarian was in a meeting and not available for
the class. The teacher did not give the
students much direction on how to find information – only the requirements for
the project. I observed as the class
googled information and copied and pasted information from different
websites. There was no lesson on fair
use, copyright, giving credit for content.
I pulled the teacher aside and asked her if she wanted me to
do a review with the students on these topics.
She told the class that they needed to have some type of bibliography to
give credit for information. It was good
that she made this requirement, but it was disturbing that the students did not
understand the legality issues with taking information especially images from
the web. (Of course, the students were
using the content for educational purposes, but what if they were not. Would they understand that they cannot steal
from websites?)
This got me thinking about copyright and fair use –
especially with images and photographs.
What role should the school librarian have in a school to help students
understand these topics? Should this
content be in the curriculum? Isn’t this
information just as important to understand as math, English, social studies?
