Episode 9: School Librarian Mark Ray Talks Curation as a Human Skill

In this episode, Kristina interviews Mark Ray, a Teacher Librarian and Free Range Educator in Vancouver, Washington, just outside of Portland, Oregon. His extensive school library background within schools and at the district level make him the perfect person to talk about the role of school librarians in this OER work. Since the role of librarian is largely one of curation and he has quite a bit of experience with this, I wanted to hear from Mark how he helps content teachers search and discover resources to use, why school librarians are critical to have in curriculum work, and what school librarian work looks like in 2020.

Kristina's main takeaway from this interview is the idea that curation is a human skill and should not necessarily be outsourced to the algorithms that the internet provides. Teacher librarians are trained as curators and have the incredible skillset to train teachers and students how to curate and further analyze information. As Mark says, teacher librarians are often overlooked resources hiding in plain sight and we should tap into their expertise for all things instructional materials, particularly OER.