Posted March 5, 2018
By Blaire Taylor, CIC Communications graduate assistant
Dr. Lucy Santos Green’s enthusiasm for helping students started during her career as a music teacher in the ‘90s. Students who were failing classes lost their eligibility to participate in after-school choir activities — a rule that meant Green was often left hanging when it came to choir competitions. Out of frustration, she began to work with the school librarian to help her students get the academic support they needed.
“What I noticed, again and again, was that the problem for students is the ability to interpret information and process what they are reading,” Green says. “The more I worked with the librarian, the more I felt that is where I would do the most good.” It was a realization that launched her career in school librarianship.
Green is one of the newest faculty members in the School of Library and Information Science. Her focus is in school librarianship, which requires a certification from the state of South Carolina in addition to the MLIS degree. Green says most of what she investigates involves designing different learning environments, the librarian as an instructional designer, and instructional partnership between school librarians and classroom teachers.
Last semester, she taught a children’s materials class that introduced graduate students to books, magazines, databases and other sources appropriate for children in kindergarten through fourth grade. This semester, she’s teaching a course on information technologies in the school library program.
“Being a school librarian is the best job in the school.”
Dr. Lucy Santos Green
Green stresses that one of the primary jobs of a school librarian is to help students develop a healthy information diet —essentially, making sure they seek out a variety of reliable sources rather than limiting themselves to only those which confirm their own pre-existing opinions or assumptions.
“With the internet, there is a lot of information thrown at a student,” Green says. “What a librarian does, nowadays, is help the student learn how to pick out the good information from the bad information. That is a skill level that is needed more than ever.”
School librarians also teach students to find the information they need through a learning process called inquiry, which helps them identify systems, look at the variables within those systems, and solve complex problems.
“If we didn’t do that, a student would spend his or her entire time trying to figure out those processes instead of completing the task,” Green says. “Their brain would be overwhelmed. That’s why we are needed more than ever.”
Being new to the faculty hasn’t slowed her down. She’s already assisting SLIS with an assessment of its MLIS curriculum. She hopes that her background and experience will prove useful as she and other committee members examine how the school’s courses can be modified to meet the needs of an ever-evolving industry.
Outside of the world of academics, Green still pursues her love for music. She is a singer and on the board of directors as the treasurer for The Cecilia Ensemble, a professional vocal ensemble based in Augusta, Georgia. She tours with the ensemble in places such as the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, Russia. She also occasionally performs as a chorus member with Symphony Orchestra Augusta.
But preparing the next generation of school librarians remains one of the most meaningful things Green does.
“Being a school librarian is the best job in the school,” Green says. “You get to work with every adult, every child — you get to be involved in all the learning activities and all the fun activities. You are the go-to person when someone has a random problem. You are threaded throughout the life of the school, and it’s a fun way to be involved in education.”
Blaire Taylor is a first-year graduate communications student with an assistantship in the web communications office of the college. She is working towards a career in visual communications and public relations. Outside of school, she loves to travel and explore.