A Study of the Roles of the Teacher-Librarians as Perceived by Supervisors, Principals, Teachers and Teacher-Librarians in Korea

사서교사의 역할에 대한 인식연구

The school library plays very important and central role for the fullfillment of educational objective in the process of implementing the school curriculum. And the media specialist known as teacher-librarian is. primarily responsible for the successful operation and effective management of the media center. It is true that effectiveness of the school library depends greatly on the cooperative coordination among teacher-librarian, teacher and principal in addition to the strong support and effective supervision of school district authority, specifically, supervisor of school library program. The successful program therefore is influenced by their perception of the teacher-librarian's role. The purpose of this study was to investigate the teacher-librarian's. educational role perceived by teacher-librarian, teacher, principal and school district supervisor. A standard task model describing both the management and educational functions and expectations of teacher-librarian was proposed after studying the relevant current standards of four countries. Serveral hypotheses were made regarding role perception and a survey instrument was designed based on this proposed task model and the results of the literature review to validate the hypotheses. The questionnaires were mailed out and the returned questionaires were analyzed by SPSS computer routine. The major findings are summarized as follows: 1) There was difference of the role perception among teacher-librarian, teacher, principal and district supervisor at the significance level of p<0.001 for both management and educational functions of teacher­librarian. The mean score of the teacher-librarian was highest among four groups and the score for the educational function tasks were lower than that of management function tasks. 2) The positive correlation exists at the significance level of p<0.001 between the role perception and the attitude toward changing social trends such as acceptance of new technology, need for better communication and information. 3) The positive correlation exists at the significance level of p<0.001 between the role perception and the view on the curriculum and teaching method.