An understanding of school libraries within the technical vocational education and training system: Chile’s CRA school libraries

Abstract

Our study seeks to explore how official Chilean governmental normative documents envision school libraries within its Technical Vocational Education and Training system. This system has not been exempted from the discursive rhetoric that maintains that for today’s society being able to engage with information is indispensable. While the library has been argued to be a model space for developing such practices, this need not be the case. The role of the library and librarians is not fixed but rather runs within a continuum. Given that libraries’ roles are not fixed, exploring the underlying assumptions of documents that set out standards for libraries is important. Failing to question such assumptions can lead to problematic implementations where discrepancies between rhetoric and practice become common. Within the Chilean context, normative documents as well as teachers explicitly assign the school library responsibility for the development of practices to engage with information. Additionally, in Chile, the enactment of public policy concomitant to school libraries originated from the idea that they were fundamental for developing literacy and practices to purposefully engage with information. Methodologically, we have conducted a post-foundational discourse analysis. Two documents central to the detailing of school library standards underwent a synchronic heuristic discourse analysis as understood by relational-ontology. Findings indicate that the understandings of school libraries are closer to that of a passive annex, or resource, of a school and not as a site for instruction and learning. Our findings indicate that such an understanding slants toward an understanding of libraries mainly conceived in quantitative terms, ultimately leading to the potential thwarting of practices to engage with information.