Mount’s new librarian wants to pump up the volume on learning
WOONSOCKET – The notion that libraries are places reserved for quiet study is as old as the Dewey Decimal System, but the new librarian at Mount St. Charles Academy may be about to shake things up.
Kristin Polseno says libraries should keep a safe harbor for undisturbed study and reflection – but it shouldn’t be the whole library.
Polseno envisions a library as a school’s center of creativity, collaboration and research – with enough space for the old-school library traditions.
“There are huge misconceptions about what libraries and librarians are about,” according to Polseno. “There’s a lot of research out there about creating four unique spaces within the library for learning, meeting, performance and inspiration.”
Polseno, who started work at the 94-year-old Christian academy last week, says her initial plans are to get to know the students, teachers and parents, but she’s looking forward to introducing some changes in line with the new research findings into how libraries function.
“Before, when a student got a topic to research, they went to the library, did research, compiled information, wrote the paper and handed it in,” she says. “It’s a very linear process and the
teacher is the only audience.”
With a library as a hub of four spaces, the process can be “more cyclical,” according to Polseno. Students brainstorm together, meet, research, refine and test ideas. If the idea isn’t heading where they expect it to, “they can go back, do more research and come up with a new approach.”
A former classroom teacher at Cumberland High School, Polseno holds bachelor’s degrees in communication studies from the University of Rhode Island and English from Rhode Island College. Also, she earned her masters in library information services from URI in 2016.
At URI, Polseno won the Maurice Tougas Award from the School Librarians of Rhode Island in recognition of exceptional achievements and leadership potential among library and information studies graduate students.
Polseno’s career in education began in 2002 as an English teacher at Cumberland High School. She later worked as an “induction coach” for the Rhode Island Department of Education, a position that called for mentoring teachers at five to 10 schools a year.
When the mentoring program ended, colleagues urged Polseno to consider school administration, but her heart was in the library.
“I thought about where my passions were, and they were in literacy, reading and access to information,” she said. “Technology and differentiated instruction were subjects I delivered during professional development workshops when I was coaching. I decided to go to graduate school for library and information studies.”
She worked as a teacher/mentor at the Captain Isaac Paine School in Foster while she was in graduate school, then taught in Scituate until the Mount Saint Charles administration approached her about leading the library.
“It was a hard offer to refuse. I’d envisioned going back to a middle or high school, so to be in a school with so much history that was considering new programs seemed like an exciting opportunity,” she said.
Polseno’s experience includes programs that are potentially a good fit for Mount Saint Charles. One of them is “service learning,” which combines volunteer work with teaching. She also envisions a wider role for visuals to support studentwritten material.
“About 75 percent of what we remember is visual,” she said. “I’d like to see us help students combine data, information and images. I worked with a fourth-grade teacher who was teaching a unit on creating brochures for every state. Instead of creating traditional brochures, we had the student create infographics with words, statistics, data and visuals.”
Polseno also has training in collecting oral histories. A fan of NPR’s “Story Corps” series, she says Mount’s long history is a natural for a story collection program focused on graduates from genera- tions past.
“I’d love to bring together different generations within the library walls around curating oral histories,” she says. “Students can interact with grandparents and alumni who are willing to come back to Mount Saint Charles and share their stories. We’d train the children on conducting good interviews – asking the right questions and following up. Then we’d not only share them, we would archive them to have forever.”