A major change in usage and thinking: working with ESL students in Bolivia

Paula Pfoeffer

In July 2003 I took up the position of School Librarian at Cochabamba Cooperative School in the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia. Cochabamba is a city of around 500 000 people, in one of the poorest countries in South America. I found the position whilst searching the Internet one day while I was on an extended holiday in Canada. I had never been to Bolivia before (and even had to look up the map to see where it was) and was very excited when the position was offered to me. Most of my experience, working in a well-resourced public library in Sydney, would prove to be very useful when it came to translating those skills to a school community with very specific needs.

The school

Cochabamba Cooperative School was founded in 1958 on an American home schooling method called Calvert; it has since evolved into a cooperative school, with a focus on the American Curriculum. The school's student population is around eight-five per cent Bolivian, with the rest being children from other countries (mostly the United States) whose parents work in Cochabamba. English is the language of instruction, however there is a program of Bolivian Social Studies and Spanish which encourages language and local history skills and knowledge. Currently there are around 320 students, with about 170 in primary school and the rest in high school.

The library

The library has a small collection of old books. Over the past ten years it has managed to collect many materials discarded from other American libraries and has relied on donations of books. This makes the collection not only ten years out of date (most of the atlases still have the Soviet Union) but also the books are filled with dust because no student is using the library, as I found out when I was weeding the collection. There is a library operating system but it is DOS-based and has no good search option and no OPAC capabilities. This system was developed by UNESCO for libraries in developing countries and is one of the most difficult systems I have worked with. There is no manual and it's in Spanish, which means I am cataloguing in English whilst the operating system language is in Spanish! There is no option to change the languages either. My language skills are improving slowly.

So what I am finding is that even if students want to access the collection they have no skills to be able to do this and no means to find the books and I don't even know how to find books through the computer system! The library does have an Internet connection but it runs off one 56K modem and one telephone line so it is slow and unreliable, especially when the power goes out, which happens quite regularly.

There hasn't been a qualified Librarian at the school for almost two years and with limited access to resources (both print and electronic) I found the students had little or no skills in finding information. Their library lessons consisted of either watching a video (in the case of primary school) or sitting in front of a computer screen waiting for a web page to download (in the case of high school). I was surprised to learn that the students in high school did not know how to find a book on the shelf and were asking really basic questions about how to use the library, like 'where is the World Book encyclopedia?' - and that was from a senior school student who had been at the school for ten years!

Libraries in Bolivia

Encouraging the value of libraries in a country with no tradition of libraries is a challenge. There are no public libraries in Bolivia as such, while some privately run libraries only have access for a select group of people and have only collections on specific subjects. This means that when it comes to arguing for funding the library tends to get left out. Things are beginning to change however. There is now a major campaign to build the first Children's Library in Cochabamba (and indeed in Bolivia). It will take a few years to raise the money as they are relying mostly on donations from the community.

So I arrived to work in a library with little to no funding, an out-of-date collection, a very slow internet connection, and a reluctance on the part of the students to use the library. Sounds like a librarian's nightmare but it has been a challenge and with the programs and procedures I've put in place over the last few months, I have seen a major change in usage and thinking about the library.

Library instruction

Primary school

I started library instruction for grades 4-6 starting from the basics: what is fiction, what is non-fiction. I found that the library instruction I was used to giving in Australia would have to be modified greatly for the students in Bolivia because they are English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. So talking library jargon to a bunch of kids who are struggling to understand the meaning of a lot of basic English words was a waste of their time as well as mine. It meant that I had to rethink how I was going to teach library skills. I have found that the ESL learners here respond to visual information so I designed some games which incorporated learning library skills with English language.

One of them, the Dewey Memory Game, consisted of a group of cards, half with the Dewey numbers and half with pictures corresponding to those numbers. The idea was that, in small groups, the students would place the cards face down and try to match two at a time by turning the cards over. The game was a great success with the students not only learning the DDC system, but having a lot of fun as well.

Since then I have found that when we review lessons that have had visual activities associated with them, the recall is quite high. They are beginning to access books on their own without the help of the librarian or their teacher, and they get excited when they come to their library lesson, a big change since the beginning of the year when long faces greeted me at the door.

Students are coming into the library more in their free time and borrowing books to support their subjects or for reading in their own time. I asked students what they thought about the library and having to come here once a week. These are some of the responses I received:

I like coming to the library and borrowing Goosebumps books. I like to read the animal magazines as well. Valeria, Grade 4 student.

Library is fun because we do puzzles and play games. We don't get to play them much in our other classes. Carlos, Grade 5 student.

I feel that the image problem the library has had over the last few years is beginning to change and with the parents on side and encouraging their children to borrow, things can only improve.

High school

The first thing I noticed about the high school students was their lack of understanding of the research process. They didn't know how to evaluate information and they didn't know how to plan or produce essays. So in the first few weeks of term I had all students from Year 9 - Year 12 take one of my research skills classes. Here I taught them how to plan and research for projects and how to evaluate information found on the Internet and in the print resources available in the library. It is hard to do this with a 56K modem but we managed, and I now have a commitment from the school for a dedicated line with DSL to come.

With high school I tried to have as much hands-on instruction as I could manage, although with 28 students in a class and 8 computer terminals in the library, this proved to be rather difficult. I have noticed, however, that after going through the different search strategies you can adopt and the different search engines you can use, students are trying them. I am beginning to notice that they have moved beyond Yahoo to Google (which to my surprise no one used) and even Dogpile.

Because the library's collection is so out of date, students have not been using it. When they come in for a library lesson there is a frenzy over who gets to use the computer. The value of books as a resource is a hard message to get across, given that books are not readily available here in Bolivia (let alone ones in English) and the school's library is one of about three libraries in the whole of Bolivia, outside of university libraries. The other problem is that it takes a very long time for orders to get to Bolivia via the US. I am cataloguing orders that were placed almost eight months ago! This presents the problem of keeping the collection up to date and with a changing curriculum, this is difficult. We have now decided to try ordering through Amazon.com, hoping that their speed of delivery is better and I have found that I can order most books through them as well.

One advantage, however, to a slow Internet connection is that the students are forced to find other sources of information. We have Encarta and Funk and Wagnall encyclopedias on CD ROM and our reference collection is not too bad, in fact better than our general collection! Our magazine collection is okay, the currentness is still a problem however with our subscription of Time magazine running six weeks behind. Hopefully access will improve with a dedicated line and a subscription to SIRS online database.

Collaboration with teachers

There are around twenty-five teaching staff in the school, with a mix of Bolivians and 'foreign hires', as they call those of us who were recruited from outside of Bolivia. Building up a relationship between the library and the teachers was a main aim. At the beginning of the school year I held induction classes for teachers exploring the ways the library could work for them. Out of those induction sessions I developed a number of systems that could improve communication between the library and the staff.

The first was a request system, whereby the teachers would inform me of the topics they were teaching and I would find the relevant information on the Internet or in other print resources before the class came in. In terms of the Internet, I was able to find websites, save them to a Word document and upload them onto the desktop for the students. This saved a lot of time for the students and helped the teachers also to find out information that they may not have access to.

We have also started a Technology Committee to discuss the needs of the school and come up with a plan for the future. There are difficulties because of the lack of funds, so we cannot get everything we want. However the Committee does increase participation and collaboration between the library, teachers and administration and with this we should be able to come up with some solutions to the technology issues we face.

The use of the school library as a public library

The lack of libraries in the community means that the school library is used by parents as a pseudo public library. Parents come in and borrow books for their children as well as for themselves, and I get similar reference questions as I did in a public library in Australia. It's hard to meet these challenges with an outdated collection, however I am finding that the Internet is my best friend!

Over the next year I hope to build up the public side of the collection with books for parents with books on such topics as how to help their children through puberty etc, as I find that these are the questions I am mostly getting. I have also extended the library's opening hours so that it is convenient for parents to come in with their children; we are now open from 7:15am-4:00pm Monday to Friday. More importantly the students are now allowed to borrow more than one book at a time, as was previously the case.

Out in the community

I have visited a pre-school for children living in prison with their parents who are given the opportunity to leave their prison home to go for some respite and instruction. These children have no access to books and, although the pre-school is attempting to provide them with some literacy, they find it extremely difficult with no resources. When I arrived with books for the children to look at, I was greeted with so much excitement - I had never seen this before. The children were so incredibly happy, it makes a nice change to see that kind of reaction. So currently we are in the early planning stages of developing a library for this pre-school through fundraising and donations from organisations outside and within Bolivia, hopefully being able to give some of the most disadvantaged kids in Bolivia a chance.

Future plans

I have great plans for the library at the school, including developing a website and holding a read-a-thon. I have ordered SIRS, an online database from the US and hope to have offsite access to this once the website is developed. I have also posted to do Book Raps with sister schools in Australia and am looking at ways of connecting students with Australian and Canadian students, using email.

The challenges continue as I constantly find myself relearning everything that I thought I knew in relation to library work. Every day I am faced with new issues but I am confident that by the time our students reach University (and Cochabamba has one of the biggest, free, public universities in the world) they will have the skills to survive in the real world.

Having previously worked in the public library system in Sydney, Paula Pfoeffer is now school librarian at Cochabamba Cooperative School, in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

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