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Loh, Chin Ee
Developing future-ready school libraries through design thinking: A case study
2021, Loh, Chin Ee, Elia M. Hamarian, Lim, Lisa Yu Qi, Lim, Qianwei, Ng, Skyler Ynn Zee
School libraries around the world need to revitalise their spaces, collections and programming to continue to be relevant for teachers and students living and learning in an information-saturated technological global age. Efforts in the rethinking of library usage and design are most effective when they are contextualised and localised, based on user needs and country or school budgets. Design thinking is a useful approach for schools to understand the needs of their populations and design targeted improvements for their libraries’ specific users. This article explains how one secondary school collaborated with university researchers to use design thinking to re-envision the role and functions of its school library. The evidence collected through the process was integrated into the redesign of an improved library for the students. This article provides a model for evidence-driven school library improvement projects.
Levelling the reading gap: A socio-spatial study of school libraries and reading in Singapore
2016, Loh, Chin Ee
This article takes a comparative socio-spatial approach at the intersection of social class and reading politics to provide a fresh way of examining school reading policies and practices, unearthing previously hidden spaces of inequity for reading intervention. The juxtaposition of two nested case studies in Singapore, one of an elite all-boys’ school and another of a coeducational government school with students in different academic tracks, revealed inequitable practices, specifically in the designs and uses of school library spaces between schools serving different social classes. The study argues that attempts to design reading interventions should move away from the view of student-as-problem to structure-as-problem in order to discover new perspectives for reading intervention. Additionally, this study demonstrates how foregrounding social class in educational research is necessary for effective design of educational strategies that aim to transform education and society by narrowing the gap between students from different social classes.