The school library, heart of creativity

Abstract

The paper explores the relationship between information, creativity and innovation focusing on libraries (especially school libraries) and highlighting their role in supporting creativity and key competences for the 21st century. Creativity is the outcome of a learning process that requires a large amount of information. In the dynamic path from creativity to economic growth, innovation is a necessary condition, central to the economy and the social development.

Libraries contribute to creativity and to the development of innovative procedures thanks to the pluralism they assure: they are an environment and a key tool for an effective education to information and awareness. The school library, as a result of three basic elements – staff, spaces and collections – has a specific educational and pedagogical role. Together with the school it belongs to, it aims at raising informed citizens able to take an active part in society. These skills are also detectable in the three main categories defined by the OECD, and in the eight key competences for the 21st Century established by the European Union. The introduction of the eight key competences in the Italian school curriculum has so far paid a particular attention to the digital ones, but the contribution of the library is ignored.

During such a crucial developmental phase for children and young people, school library services of good quality are to be provided to pupils (and the school community). The school library should be a welcoming environment that stimulates curiosity and interests and communicates warmth, comfort, variety and functionality in order to establish that "third space" where the curricular knowledge meets and merges with the knowledge of which students are carriers, enhancing the personal knowledge and divergent thinking. In order to abridge the social gap and foster inclusion and innovation, more investments should be put – even in hard times like the current ones – in the school library (especially in governmental schools) because the education of young people affects the future of society.