Cross Case Features: Teachers

Clemens Middle School: Media

Patty Beaumont, Media Specialist

Patty Beaumont, the Media Specialist at Clemens Middle School, says that she is uniquely placed to make connections among teachers: “I’m in the library so I work with all teachers.” The principal describes her as an “instructional leader,” saying, “Our media center is outstanding for a middle school—the wide range of available resources and sheer number of things that [Patty] has ordered.”

After participating in the NCTA seminar, Patty was one of twenty teachers selected from a nationwide pool of applicants to attend an NCTA study tour to Japan and Korea. Before the tour, Patty was able get information about the places they were to visit through a web site one of the national coordinating sites set up. In addition to providing information about locales, the web site offered suggestions for research that participants could do in advance of the trip.

With funds from NCTA and elsewhere, Media Specialist Patty Beaumont has gathered a wealth of Asian resources in the media center including videos, books, pamphlets and artifacts. She also acquired a kamishibai stage and five sets of Japanese stories for Japanese storytelling. The interest in Asia is evident in the media center’s brightly colored display cases that feature the cultures of China, Japan, and Korea. Behind the checkout desk is a collection of Japanese artwork.

Patty works hard to make the Asian collection accessible to students and faculty. She has put together resource kits on Japan and Korea that teachers at Clemens and other schools can check out. She also conducts book talks for middle school classes. Using e-mail and school and district newsletters, she keeps people up to date about what is available and new in the media center on Asia. To make sure students and teachers can find the expanded resources on Asia, she has revised library cataloguing to provide easy access to these materials. The principal praises her work: “She keeps up on the curriculum for all the grade levels and subject matter and is constantly putting together groups of material for teachers and getting them into the library.”