Surveys: a tool for professional associations to collect datas. The case of A.P.D.E.N., the French association of teacher librarians

Abstract

The A.P.D.E.N., Association des Professeurs Documentalistes de l'Education Nationale, is the national association of French teacher librarians founded in 1972. Since its creation the association has always used various tools like surveys to provide datas about school libraries and teacher librarians. This paper divided into two parts aims to show how the professional association, the A.P.D.E.N., can provide datas about teacher librarians, first by the achievement of surveys and secondly by the realisation of a dedicated website. First, surveys conducted by the A.P.D.E.N. : a tool to improve teacher librarians' capacity building. The A.P.D.E.N. has always conducted surveys in order to provide datas which reflects the reality of practices of French teacher librarians. Furthermore surveys are strong tools for the association to give significance when advocating with the national institution, like the Ministry of Education and stakeholders. Since 2013, six national surveys had been conducted and published, the last one launched in November 2018, is ongoing analysis and will be published in 2019. On the one hand the A.P.D.E.N. uses the results of these surveys not only to give datas and facts which reflect practices of professeurs documentalistes but also to advocate in a policital demand when meeting institutional partners and stakeholders. On the other hand, the A.P.D.E.N. utilizes these surveys to take teacher librarians’ practices into consideration and to extend its reflection about their duties like information literacy instruction.

Secondly, for the promotion of datas the A.P.D.E.N. launched in 2018 a website called "Profession prof-doc" in order to promote its work and to provide datas about French teacher librarians which gathers, among others, official datas and surveys conducted by the association. The website aims at those, journalists, professionals of the education world, stakeholders, students parents, general public, who wish to inform about the profession of "professeurs documentalistes", to update their knowledge about it and to compare their views with official texts and the reality of practices within schools. The website is organized in 4 sections : "la profession en bref" (the profession in short), "données statistiques" (statistical datas), "Les enquêtes de terrain" (field surveys), and "La parole aux profs docs" (let's teacher librarians speak).