Summer Getaway offers knowledge and networking for school librarians

The fifth annual Summer Getaway, hosted by the iSchool, was held July 12-14 on the Urbana campus. The annual professional development event offers a series of workshops focused on current topics in school librarianship and provides opportunities for participants to gain expertise through collaborative activities.

This year's event attracted more than seventy individuals—school library professionals, youth services professionals, and current iSchool students—from a variety of locations and as far away as Peru. Led by school library professionals, the sessions emphasized the cultivation of community partnerships as a mechanism to support youth literacy and inquiry. Participants were encouraged to invite a potential community partner/educator to attend the conference with them.

Summer Getaway 2018 participants
All participants received a Merge Cube for students to explore virtual reality in the school library.


Carlos Quispe, a school librarian at Colegio Áleph in Lima, Perú, found out about Summer Getaway from Twitter. After visiting the event website and learning the conference would cover topics such as literacy, digital citizenship, and the library as a learning playground, he decided to attend. 

"It was great to have a foreign space to talk about ideas related to the library where I work," Quispe said. "Áleph is a socio-constructivist school, so it was fascinating to share the philosophy the school follows and the things I'm doing in a socio-constructivist school library. Additionally, it was a pleasure to share perspectives with other school librarians about what are we doing and what we want to implement in our libraries."

As a result of the ideas and techniques shared at the event, Quispe plans to implement changes in his work. One of these changes is refocusing a creative writing workshop for grades 1-5 to incorporate critical thinking skills, which will involve asking students to read stories and use artistic language to propose realistic solutions for what happened to the characters.

For Michelle Torrise (MS '07), library media specialist at Westmont (IL) High School, one takeaway from Summer Getaway was the importance of connecting activities to books. "Each session reminded me that the value of the activities we plan is in the literary connections we make."

Torrise also enjoyed reconnecting with professors, staff, and colleagues during Summer Getaway. 

"It reminded me of the lifelong intrinsic and extrinsic benefits of my education at Illinois,” she said. “The sense of camaraderie that is a part of all iSchool events is amazing and always makes me feel like I am a part of something much bigger than myself."