Selecting Turkish language books - Pandora's box?

Selcuk Demirel - artist

This afternoon my colleague Lindsay and I went shopping for nonfiction Turkish language books to add to our library collection. We went to Pandora book shop and met with Merthan who has been helping me get a list together of what we potentially need. Merthan visited our Marmara Campus a few months ago to look at our collection with me. 

We spent a wonderful afternoon selecting books - some in English and Turkish, a wonderful book on birds of Turkey. Most of the books were in Turkish language but more importantly written by notable Turkish writers and scholars. Many of our students do personal research on Ataturk and we have no resources in Turkish language by Turkish authors about this important nation maker. The books we purchased for the sciences are all were written by eminent Turkish scholars. We are slowly building up our Mother Tongue (why do I hate that phrase so much?) collection and to do so with a colleague in an actual bookshop was a delight. 

Wondering at work - language

In our library we have many columns to support the building in case of an earthquake. Here is the column beside our work area. We have started to create our "Wondering at Work" area. It is thoroughly appropriate that we use this supporting column as we are adding questions and words which support our quest at becoming an Inquiry Library.

One question we asked ourselves was what does an Inquiry Library sound like? It was inspired by this blog post 'Inquiry is an approach, not a subject' by Kath Murdoch. She asks these great questions in her post How might I re-think my language to better reflect the reality of a day in the life of an inquiry classroom? Our learning involves us inquiring as readers, as writers, as mathematicians, as scientists, as historians, as musicians – as team members and as self-managers.  How to I let my students know that they are inquirers more often than when they are simply “doing” a unit? So we decided one way we could add to the language of Inquiry in our library was to have a word of the week. We would try to use it as we speak, as we blog, as we think and we would encourage one another and our students and colleagues to adopt the word as well. 

So far we have had the words; peruse, browse and now bibliophile. Each week one of our library teams selects a new word and in our Monday morning team meeting she let's us know what the word of the week will be. This is a small step in the process of ensuring that we sound like an Inquiry library. We want to encourage questions, reflection, thoughtfulness and we are trying to ensure our language assists this process.