During the 1980s, curriculum reform across Canada resulted in a new commitment to resource-based learning. In 1982, the Ontario Ministry of Education published Partners in Action: the Library Resource Centre in the School Curriculum. This publication has influenced school librarianship in Canada more than any other single document even though it is only advisory and does not mandate resource-based learning in schools. Partners describes how students are encouraged to become active participants in their own learning as they investigate various topics using an array of resources. The partnership of teacher, teacher-librarian, and principal enables the design and execution of these programs through joint planning and team teaching efforts that build the research process directly into classroom endeavours.
Following Ontario's lead, other provinces joined this educational focus. Commitment to resource-based learning is evident in policy documents developed by: Calgary Board of Education (1984); Alberta Education (1985); Saskatchewan Association of Educational Media Specialists (1986); Saskatchewan Education (1987); River East School Division No. 9, Manitoba (1988); Eshpeter and Gray for the Calgary Board of Education (1989); British Columbia Ministry of Education (1991); Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Education (1991); and Manitoba Department of Education (1994).
The last guide prepared by the Manitoba Department of Education, entitled Resource- Based Learning: An Educational Model, represents a state-of-the-art interpretation of resource-based learning in Canada. It was prepared as a guide for educators to facilitate the implementation of the resource-based model implicit in the province's curriculum guides from kindergarten to the end of high school. The document outlines the rationale behind resource-based learning, how it fits into the curriculum, the benefits it offers, and the role of librarians and classroom teachers in its integration across all subject areas.
In 1995, the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training published an extension to Partners entitled Information Literacy and Equitable Access: A Framework for Change. This document responds to dramatic changes in information technology and information literacy instruction over the past decade. Ensuring that Ontario students have equitable access to information, information technologies, and information skills instruction are of primary concern. It calls for "... the transformation of school resource centres into information centres that, in addition to performing traditional functions of libraries, would be the nucleus of a school's information network and the window to the world of information beyond" (Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, 1995, p. 1). The document identifies resource-based programming as the means to develop information-literate students who have " ... the ability to acquire, critically evaluate, select, use, create and communicate information in ways that lead to knowledge and wisdom" (Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, p. 4).
Information Literacy and Equitable Access is remarkable in that it calls for responses from all educational levels, from elementary through postsecondary, thereby addressing the need for information skills instruction across the educational spectrum in the provision of a foundation for developing lifelong learners. One reason that Partners in Action has never been fully implemented may be that it focused on programming at the elementary school level rather than the full continuum of educational experience. Presumably, before the immense impact of information technology on the requirements to actually find information, educators considered it appropriate to provide regular information skills training only in the early learning years. Secondary and postsecondary schools appear to expect that these skills be merely maintained and developed when in fact they continue to change drastically with the introduction of new technologies.
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