Tumbling through my first year as a school librarian.
From the Ground Up
There’s a new post on the Building a Bridge to Literacy blog.
Today it was announced that minority babies outnumbered white newborns in 2011 for the first time in U.S. history. What does this mean for school libraires? For public libraries? For the publishing industry? How does this relate to and impact the literacy achievement of African American male youth?
I’ve been pondering this recently as a librarian at a school with a very diverse population. I already put a great deal of effort into maintaining a global collection, but the implications of this statistic are far beyond just what I purchase in terms of materials for my library. Libraries are community spaces and the development of our community needs to reflect the demographics of our community.
I think this means as an individual librarian, I need to support diversity in library staffing. I can do this financially, by supporting ALA’s Spectrum scholarships. But I have also been thinking that I need to reach out to area universities with ILS programs and invite library students into our space to work with students, particularly library students from underrepresented minorities. We do not have a racially or linguistically diverse staff at my school, and it would be wonderful to have more African American, Latino/Latina, and Spanish speaking adults working with our students.
I actively reach out to students from minority backgrounds and engage them in our learning commons as volunteers, giving them a sense of ownership in our community. I promote librarianship as a flexible career with a great future. Up until now, however, these have mostly been girls. I would like to work to engage more of my African American males as decision making stakeholders in our learning commons xommunity. I hope someday there will be a Bloomberg new report saying that minority librarians outnumber white librarians!
Have you visited the Bridge to Literacy blog yet? There’s an amazing summit coming up this June, and it will focus on supporting African American male youth through literacy and libraries. The most recent post on this blog- Counterstories and Voice- asks:
- How have you involved African American male youth in your library programming and planning? In your research?
- How have you given them voice?
- What counterstories did they tell?
Stop by their blog and add your voice to the conversation. I’ve included my response here as well as in a comment on the blog.
Hello,
I am a first year librarian, and I have spent a great deal of time (physical and mental) this year trying to find different ways to involve my African American males in literacy at our school. One of the easiest ways I worked to involve these specific students was to involve them in the purchasing of books. I allowed any student to be involved in this process, but I specifically sought out some of my African American boys to ask them for specific books they wanted as well as sharing catalogues with them and giving them time to make recommendations.
We started book clubs at our school this year as well. We had varying levels of success with the book clubs themselves, but I learned a lot of lessons and I am looking forward to using this knowledge in the future. We selected students for these book clubs by looking at test scores, Lexile measurements, and teacher recommendations. Within these constraints, we made an extra effort to invite and encourage students from minority backgrounds to be involved in both the book club for really strong readers and the book clubs for our struggling readers. Once we got the groups of students together, we selected a variety of challenging texts and allowed the students to choose which book they would like to read. We made sure each book was engaging, relevant to real life issues and had characters from diverse backgrounds. We did our best to make sure that these texts were “enabling texts” as defined by Dr. Alfred Tatum in the book Reading for their Life.
One of my favorite programming related forms of outreach has come through a partnership with UNC’s School of Library and Information Science. We had two great volunteers from the Youth Services in a Diverse Society course work with our students on creating a podcast series called Radio LMMS. We had a really diverse student population working in this group, including four African American males who really took the reins in the planning and execution of these podcasts. To me, this was a great example of counter stories, because these students were selecting topics which interested them and telling their own stories. Plus, we are empowering these students with great 21st century skills and giving them ways to be visible within the school community.
In all honesty, the biggest thing I’ve seen be successful is to help these students develop into lifelong readers. By introducing them to engaging and relevant texts (Yummy by G. Neri; Handbook for Boys for Walter Dean Meyers; and We Beat the Street by Samson Davis, Rameck Hunt, and George Jenkins) they get sucked in and come back asking for more. One of our African American male students started the year and would only read books about dogs. I talked him into trying out Yummy, and now he is blazing his way through our collection, reading anything about or by African Americans. Even better, he is recommending these books to his friends (with a little nudging from me) and re-reading them whenever they aren’t checked out!
I would just like to end by saying that at the core of any of these efforts is a strong relationship with kids. I can’t recommend a book to a student if they don’t know that I like them, trust them and want them to be in our learning commons. I can’t convince them that they should try the podcasting club if they don’t think that I think they are smart and capable. The relationship comes first; after that, everything else is butter.
Thank you,
Katy Vance
Librarian
Lakewood Montessori Middle School – Durham, NC
I am both honored and humbled to participate in the upcoming Building a Bridge to Literacy summit in June. This summit is co-sponsored by UNC Chapel Hill and NCCU. It was made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The description below is taken from the Building a Bridge to Literacy website.
Building a Bridge to Literacy will be a working meeting that will result in a white paper.
- Two keynote speakers and a panel of literacy experts will lay out the scope of the literacy achievement gap for African-American males and will present potential strategies for addressing the gap.
- A panel of public and school library representatives from communities that serve large populations of African-American youth will discuss the current state of library services and programs designed for African-American youth. Panel members will be asked to share their successes, as well as the challenges they face in serving the needs of these youth.
- Young African-American men who are part of the Centennial Scholars Program and the Black Male Initiative at North Carolina Central University will share their experiences with books and reading, and with public and school libraries.
I will be posting about this summit here on Tumblr and on my Twitter account with the hashtag #Bridge2lit so if you are a librarian, an educator, or a human with a stake in literacy, stay tuned!
Thanks to two UNC SILS volunteers, Amanda H. and Caitlin W., Lakewood Montessori Middle School now has a radio show! You can listen to our first episode by visiting Radio LMMS’s website. 
The above infographic comes from the Berkman Center at Harvard University’s recent report, “Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality”, re-emphasizes how essential it is that we empower students at a young age with strong search skills. I know that I am helping students to evaluate websites through our school wide blogging project, but this study reminds me that I am not effectively teaching them how to shape their search to get better results.
The Four Key Findings:
1. Search shapes the quality of information that youth experience online.
2. Youth use cues and heuristics to evaluate quality, especially visual and interactive elements.
3. Content creation and dissemination foster digital fluencies that can feed back into search and evaluation behaviors.
4. Information skills acquired through personal and social activities can benefit learning in the academic context.
I’ve been terrible about posting lately, because I’ve been busy with book clubs, piloting a Nook Color program, and starting a school wide blogging project, amongst other endeavors. But I am excited to share an article I published recently with several of my colleagues from UNC Chapel Hill and Durham Public Schools! We were published in Phi Delta Kappa’s journal, Kappan magazine. It’s awesome because we managed to break out of the echo chamber of librarians (preaching to the choir) and into the broader educational conversation. Thanks to Dr. Hughes-Hassell and Casey Rawson for including me in the article.
The Joy of Books!
I am an avid Kindle fan, but the message about “Real Books” in this whimsical video is so true. This video is fantastic! And The Spec did a great article on it.
Core routines for starting a culture of Visible Thinking in your classroom- I am LOVING these! I need to think about how I can incorporate these into our school wide inquiry/problem solving topic we’ll have in the learning commons next month.
Thanks to Flickr User gerriet, who allowed me to use this photo under a CC BY 2.0 license.
So I just figured out that the filter my district uses, the M86 Web filtering and Reporting Suite, doesn’t allow me to block a large domain, like YouTube and then unblock specific sites within that domain.
For example, my district as a whole blocks YouTube, basically because of the “obscenity, tastelessness, pornography” etcetera that students could run into while trolling Youtube. Never mind the fact that they are more likely to use it to hear the songs they hear on the radio anyways or to watch The Annoying Orange, again. I don’t understand the Annoying Orange honestly, I’m more of a “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” girl myself.
So, yes, my students will not run across some of the fabulously gross and offensive stuff that is available on YouTube. But they can also not access Dublin Philharmonic playing Dvorak’s New World Symphony, the It gets Better Project videos (blocking this should be criminal), or most of the awesome Book Trailers made by my favorite professor.
Personally, I think the negatives outweigh the benefits here. I also think that blocking YouTube as a whole is the easy way out when we should be teaching these kids to make positive choices and use their powers for good. YouTube is an incredible source for teaching tools as well as an incredible source for things which many people find distasteful, much like the real world. How long until we support our kids in learning how to live in the real world?
I like Tim Gauntley’s proposal for how to create an ongoing wall of inquiry in your learning commons.
