School Librarian tumbling through the first few years...
From the Ground Up
Last month, The American Cooperative School of Tunis lost their entire elementary library in an attack on their school. If you would like to donate to help them build their collection, please visit their TitleWish page.
If you would like to learn more about what happened, see the Atlantic Wire article entitled Demonstrators Killed in Attack on U.S. Embassy in Tunisia as Protests Spread.
My partner and I just donated. If you want more information on how to help, visit the ACST website.
This is a screenshot from @shellterrell’s #LIB2012 session on preparing your library for mobile learning. It was a great one full of app recommendations, QR codes and advice on research in the 21st century.
Gamification of Learning is so good it glows! @katyvance is excited to be back on the #levelupbc train.
#summerreading has taken an academic turn with James Paul Gee’s “What Video Games Have To teach Us About Literacy and Learning”!
It’s Not Inquiry If: Three easy (and attractively-formatted) questions we can ask as we look to whether or not we do inquiry
- Compliments of the School Library Monthly blog
I am so excited to kick off my own summer reading by joining the Level Up Book Club. I am NOT a gamer, but gaming in schools is something that is on fire right now. I really want to learn about how gaming could enhance teaching and learning.
Looking for great resources for the African American male teenage readers (and non-readers!) in your life? Check out the Bridge to Literacy website for book recommendations and discussion protocols.
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
