Josephine Crimp

Coming out with all guns firing; promoting manga to students and defending manga to staff

This session will inform attendees on the potential manga has for helping students to develop a variety of literacies. I enjoy reading manga myself, though there are only a few series that I'm familiar with, and really want to give other librarians the confidence and drive to start/further develop manga collections within their libraries. This relates to a variety of literacies; visual literacy, cultural literacy (being able to decode text laid out according to another culture's rules), as well as your common and garden traditional literacy!

The session will look at the different ways in which we can promote manga to students, as well as preparing for the concerns that parents and other members of school staff may raise. The session will be appropriate for attendees with a varying range of experience with manga, from beginners

to people who know more about it than I do! By combining talks with shared activities, attendees with more experience will also be able to pass on their advice and best practice - you may well know more about manga than I do!

This session will be made up of some short plenaries, and discussions initiated by scanned example pages from different manga series. This will be interspersed with group activities that have a practical connection to our day-to-day work with manga. My intention is that we will all come away from the session knowing a little bit more about manga, with a lot more ideas for how to use it to promote a variety of literacies in our school, and with some solutions for the hypothetical problems which could occur.

I've only started introducing manga in my library, and in my personal reading, in the last year or so - I'm not the most experienced person around, but I think I know enough to make this workshop really interesting. If you have had some experience in working with manga in your library, I would welcome your presence in this session so that we can all share and further learn. Please come prepared to talk about any favourite manga authors you have, and tales of any sticky situations you've come across related to manga and libraries, and how you solved them.

Please see the PDF download below for complete details about this workshop.