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COMPETENCY:
Candidates will demonstrate an understanding of 21st Century Literacies.
SUBTOPIC #1 - Candidates support and promote textual literacy.
The traditional heart of all libraries is reading. Despite the many more modern and progressive ways that school libraries are contributing to their site and community, it starts with books. Primary duties of school librarians include not only acquiring and organizing collections, but also promoting and supporting textual literacy in a variety of ways. I have come to breakdown my own reading efforts into two categories. One is passive literacy promotion that looks to target voluntary students in the library's physical and digital spaces. This includes dynamic shelving and multiple books displays in my library, but also digital promotions on my library website and social media accounts. A more direct approach is a proactive one to recruit teachers to collaborate with the library and have their classes participate in literacy efforts. I do not have much data to compare my circulation data to measure the impact of my passive promotion, but I know my targeted efforts to recruit teacher and whole class involvement to be very successful.
As encouraged by Professor Bogan in the above link, and the marketing geniuses at Barnes & Noble, simple rearranging of books for how they are placed on shelves called "Dynamic Shelving" can make a positive literacy impact. I have implemented my own spin by alternatively orienting books on vertival shelves between the left and right sides to catch the eye, and attempting to reduce copies per shelf (still need to heavily weed) to make quality books easier to find and face at least one book cover out on each self to pasively promote more books. It is astonishing how many times students will pick up these books and check them out!
My library has a few good areas and furniture for book displays and we often rotate them throughout the year. We typically always have a display for new books, high interest nonfiction, and some sort of thematic book display (my student TAs are encouraged to think of topics and create their own). In the above picture, you can see my Banned Books Week display that we put together using the ALA's list of annual most challenged books. The link shows the post for the display on our library's Instagram account which is a form of our digital passive literacy promotion.
One of the most effective ways I have found to promote literacy is presenting to my English teachers during department meetings about the latest offerings from the library and advocating more teacher collaboration. In this linked department presentation, I casually informed them of new resources and also begged for involvement. Immediately after the meeting, practically every teacher in the department reached out to collaborate with whole class check outs for silent sustained reading or starting Lit Circle programs. I continue to attend different department meetings to advocate for more teacher involvement, and thus more student literacy.
Too often, when classes come out to check out books, many students express they are not interested in reading and don't know what books to check out. As a result, I have created this Reading Interest Form to pair what TV and movies that students like to watch with corresponding book genre sections in the library. I also use this form as a way to introduce Destiny Discover LMS which I have customized to our specific library and pitch as our "Netflix menu" for books which suggests new, popular, and recommended books just like Netflix! This has been hugely successful.
SUBTOPIC #2 - Candidates respond to diverse literacy needs of the school.
I usually joke when saying this, but it is not too far from the truth, that most older traditional libraries used to be filled with books written by old dead white guys. Of course, many of them are considered classics by Western perspectives, but that standard is no longer sufficient. That stereotype of homogenous library materials does not reflect the diverse nature of today's students or their needs and interests. One of Ranganathan's foundational library laws is "for each reader, a book". If our readers are increasingly diverse students, we need increasingly diverse library materials in regards to cultural perspective, topics of interest, language, reading complexity, and formats. As a school library, our patrons also include teachers and their own respective needs. It is up to modern school librarians to live up to ensure that each diverse reader has their preferred book.
Our district provided a Course Representation training to our librarians and English teachers along the lines of the Diversify our Narrative campaign. It taught us the benefits of offering diverse cultural perspectives of "mirrors and window" in our books and curriculum. With corresponding funding, I purchased a Lit Circle collection of many titles with a main emphasis on diverse perspectives. The linked Diversity Audit is from this order and shows attempts to diversify collections by documenting diverse characteristics to help ensure balanced perspectives and fill areas of need.
Based on requests from teachers to accommodate their students with lower reading levels, I have purchased a special collection of Hi-Lo books from Saddleback Publications and other vendors. Hi-Lo books stand for high interest and low readability. Basically, books that have more mature content, but are easier to read for students that read below grade level. This is an especially difficult need to fill at the high school level with more mature students that often have elementary reading levels (not uncommon for many of our English learning students). See this order list that shows the variety of sets ordered that satisfy many diverse comprehension level needs.
Our school district has partnered with our local public libraries to provide our students with access to Sora, which is a filtered version of their e-materials. This provides alternative formats that could be preferred by many students, including e-books and audiobooks. In our low-income community, many families are hesitant to checkout physical books in fear of loss and subsequent fines. I have found e-materials to be a perfect solution for such instances. The audiobooks are also a great gateway for reluctant or low level readers. Our district librarians put together the above linked website to help students get set up on Sora. I push it heavily on students and teachers alike to break the taboo of audiobooks at schools so those that need and want these formats can benefit from them.
SUBTOPIC #3 - Candidates provide resources and promote resources to support multiple literacies.
As textual literacy is the foundational heart of libraries, it is now transliteracies and multiliteracies that are the future of libraries. No longer are librarians only concerned with how to read or book skills like research via card catalogs and indexes. Libraries have always been about information, but the information landscape has changed. With information comes skills, and with change comes increasingly different contexts. Of course, there is the hopefully familiar concept of information literacy that is stressed by school librarians and is often enforced with the teaching of proper research skills. However, there are an increasing amount of functional and contextual literacies that are stressed in modern libraries. Can students adjust, learn, and use an evergrowing array of new technologies like social media and artifical intelligence? Can students appropriately navigate sittuations and interactions via cultural literacy, and tackle the challenges of social and emotional literacy? These are new learning objectives that we must teach along with our foundational textual and information literacies. We must also challenge our very definitions, perceptions, and evaluations of literacy. For instance, I am a highly educated prfoessional completing my masters, yet I would argue many of my refugee students that can speak 4 languages, have a variety gloabl lived experiences, and can navigate and create content on all the latest apps and technology are far more "literate" than myself.
Information literacy and research is still a thing. So are book skills, even though I still must convince some of my teacher colleagues that research can include books, not just the internet. Research is all about using your resources to find information from a variety of resources to best answer the questions we face. I have put together this linked document that attempts to share my favorite research tips and tricks. I provide teachers this template that lists many research areas that I like to teach and then I have teachers select which ones they want me to emphasize with their classes. Usually, it involves how to prepare for research, basic library and book skills, some database introductions, but I like to stress readily available search bar tactics like Boolean operators and advanced Google search tools such as searching for only educational domains.
Even though this was a project for my MLIS program, I did present this mind map on literacies during a leadership meeting for my school. It covers traditional literacy, but also the changing landscape of many new forms of literacy, including multiliteracies and transliteracies. This has been a great success to help me collaborate with an increasing amount of departments beyond just English. My school has bought into changing literacies and the libraries role in teaching them. I am happy to report that I have partnered closely with the science and math departments, but also art, engineering, and even counseling. With each, we collaborate on teaching the varied literacies that our world now presents and demands from out students.
I am proud to have established our school library's first Makerspace. Although primarily through passive programming for now, this doc lists some of the consumable and non-consumable resources for students to explore and learn new STEAM literacies.
Students love to experiment, fail, adjust, and learn while building with simpe Keva planks. Pictured here, students play with physics and engineering to utilize load bearing cantilevers to build a bridge between tables with nothing but short little planks.
3D Printing
3D Printing
One of our newest additions to the MMHS Makerspace is a 3D printer. We are putting together hyperdocs with resources for students to learn how to create 3D objects on their Chromebooks and then print them on the printer. If a student shows me that they are attempting to learn this new literacy, I will print the object for free!
REFERENCES
American Library Association. (2013, March 26). Top 10 Most Challenged Books lists. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10/archive
Bogan, K. (2022, February 28). Dynamic Shelving pt.1: Introducing Dynamic Shelving. Don’t Shush Me! https://dontyoushushme.com/2022/02/28/embracing-dynamic-shelving/
Diversify our narrative. (n.d.). Diversify Our Narrative. Retrieved November 28, 2023, from https://www.diversifyournarrative.com/
Ranganathan, S. R. (1931). The Five Laws of Library Science. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/105454
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