Module 23: Transforming Library Instruction

After working through this module, you will be able to:

• Evaluate your library instruction through a racial equity lens.
• Collaboratively develop a plan to improve your library instruction to better serve BIYOC.
• Implement your plan and assess the impact of changes to your library instruction on BIYOC.

Instruction is at the heart of a school library program and is a valuable part of public library programming. Your instruction communicates your values and expectations to children and teens. It can engage and impact them, or it can alienate and fail them. In this module, we will explore and review strategies for creating library instruction that is culturally sustaining, share examples of libraries that are putting these strategies to work, and provide guidelines for effective library instruction that you can use to plan for improvements within your own context.

Read

Is this module relevant for public libraries? Do public librarians have an instructional role? Yes! To understand how and why, read the introduction to the open-access textbook Instruction and Pedagogy for Youth in Public Libraries.

Review

In Module 17, we introduced Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. In Module 18, we introduced Banks’s framework for integration of multicultural content. CSP is an approach you can take, and Banks’s framework a strategy you can use, for transforming your instruction. Revisit these modules for a reminder of how they can help you transform your instruction.

Read

There is a wealth of material that addresses instruction for BIYOC, but most of it is focused on classroom instruction rather than library instruction. Most of that material can be adapted for use in the library, but it is also helpful to consider how library instruction, specifically, can be approached through a racial equity lens.

• Explore the Association for Library Service to Children’s El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) initiative, commonly known as Día. This initiative is explicitly designed to promote diversity in library programming and material collections for children. The website offers several tools for creating programming that centers BIYOC.
• Review YALSA’s Teen Programming Guidelines and Teens First: Basic Learning Outcomes [PDF]. As you read, try to think about each guideline or outcome through a racial equity lens. For example, Guideline 1.8 is “Direct the library’s limited resources appropriately to provide needed programming that is relevant to local teens, reflective of their identities and interests, and not already offered elsewhere.” Considering racial equity in the process of reaching this goal would require librarians to understand the identities and interests of their service population, ensuring that the widest possible variety of teens is represented, especially racially marginalized teens.
• Review the AASL Standards Framework for Learners [PDF] and think about it in the same way. The Shared Foundation “Include” is an easy place to start; for example, in the “Create” domain, there is the competency “Learners adjust their awareness of the global learning community by: 3. Representing diverse perspectives during learning activities.” Learners might demonstrate this competency by sharing their own expertise, as we discussed in Module 17; to create the opportunity for them to do so, librarians need to design programming and instruction that centers BIYOC’s interests and experiences, holding space for their expertise to operate as the focal point of the program or lesson.
• In addition to designing specific approaches to target racial equity and modifying approaches that don’t address diversity directly, you can also apply strategies from approaches used to address diversity more broadly to transform your instruction for racial equity. Read the chapters “Differentiation and Universal Design for Learners” and “Critical Learning Theories” from the open textbook Instruction and Pedagogy for Youth in Public Libraries, to learn about such approaches.

Review

In Module 20, we introduced the five-part framework of Effective Library Services for Diverse Youth. Based on our own research and discussions with BIYOC as well as the research of others working in the library and education fields, we have identified nine key features of effective library instruction for BIYOC.

Respond

In your response journal, reflect on each of the nine features of effective library instruction. For each characteristic, come up with 3-5 specific ways that a library might embody that feature: What would ________ library instruction look like? Try to think creatively and expand your brainstorming ideas from the previous module. Your examples might come from your own instruction or instruction you’ve seen delivered by colleagues, but you can also think outside the box to explore new ways that library instruction might meet these benchmarks.

Explore

As discussed in Module 19, counterstorytelling is the telling of stories not often told, particularly those of people not belonging to the dominant culture. Incorporating counterstorytelling into your library instruction benefits those who have been traditionally marginalized and those in the dominant culture.

Listen to “Teaching Slavery Through Children’s Literature,” an episode of the podcast Teaching Hard History.

READ

Include is part of a six-volume series on the Shared Foundations in AASL’s National School Library Standards. Edited by school librarian Julie Stivers, the book explains why the concepts of equity and inclusion must be central to the practice of school librarians and offers ideas library staff can use to create more equitable and inclusive services for BIYOC.  A must read for all school library staff!

Images of Practice

Former Teen Services Librarian and YOUmedia Manager Gabbie Barnes worked with teens at the Hartford Public Library to facilitate their development of the “Woke Teens Forum” and associated “Unconference,” which Barnes described as “a design-thinking workshop aimed at developing practical solutions to the issues [teens] deem most relevant to their education.” Barnes considered this project to be instructional, and her learning goals for participants included defining a problem, constructing a community organizing plan, and pitching a creative solution to a shared problem. To learn more about this program, see the following resources:

• Writeup of the program details (including learning goals) on the YALSA Teen Programming HQ site
• Interview with Gabbie Barnes about the project posted on the YALSA blog
• Unconference website

In 2016, former English teacher Jarred Amato launched the Project LIT Community to increase access to high-quality culturally relevant books, promote a love of reading, and spark the difficult conversations that are necessary to effect change in schools and communities in East Nashville. Additionally, Project LIT empowers students to gain valuable real-world skills as they plan, facilitate, and engage their communities in meaningful ways with books such as All American Boys and The Hate U Give. The program, which exemplifies many of the elements of effective library instruction, has spread to more than 500 classrooms and school libraries across the country. To learn more about the program, log onto Twitter and follow @ProjectLITComm, read Jarred’s article about the project in the Winter 2018 issue [PDF] of YALS (article begins on page 31), or check out Jarred’s blog.

Fifth-grade teacher and edublogger Jessica (@Jess5th) Lifshitz published a post on her blog Crawling Out of the Classroom in which she describes how she engaged her fifth-grade students in examining their biases using the images on covers of picture books. This exercise, the beginning of a unit on how what we read impacts our biases, exemplifies many of the characteristics of effective library instruction and could be replicated by librarians and educators working in collaboration.  As you read the blog post, think about how you might adapt this lesson at your school or library. How might this lesson fit into a larger unit?

#DisruptTexts is “a crowdsourced, grassroots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve.” Led by four women of color with more than 65 years of collective teaching experience, #DisruptTexts provides concrete strategies educators and librarians can use, including  teaching and learning guides for texts (picture books, novels, etc.) to share with youth – texts that introduce youth to and affirm their identities and lived experiences.

Explore

In this blog post, “How Inclusive is Your Literacy Classroom Really?,” educator Tricia Ebarvia provides 8 questions educators can ask themselves to assess how inclusive their curricular materials and teaching methods are. The questions can be answered individually, in small groups, or even in a faculty meeting (or library staff meeting).  A PDF of the questions is available for printing and posting in the library (or your classroom).

Act

Improving your library’s instruction should begin with an assessment of your current practice. If you haven’t already done so, use the Culturally Sustaining Library Walk tool (introduced in Module 21) to collaboratively assess your current library instruction. Be sure to include input from BIPOC children and teens.

After assessing your current instruction, set three goals for improving your library instruction: one short-term goal that you can accomplish immediately, one medium-term goal that you can accomplish over the next several weeks, and one long-term goal that you can accomplish over the next year. Use the Goals for Improving Library Services for Diverse Youth [PDF] template to write these goals down. We suggest printing this document (in poster size if possible), laminating it, and using it to track all of your goals related to the material in the next several modules. Post these goals somewhere in your library, and work with youth and other library stakeholders to achieve them. Once you have achieved a goal, replace it with another one.

As you achieve each goal, revisit the Culturally Sustaining Library Walk tool, taking care to solicit input from BIYOC, to assess the impact of the changes you made.

But Wait!

In this section, we address common questions and concerns related to the material presented in each module. You may have these questions yourself, or someone you’re sharing this information with might raise them. We recommend that for each question below, you spend a few minutes thinking about your own response before clicking the arrow to the left of the question to see our response.

Additional Resources

Accardi, M. T. (2013). Feminist pedagogy for library instruction. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press.

Accardi, M. T., Drabinski, E., and Kumbier, A. (eds.) (2010). Critical library instruction: Theories and methods. Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press.