I’m back from ALA Midwinter and taking a quick break before hustling off to lead some teacher professioanl development.  More on Midwinter soon, but in honor of MLK Day, here are some announcements to help you think about future collection development purchases.

WHO WON THE CALDECOTT? NEWBERY? CORETTA SCOTT KING? AND MORE?
All of LibraryLand is abuzz today with the announcement of ALSC’s leading literary awards for children’s and young adult literature, including the Newbery, Caldecott, and Coretta Scott King Awards.  But you didn’t have to travel to slushy, sleety Boston to hear the news.  See the list of winners here.

DEVELOPING RESPONSIVE, THOUGHTFUL MULTICULTURAL COLLECTIONS
Author Mitali Perkins gives some great tips for evaluating multicultural literature here in her outstanding April 2010 article for School Library Journal, “Straight Talk on Race: Challenging the Stereotypes in Kids’ Books.” Her ideas have helped me think with more respect and depth about the role of non-white, non-middle characters in books for kids and what it truly means to have a responsive, multicultural collection.  Consider forwarding the link to your teachers, too — so many classroom collections are built on garage sale or public library Friends sales, which makes those collections particularly vulnerable to outdated views of gender, race, and culture.

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… that’s how one of my grad students described the history of school libraries as told by Blanche Woolls in The School Library Media Manager. Funny how I hadn’t noticed that, but most of the students did. 

Right now, this is a time of high highs and low lows in the profession.  As many prepare to head to chilly Boston for ALA Midwinter, we anticipate the high highs: noshing with long-distance friends, chatting with vendors, picking up free gallies, and — for those luckier than I — hearing the Youth Media Awards (Newbery, Caldecott, et al) announced live on Monday. 

But many will return home to the low lows: reconciling the credit card balance accrued by paying one’s own way, teachers whose own stresses have turned them inward instead of seeking collaborative partners, and an uncertain perspective about budgets and job security for the coming school year.

And then there are the high highs again: the promise of the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and what full implementation would mean for our students and our school’s culture of learning. Or the school administrator who said to me yesterday, “I don’t just want our school librarian to be an instructional expert.  I want her to be an instructional LEADER.” Or reading my grad students’ work and having an absolute certainty that they are the kinds of leaders that our schools and public libraries need to grow and thrive.

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If you buy your breakfast cereal from Safeway, you may have seen this on the back of your cereal box.  It was a collaboration between many ALA divisions (including AASL - those of us on the Learning Standards and Guidelines Implementation Task Force got to share our favorite ideas!).

Click here to see a summary of the ideas or here for a full-sized PDF of the back of the cereal box.

Bon appetit, and here’s hoping that this campaign leads to some well-fed future school library advocates!

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