A few weeks ago, as we were discussing facilities in our school library management class, the students were curious to see some before-and-after renovations or rearrangements. What a great idea!

Thanks to folks on AASLForum, LM_NET, and MAME, we’ve got some great befores-and-afters to share with you all in this and upcoming blog posts.

First up, Deb Logan, who endured a lengthy renovation in Mt. Gilead, Ohio.

Here are three images of her library BEFORE. Note the dark woo, mismatched computers, and overflowing bookshelves.   The veneer on the circulation desk is chipped and small. It’s clearly a library that wasn’t built to accommodate the digital age. 

And here are the AFTER shots. Wow - so light and bright.  Chairs with sled wheels move much more easily to help the library staff straighten up and to help students quickly and quietly move their seats to accommodate group works or flexible seating. Light laminate table tops brighten up teh space, as does improved lighting and more windows. The library has real computer tables that disguise more of the cables and cords. A projector hangs from the ceiling. There’s more breathing room everywhere - including behind the circ desk!

Thanks for sharing these, Deb!

What do you see in these photos that you’d like to try in your own library?

Bookmark to:  

I’m sitting in our classroom as my children’s lit  (aka, “Media for Children and Young Adults”) students do a pair of reflection projects.  First, they reflect as a group about the major ideas and themes of the course.Then, I ask them to reflect alone. The instructions:

This semester, you’ve heard a lot about what I believe about literature and resources for children and young adults.  Now that you’ve reflected on the course content, what do you believe about selecting media for children & YA?You can write your response as:

• a “This I Believe” essay
• a policy statement
• a Children/YA Bill of Rights
• a philosophical statement for your portfolio
• something else

I like spending the final hours of a course having students synthesize the ideas so that they can leave the course reminded of all we have done, but I’ve only this year added the individual reflection.So … what do I believe about media for children and young adults? I asked myself, watching them write, and I figured I should answer my own question.

I believe that books still matter and that they can help us grow our thinking and our world view.  They can make us laugh, teach us how to do things, or help us know our world.

While print books are still my preferred mode, I believe in multimodal and multimedia formats: digital texts, ebooks, audio books, audio mp3s, graphic novels, magazines, Web sites, and more.

Keeping kids reading is more important than being picky about what they read.  I am excited that we have passionate readers throughout our K-5 building.

I believe that our library collections should be real havens for pleasure reading, not just give lip service to that. 

I don’t expect my students to love what I loved, even if I wish they did.

I believe in library spaces that welcome children in and value them for who they are.

I believe in library spaces that build a sense of community and thoughtful excitement about learning.

I believe that library spaces should adapt to the needs of its users, not vice versa.  My hat is off to whoever invented casters for library furniture.

I believe that kids should be allowed to check out what interests them, not what is good for them or what is “on their level,” and that we should help them make good choices for their developmental level, not decide for them.

I believe that making good selections based on student needs and available budget is not censorship, no matter what School Library Journal put on its cover.

I believe that reader’s advisory is two-way: that I can recommend resources to kids, and that they can advise me right back.

I believe that libraries are safe places to explore new, unfamiliar ideas.I believe that a kid saying, “I love the library” should be the rule, not the exception.

I’ll close now so I can see what my students have to say.  Knowing their track record this term, it will be far more profound than what I have written.

What’s your manifesto?

{Post-class afterthought: I’m sitting in my office with tears in my eyes reading what they wrote. I’m a very lucky prof. Very lucky.}

Bookmark to:  

I’ve been in a big Twitterversation with Beth about the role of school libraries in writing, and I mentioned our “writing castle.”  The writing castle evolved from a writing center: basically a sorter of pens, envelopes, and writing implements.  But parents took it way bigger and turned our existing “cube,” a collection of bookshelves inside which we stashed our professional development and leveled readers collection, into a veritable palace.

As a teacher resources area, there was no real reason for children to go into it, but we still lost a lot of square footage that could have been used for kids.  So we curtained off the bookshelves to hide away the teachers’ stuff, left two sets of shelves open to hold student supplies, moved in inexpensive IKEA parsons’ tables and stools, and parents who run a graphic design firm designed and installed the archway.  (Later on, we eventually moved the leveled readers into a rolling bookcase in the 1st grade ‘wing’, though I wasn’t savvy enough to call it a ‘branch library” as Carl Harvey has done in the latest issue of Knowledge Quest). 

With its unveiling came a conscious paradigm shift: it became a children-only area.  There were no adult-imposed rules about the number of students who could be in the castle at one time, nor were there restrictions on what could happen there.  Adults weren’t even welcome in the castle unless they were invited in by children either by request or by acting outside our school rules.

The castle evolved into something we hadn’t expected.  Older children used it to meet with their production groups during video club or as a private lunch space.  Younger children used it to play school, to play bank, to draw, to create books (no kidding, we went through 6 plastic staplers as kids cut up paper to make their own blank books before we got smart and ordered high-end staplers), to write letters to one another (our “green school” parents would donated their unused business reply envelopes — kids didn’t care - they just wrote on top of the pre-printed address), and more.  Sometimes, kids on one side of the castle would borrow puppets from the puppets area and put on a play for the kids on the other side.  One day, an entire first grade class (except for one child intent on a quiet activity) sat inside harmoniously.

Yes, sometimes there was trouble, and I’d step in.  And yes, they made a huge mess in there.  But it was their mess, and they would take turns cleaning it up, or we’d just let it stay messy.  (Even our diligent custodians reluctantly agreed to keep it a mess … unless there was a school visit or a meeting scheduled for the library.  They even scrounged and found a recycling bin and an extra trash can to encourage kids to clean up themselves.) 

It wasn’t until after we launched at the castle that I read Brian W. Sturm’s article in the Maps issue of Knowledge Quest and realized that we had accidentally created what he calls a “secret space.”  Here’s the abstract (from Worldcat) for his article “Imaginary ‘Geographies’ of Childhood: School Library Media Centers as Secret Spaces”: 

Secret spaces serve as mirrors in which children can explore themselves and play with identities, while at the same time they act as windows to the real world through which children develop an understanding of social interactions and societal norms and expectations. The understanding of secret spaces has important implications for the physical design of school library media centers (SLMCs). What more creative space exists than the room in the school that is filled with the world’s knowledge and the endless possibilities that knowledge creates. However, libraries tend to be built with close attention to easy sightlines to avoid blind spots where children can cause mischief. In this article, the author contends that if SLMCs are to function as secret spaces, designers should reconsider this practice and allow children some spaces to hide. Children need small spaces, nooks and crannies, and areas not in the direct sightlines of adults if they are to feel sheltered enough to imagine freely.

Oh … that’s what we had made.  A secret space.  A nook where the shelves created a separation between adults and them.

Even in a high-tech world, people yearn for what futurist John Naisbett called a “high-touch” environment.  Does your school library have a secret space? Do you have conference spaces that used to be for adults-only to check out that could be opened up for children to sign out? I know, I know, some of you are high school librarians, and a secret space could be an invitation for hanky-panky, but think about how furniture can be clustered out in the open to create high-communication zones that feel cozy even if they’re in your sightlines.)

Vintage bumper stickers proclaimed, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”  The more I work toward student-centered learning, the more I want my bumper sticker to say, “Sometimes, leading means getting out of the way.”  Sometimes, student need the comfort of knowing that we trust them to work and create on their own and that we’re just a few paces away when they need us.

Bookmark to: