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.}

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So imagine that you’re about to lead a professional development session, staff meeting, or workshop.  You want to use those minutes before the appointed hour wisely and get folks thinking about the topic to come.  You want to awaken that prior knowledge as richly as possible.  Oh, and you’ve got five minutes to put it all together.

Or maybe you’re doing a long workshop and you want to get some mid-workshop feedback.  Have folks Tweet their observations, marking them all with a unique (and not easily replicable) hash tag (pound sign - # - followed by letters or numbers, like #blc09 or #aasl).

Type  a Twitter search term (a username, a hash tag, or a keyword) into visibletweets.com, which generates beautiful randomized animations of Tweets that meet the search criteria you’ve implemented. How cool is that!

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Today, I finally maxxed out my 200 free books in LibraryThing and paid the unassuming $25 for a lifetime membership.  If you click on the LibraryThing category in the right column of this blog, you’ll know that I’ve admired LibraryThing for a long time. 

My familiarity with LibraryThing began when I wrote about it for SLMAM at Deb Levitov’s request a few years ago- available via EBSCO or ProQuest databases; Worldcat entry here. 

But it wasn’t until I told our children’s lit class last fall that I would hold myself to reading 50 books over the term just as we expected them to that I became a consistent LibraryThing user. 

I am surprised at how it’s been helpful:

• When I can’t remember the name of something I’ve read recently, so I can recommend it to someone else, I look it up.  Being able to tag with my own language helps.
• By giving me aplace to document what I’ve been reading, I get a reality check on how much I’ve been reading (it’s often more than I think) or what I’ve been reading (for example, how much YA to keep up with things for the children’s lit class vs. how much elementary material for my school library or where my own reading biases are).
• Having each entry date-stamped helps me set mini-goals for reading. My summer goal is 60 items.  (Lucky for me, I work in an elementary school, so keeping up with picture books and short non-fiction makes this possible.)
• I’ve used it to get man-on-the-street reviews to supplement the review publications for books that I’m unsure about buying for my elementary readers.

There are other features I don’t use (I don’t apply for advance reading copies via LibraryThing, for example.  I just don’t think it’s fair when I don’t even make it through the ARCs I get at ALA twice a year.)  Paying $25 was a small price to pay when I reflected on how much it had impacted my practice as a university adjunct and as a practitioner.Â

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