Being a school librarian during a pandemic #LibCollab - Season 5, Episode 1

In the first episode of the Book Love Foundation Podcast Season 5, Julia Torres talks to school librarians Julie Stivers and Kathryn Cole about the challenges and opportunities in their work during the pandemic and about their #LibCollab initiative.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Penny Kittle

Penny is Chairman of the Book Love Foundation and is dedicated to helping students and teachers develop a passion for reading and writing. She has taught English and coached literacy in public schools for 34 years.

Guest

Julia Torres

Julia E. Torres is a veteran language arts teacher and librarian in Denver Public schools.

Guest

Julie Stivers

Guest

Kathryn Cole

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Penny Kittle 00:00
Welcome back to the Book Love Foundation podcast. It's season five. I'm Penny Kittle, founder of the Book Love Foundation. We fund classroom libraries. We have currently given away almost $600,000 in grants to fund 270 outstanding teachers in 41 US states and six provinces. With the ongoing pandemic and our current political climate, we believe we need to build more inclusive libraries. It's more important than ever. That's why we planned a special season of podcasts to give you our listeners some ideas on how we continue this important work. Today, we're going to listen to an interview by Book Love Foundation Board Member Julia Torres, who is a Denver librarian and the co founder of the Disrupt Text Movement. She's an anti racism educator and a national speaker. Can I just say, as someone who's presented with her, she is amazing.

Julia Torres 01:13
Hi, I'm Julia Torres, and I am here with Julie Stivers and Kathryn Cole we are so excited to talk with you today about lib collab, which is a hashtag, a movement, a collective, a group of librarians and library media specialists, whatever you want to call it, who are here to serve the needs of our students during these unprecedented times. As people like to say, so, we're going to kick things off with a few introductions, and then we'll go ahead and talk about what it means to be a librarian, or if you want to turn it into a verb, what librarianing is like in these times of coronavirus and quarantine and school from home and all of those things. So Katherine, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience first?

Kathryn Cole 02:00
Please. Sure. So I'm Kathryn Cole, or Kat Cole from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I'm public school librarian at the k5 level, actually, pre k5 and I've been doing this now for about, gosh, 15 years, and it feels like a brand new year doing this in this environment, so it's been a lot of learning, but libclab has been great for that that community, awesome.

Julia Torres 02:27
Thank you so much for being here with me today. I know we have a lot of listeners that are language arts teachers who have libraries in their classrooms, but we also are starting to have more librarians join the community as well, which is one of the reasons why I wanted the very first podcast of the year to start off with librarians. So thank you so much for joining us, Julie. Tell us about yourself.

Julie Stivers 02:48
Sure. I'm Julie Stivers. I love Julia. I love that word librarianing. I decided I'm gonna put that on my telework log. I'm librarianing all day. I am a middle school librarian, so six through eight in Raleigh, North Carolina, at a public alternative school, and I'm so happy to be here. I was looking at your prior podcast guests, and I thought, oh my gosh, what am I doing here? But we're ready to talk.

Julia Torres 03:12
Listen. I'm honored to have both of you here every guest. I'm always so excited that folks are willing to give a little bit of their time to jump into a conversation with me, because I really think that we've gotten feedback that some folks listen to this on their drive home from work. And though we don't have drives home from work, most of us anymore, it's always better to feel less alone, I think. And that's what podcasts sometimes do for me, is I feel a little bit less alone, especially when there are other folks who are librarians that I get to listen to. So I thought we could kick things off by just talking a little bit about what it has been like to do the library thing, to be librarianing during the time of covid. I am a public school librarian as well, and my library serves students in grades six through 12. Massive difference in the way that librarianing Looks with sixth graders versus 12th graders, and that has taken some adjustment. I think now folks are more likely to speak, and they get excited when I do a classroom visit, so they'll pop up in the chat with cool things to say and questions. But in the beginning, it just felt like everyone was, like in shock that we really weren't going back to school, and everyone was just kind of, you know, more quiet. Cameras were off. It was so awkward. So, you know, there are a lot of things that I think about when I think about this past year. If we go from January now to January a year ago, we didn't have any clue that things were going to be how they are right now. So either of you, whoever wants to begin, could you just take us through your journey of being a librarian over the last year? What are some highlights or big things that have happened over the past year? Sure, I'll start.

Kathryn Cole 04:51
I'll never forget Julie saying, actually in the spring, how as librarians, when everything hit and we went out, how unmoored we felt just being. Being without our kids, our students in person, having those small conversations in and out of the library. And I thought it was a perfect way, when everything hit, to kind of surmise how it felt to be a librarian in that moment, and trying to figure out without necessarily a class of our own, how do we fit in this new environment that everybody's been thrown into in a matter of, like, less than 24 hours a week, if you're lucky. And what, what I started in spring actually shifted into the fall. In the spring, it was very much okay. I'll just do I'm going to do some recordings. I'm going to do some read alouds that kids and their families can share, you know, whenever, whenever they'd like to, when it fits them. Or teachers can share those and would always try to connect it to, I'll share a story. And then here's a connection that you can do in your home. So almost like an interactive read aloud, but a recording of that. I would bring in puppets and but even still, without those students in front of me just felt very disconnected. So I knew, moving into the fall that I wanted to have a real presence with students and staff in a very consistent way. I'm not part of the specials. I'm rotation. A lot of elementary librarians I know are across the country, but at our school, we do run a flexible schedule, which is wonderful in a lot of ways, but in this environment, felt very isolating, without really making it a point to work with teachers, to be in their spaces, those virtual spaces. So every other week I see every class I go in, and really the focus for me this fall has been joy and justice, and continues to be that moving into the spring, so we center read alouds. We center conversations when our code came. We were focusing on some joyful hour of coding activities that kids could collaborate on. But it's really been for me, trying to center just the joy of story, but doing that in a way that also allows students to think critically and look at what that word justice means at the elementary level. So that's where my focus has been this fall.

Julia Torres 07:08
Awesome. It's really good to hear that, because I'm at the middle and upper, you know, secondary level, and it's been, I would say similar in some ways, but I am in a community that had to fight to get their library back. I think folks know by now that that was a big part of my librarian journey, was that we didn't have a library at all for a long time, so it took us a bit, I would say, over a year, 18 months, to build that community, building wide culture of valuing reading and literacy. I won't say all students didn't, because we have many students who were always readers with or without the library, but we also have many who were not. And so the struggle was getting folks to attend the author visits, getting folks to attend the read alouds, getting folks to get excited about checking a book out, when someone would come to class. And then once we got in the rhythm of doing that, coronavirus hit, and so all of that was taken away. And so I can say, in hearing you talk, I hear about a lot of work that you've put in to making sure that you change the culture of reading in your building to one that still provides the essentials for the young ones, but it just might look a little bit different, and that's something that I've really tried to work on as well. I've been not as successful in some ways, and, you know, more successful than I thought I would be in others. It's not easy to maintain a school wide culture of reading during coronavirus.

Kathryn Cole 08:32
Yeah. I mean, I think it's hard in a in a normal environment, right? And it's in a traditional environment, without all, all of this surrounding us. And in addition to, you know, covid 19, we have so many other things happening in our society and our world, and all of that's going on and surrounding our kids while we're going about this business of school. And so what does that then look like for our library programs? And I really had to for for my own self, had to say in this moment, and Julie and I have talked, talked a lot about this in the spring, like, what are we doing? So with that, what are we doing? How then can libraries situate ourselves and librarians and our programs in a way that really focuses on the students in front of us and keeping that, that joy at the heart of learning. And I think that's what libraries do so well, when we center our students, is joy is at the is at the dead center of that. So that's what we're striving for in our program.

Julia Torres 09:36
I couldn't agree more. That's absolutely something that I strive for, is that the library is a place where maybe they can get a little bit of respite from the, you know, academic rigor or the language that we use. That really means that we are, you know, turning the process of education from something that should be rooted in curiosity into something that too often is done to students rather than. With them. So Julie, tell me a little bit about your journey over this past year. I know that you're one of the people who I consider a rock star in terms of, like, getting secondary students really continuously reading, because you have so many different ways of doing it. And our secondary students are like, they're they're stereotypically, you know, pushed away from reading for pleasure a lot of times. So what were library journey like this year?

Julie Stivers 10:24
It felt like, and I don't know if you two felt the same, like in March, it was like triage, almost, right? Like no one knew our district was telling us We'll definitely be back at school on Monday. And I thought to myself, There's no way, like I was throwing books at kids, like I wanted every kid to leave with like, 20 books, because I'm like, I'm no, I'm not going to see you for a while. And I don't know if I felt like all of a sudden librarians were like, being super valued for providing access and helping teachers set up Google classrooms and doing all of these things which I'm not saying those things aren't important, but it scared me because I was like, I could see us like, getting pushed away from literacy, when I think we'd all agree, like, that's the bedrock, that's the foundation of what we do, is joy and justice through literacy. And so I was very lucky, because with our school, like I said, we're an alternative school, we decided to, like, prioritize math and English. And the great thing is, even though we have a scripted curriculum, our administration and ELS said, Let's do something different. And the ELA teacher said, Well, what book should we do? Miss Stivers? And I was like, okay, so we did Stamped in eighth grade, and Trevor Noah Born a Crime and kind of like Brothers in sixth grade. So we had all of these books. So that's what I got to do in the spring, was just be like a co teacher in ELA classes, which was amazing and wonderful. And my like, independent reading part was gathering all of these, a lot of, like, the free things that came out in the spring, right? They weren't good. There wasn't a lot of own voices, there wasn't a lot of graphic novels. There wasn't a lot of, like, engaging reading materials. So it was like trying to find really good things, like Nick Stone advertised her fan fiction that she had written, like, years ago. So that would be the kinds of things that I would go into classes and talk to, like, these other kinds of reading that we could suddenly have access to. Every student in our district had a Chromebook, and so we could do that. And then the fall, kind of like, Kat was saying, like, you were saying, Julia, I wanted to reimagine, I'm like, Okay, I need to step back and, like, really, like, push in with my library program and make sure that I'm continuing that. And I thought, I'm going to do this. Over the summer, I got a grant, and I did ebooks and digital audio books. I'm like, I'm set. It was not a hit, right? Like it was not, it was not what my students wanted. And I thought, okay, okay. And I was coming into classes, and I was doing all of this, like, all of these visits and everything, and after about maybe a month, I was like, Julie, break it down to what works best is one on one with a student. So I started setting up individual reading conferences with all my students. Now, I do not have a huge school, so I know that someone listening to this could be like, Oh, that sounds great, but you could prioritize one class or one level, or your ELL learners, or, you know, a class that really needs that independent reading for pleasure, and that was amazing. I could come into a class and book talk these amazing things and show videos and authors and like, let me know what you want. And I wouldn't get as much when I did an individual reading conference, every kid would be like, these six books is what I want. So I'd have them ready, because we went back in November. So when they came in, then at their desk, would be like, clean quarantine books in a bag with their name on it, so that was amazing way to do hybrid with them. Now we are fully remote for a while, so I'm going to be doing the same things, but with book deliveries again, because I have a smaller school, so I can make that happen.

Julia Torres 13:33
But yeah, that's incredible. We've got lots of librarians in our district that are experimenting with dropping books off at kids homes. I'm I have also done a little bit of that, but it was not a good thing when I was expecting that people would come to school and be so excited to get these books, and I had this request form I was ready to go, and then it just didn't happen. People were not showing up to school to get these books. And so now it's a more organic process where I push into a lot of language arts classrooms and work with language arts teachers on whatever unit they're already doing, and then just try to add in the choice reading but then some teachers actually have independent reading units, and so that's when we really get to get creative. And I think the favorite thing that I've done so far last semester was we got the chance to organize each kid got to do like a vertically aligned stack. So they had a picture book, a chapter book, a middle grade book and a YA book, and then if they could find one, an adult book, these were 11th graders, and they chose to thematically build the stack. So that was really cool, because then they did these presentations where they talked about what they could find in each of the books that was crossover. And we had somebody just really finding motifs in different books that probably the authors would say, Well, I have nothing to do with that author or their book, but they had some really beautiful symbolism that crossed over, and that's where the reader response experience really gets exciting. So I. Know exactly what you're talking about. I have ambitions this quarter of delivering all of the copies of Superman smashes the clan that we got donated for all ninth graders. Every ninth grader in our school gets a copy of that comic book. It was donated by the tattered cover, and I'm super excited about it. It's just been difficult because just like you both said, one minute it's hybrid, then it's staying at home, completely remote, then it's some kids are in the building, but not all. And so making sure that you're not participating in cross contamination, but you're still able to circulate the materials has been really big, because, you know, the CDC has guidelines, and other places have guidelines for how long library materials need to rest, and fortunately, we're still able to order books right? So I've shifted my ordering to a lot more ebooks and audiobooks, and then our district really stepped up the the audiobook and the ebook collection that all students have access to. So there's certain books that I purchased for those in my building, and then there are certain that all students in the district have access to, I still have ambitions of doing, you know, a book club that is respite or a break away from the reading that students get assigned, but they can still somehow get credit for it. And I'm still working on what that would look like and how I can figure that out, but it is good to see that kids are still wanting to read, and that there are books out there that are being published these days that they are really excited about. So I want to talk about lib collab. So what is lib collab? Why did you start it? How did you start it? Who's involved? What do you talk about? What are some things that have come out of it.

Julie Stivers 16:41
So that when Kat mentioned unmoored, it was just a tweet that I sent out with, like, a picture of my library, like that second week, right? Like, where are students? And in the beginning, Julia, when you were talking about this podcast, and like, feeling alone. I think librarians, we often feel alone, right, because we're the only one in our school building or across multiple like campuses, like, for you, Julia, and so it felt even more so that way, because we were just all siloed away from each other and away from our students. So it just came about. Let's start a Google Doc. Let's get together like this, like, very loosely organically made national PLT of School Librarians and the first couple we would just meet on a Google meet, like, once a month. I know Julia, you were on one of them, we would talk about how to engage students in distance learning, how to support, how to push for access, how to advocate for our students, like in this new as we're designing school like Kat was kind of talking about, like, I kept saying, what are we doing? Why are we talking about testing, you know, and how we could be advocates for our students in our school spaces. And then from there, over the summer, we thought, let's dive into project ready, which is a free, self paced, online, anti racist curriculum for all educators, librarians and public librarians. And so then we've started moving through those modules. And so in a lot of ways, it's kind of lib collab, I'd say, has shifted recently into more talking about how to like disrupt whiteness in libraries, in addition to diving into the modules of project ready, which, of course, part of that is disrupting whiteness and CIS het normativity and other issues of equity, I feel like it's almost become, recently an affinity group, right, Like we don't need to, you know, white librarians don't need to put work and labor on our colleagues of color for understanding a lot of these issues, and we need to do our own internal work and come together and, of course, be learning from all of our colleagues of color. I be our POC colleagues when we're doing that. So in a lot of ways, lib collab has shifted into that a little bit, that it's a space for us to come together and learn and dive into and learn from the ipoc scholars through the project ready curriculum that fair Kat, that's kind of what it's turned into. I think when we finish project ready, it will go back to more a broader Okay, let's come together as librarians again. What have we learned? What are we doing to advocate for our students?

Kathryn Cole 18:57
Yeah, but what, and what I love about the work that we've done with project ready is that it's really put that because so much of the work has been through project ready over the summer and into the fall, it's really centered that work as part of this community that we've built. And what's been really nice to see is how that community has grown in such a way that we've really gotten to know one another and build camaraderie around the issues that matter most, and around the work that we all really need to be doing in our library spaces. And then on top of that, as we grow the community, we can, we can add layers, but this is the work that we need to be thinking about in libraries, because libraries aren't immune to racism, they're not immune to any kind of inequity, so we have to be very conscious of keeping that at the center, and I have really appreciated growing the community around that work and building that solidarity with other libraries. And who are committed to doing the same moving forward. So it's been, it's been wonderful, the community that's being built as part of that.

Julia Torres 20:08
That's really exciting. I know that I was really I gained a lot from just attending the one lib collab meeting that I did go to. I after I did see that it was turning more toward anti racism for white librarians that is such important work, but that's work that I wanted to not be doing, just because I'm not a white librarian. And I absolutely wanted to, you know, dedicate my spaces to the librarians who are BIPOC librarians out there, who we find solidarity in other ways, because our racial healing work looks different as well. It's not that we don't have to do it. It just looks different. And so, yeah, so that's those are some conversations that I've been taking part in, especially over the summer with the Book Love Foundation summer book club, which is super exciting.

Julie Stivers 20:56
I do want to say one quick thing about lib collab. It's not, I don't want people to think that now it's like, just a bunch of white librarians talking about things. It's like the project ready has been, like, this arm off of it, and we still have, I think there's like 150 librarians, right, that are still in lib collab, and it's open, obviously, for everyone. And we can't wait to, like, get back to some of our bigger meetings. So I did want to say that real quick.

Julia Torres 21:19
So before we wrap things up, what are you reading? What do you love right now that you can share with our listeners?

Julie Stivers 21:25
I can start if it's like right now, right now, and I'm going to call out two local authors, so right now, right now, I am reading Tristan Strong Destroys the World. To the first Kwame, by Kwame Avala, who is an amazing author. Everyone should be following him on social media, if you're not anyone out there and another so that's what I'm reading right now. And probably I would say my favorite read since the pandemic hit would be Legend Born by Tracy Dion, which is a beautiful YA novel that is joy and justice, like Kat was talking about, but black girl magic through the lens of like Arthurian legends and a modern retelling, it's beautiful and amazing.

Julia Torres 22:07
I just pulled that one I'm I was in the process of moving. Because I moved, I decided I needed to move house in December, which was really chaotic, end of the semester, right after NCTE, and I'm moving house. So it was chaotic. I have a lot of boxes and books that I unpacked, and Legend Born was one that I just unpacked today, so I'll definitely move that toward the top of my stack. Kat, what about you?

Kathryn Cole 22:30
I'm actually going to echo one of Julie's not to double up here, but I also want to shout out, Kwame Avala. We were able to have a surprise visit right before the break, where he came in and surprised our fifth grade scholars and one of our Google meets that we had arranged. And so I'm in the middle of that audio book, his second Tristan Strong Destroys the World, along with some of our kids who are they all got a copy of his books that we're reading that together. And like Julie says highly, highly recommend, if that is not, you know, and that's we're at the elementary school and reading it. And it's one of those books that can span, like from elementary across middle and even in the high. So he's a big, a huge fan favorite at Northside. And the other book that I so I have joined the Haymarket book club. That was a gift that my husband and I gave each other their monthly book club for the holidays, which is also kind of bananas, because I get way too many books that I can't go through enough in time, as it is, but I'm reading the Black Lives Matter at School, Uprising for Educational Justice just came out. It's been instrumental for thinking about what that's going to look like for our school. It's been a really wonderful guide. There's a really great chapter in there, specifically written geared towards where they take the 13 guiding principles, and each principle, they lay it out in language geared towards younger Elementary, like from pre K, early elementary, even like early pre K students, and how to introduce the guiding principles with young learners. So we've been going through that and reading some of the stories in the collections. And so that's where my mind is, and my reading life is that right now, diving into that to support the work we're doing at our school. I did read What Lane Did in the Fall, another highly recommended book. Love Tori Maldonado and his work, and that's a personal favorite as well. And picture books to being at the elementary level. So I have speak up by Miranda Paul is one that we're getting ready to use with some of our youngest learners, letting them know that they have a voice that they can use even at the littlest of ages.

Julia Torres 24:53
Probably have to create a little web page where we can just keep track of all of the great suggestions that folks have. I'm going to go ahead and suggests this one. It's called DMZ Colony, and it's by Don Mi Choy, and it is a collection of essays and pictures, and it's kind of like a mixed media book, but it's all about Korea and life on the DMZ line. So I'm reading that one for one book club, and then my other book club is reading Sula from Toni Morrison and Chlorine Sky by Mahogany Brown. And there is an elementary school book for from Mahogany Brown, Elizabeth Acevedo and a few other folks. It's called woke, and it's so beautiful. So when folks are elementary school, you know, great for our young poets. So definitely want to encourage folks to really think about that vertically articulated stack. What could that look like for any age level? If you said, Hey, here's a picture book that's an entry to what you love. Here's a chapter book like, you know what lane that's an entry to what you love? Here is a middle grade and why a and then here's an adult book that I love, but, you know, you may not quite be there, but this is something that you could shoot for, that's something that I'm really passionate about right now.

Kathryn Cole 26:07
Well, just hearing you talk about that, I think it's so that the idea of the vertical alignment is so wonderful for families to like having a theme or an or, you know, a subject across that an entire family could dive into from the youngest to the oldest, makes me think of some now my wheels are turning.

Julie Stivers 26:26
And staff. I was thinking like that, staff could choose with professional books and ya and middle grade, I was gonna ask you, I just ordered this book, The Anti Racist Writing Workshop, How to decolonize the creative classroom, by Felicia Rose Chavez, have you?

Julia Torres 26:42
Has anyone I saw a picture of that? I don't have it yet, but I've seen a picture of that looks so you'll have to let us know how it is. I'm really looking forward also to I know Tiffany Jewell has like, a journal component that's coming out. It's a separate book, but it's journal component to this book is anti racist, so I definitely plan on picking that one up as well. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been so great to talk with both of you, and I know that we are joined with librarians out there listening to this right now. So please reach out to us. How do we get a hold of you? Julie, if we want to talk to you.

Julie Stivers 27:22
I'm on Twitter @bespokelib

Julia Torres 27:26
and Kat, how can they get a hold of you?

Kathryn Cole 27:28
@katcolereads on Twitter and email. My school email, K, Cole, ch, CCS, dot, k twelve.nc.us,

Julia Torres 27:37
Thank you so much.

Julie Stivers 27:39
Thank you so much. Oh my gosh. Thank you.

Kathryn Cole 27:41
Thank you. Julia, it was a pleasure. Yay.

Penny Kittle 27:44
Thank you so much for listening. The Book Love Foundation is currently accepting grant applications until March 15 of this year. Our funding depends on kind teachers like you, sharing our work with others. For more information about applying for a grant, or just to check out our new website, professional development, our summer book club, how to get involved, check out booklovefoundation.org. Thank you again and happy reading.