Library staffers need to keep our collections fresh and up to date, and it’s a constant process to ensure we do a good job there.

Check out this excerpt from the American Libraries Magazine. You can find the whole article here. The authors talked about their presentation they made from the ALA.

“Julia Torres and Julie Stivers, teacher-librarian at Mount Vernon Middle School in Raleigh, North Carolina, began their session by reviewing factors that contribute to reading trauma: high-stakes testing, a fixation on what education systems consider to be classics, toxic or lack of meaningful representation, trauma-centered narratives, and shaming students for reading choices.

“If we’re measuring literacy growth only through test scores, we’re failing them,” said Stivers. She added: “We know how problematic some of the ‘classics’ are.”

To illustrate this point, Torres shared a chart of the New York State Education Department’s top 20 book titles read in its public schools (such as The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), of which a majority were written by white men and take place in historical time periods.

“A lot of these students don’t read these books because they don’t feel they relate to the lives that they’re living,” said Torres, who noted that the top books among her students this year were Long Way Down, The Hate U Give, and The Poet X, as well as poetry, manga, and graphic novels.

To interrupt traumatic practices, Torres and Stivers had several suggestions—the first of which includes realigning the role of the school librarian.

“Students are more important than books. We’re not gatekeepers of books, that’s not our role,” said Stivers. “I would much rather lose a book than a reader.”

Other interruption strategies included redefining what “counts” as reading and deploying inclusive programs and policies that emphasize diverse, reflective collections. At Stivers’s library, for example, she and her students created a set of guidelines for professional and collection development called the #LibFive, which includes tenets such as “Graphic novels and manga are not extra” and “Show the joy in our stories.”

You can read the rest of their strategies here!