Week 13: Profile of a Young Peoples Librarian

This blog entry I am going to talk about a real world example of using popular culture to engage with youth. This example is a Young Peoples Librarian… who also happens to be my mum.

My mum is a former high school English teacher, who decide on a career change when I was in high school (yes, there could potentially be a link here but it’s not relevant). Upon her completion of her university graduate diploma (from QUT no less), she applied for the role of Young Peoples Librarian.

That was awhile ago now, and since then, the YPS section has undergone some changes and the services they provide are some of the most popular activities within the library. A short while ago, a position was created for a Young Adult Librarian to focus on the YA collection and users of the library.

Some of their most regular and popular services include:

Baby Bounce: for mums and bubs under the age of 18 months, sit along and sing along to rhymes and songs.

Storytime: For the youngens aged 2-5. They sing, they dance, they read books.

School holiday activities: To help keep those pesky primary school kids entertained over their ridiculously long holiday periods.

MakerSpaces: I still don’t understand what they do, but they have a 3D printer called ‘Dave’ and last week they were making little houses which would light up when it gets dark. @yalsa was retweeting about this concept only this morning. (See my resource page for librarians)

Friday Frodos: Friday afternoon activities for teens aged 12-18. I recall a manga drawing class and a knitting class. Quite varied options obviously.

I asked my mum one afternoon - ‘how do you use popular culture to engage with your children and youth population?’. Her response was a sigh as she struggled to think of an answer. I admit, I probably didn’t choose the best time to ask her such a question without any preamble and we had a friend visiting from the UK. The champagne was a welcome distraction for all involved.

I still haven’t given her any preamble or questions so that she can mull it over and she has given me permission to write this profile on her. After going over her role and services, I made a startlingly obvious conclusion:

All of these activities involve popular culture.

In the Storytime sessions she dances and sings to the Wiggles (Point Your Fingers and Do the Twist is a favourite of mine) as well as reading a variety of books, both old and new and different themes each week.

Baby Bounce has nursery rhymes and songs that we all would have heard when we were younger. That’s got to be a form of popular culture if all of us can remember those rhymes and songs right?

School holiday activities are the same; they use popular current ideas to create activities for the kids.

For the older teens, the Friday Frodos create movie nights with pizza and dress up (a Twilight night was a huge success years ago), manga drawing lessons. These sessions are aimed at using popular culture or “the cool stuff” to get the kids involved.

The more I think about it, the more I realise how much popular culture they use, even if they don’t call it ‘popular culture’. What we are exploring here, they are already doing, and with great results.

So there may be those who harbour the view of libraries being out of touch with the real world; but really, they've been doing this stuff for longer than we've been alive.44

(Estepp, 2012)

Your local YPS Librarian or school librarian is probably the greatest resource when it comes to engaging youth through popular culture because they are already doing it. And I mean, they’re librarians – if they don’t know it, they can find it.

Mum & I, so cool we take #selfies (personal image)

Written with much appreciation to my mum for being a thoroughly fantastic resource and role model.

IMAGES

Estepp, J. (2012, August 16). Storytime Favourites [Image]. Retrieved October 23, 2013, from http://letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/so-you-want-to-be-childrens-librarian.html

Week 11: Interview with a Young Person

As I do not have any young people to interview personally apart from a 2 year old girl obsessed with the Wiggles. As I am a bit over conversations about Emma the Yellow Wiggle, I instead asked a friend of mine to give the questionnaire to her twin daughters who are in year 6.

I found that they both like to read action and adventure books. Out of the four books they mentioned, only two were familiar to me: Hunger Games Catching Fire and Skulduggery Pleasant. The other two were The Golden Door by Emily Rodda (The Three Door series) and The Diamond Brothers: The Falcons Malteaser by Anthony Horowitz. Already there is a reference to a famous crime novel/film The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

When I asked LV whether popular culture influence her or made her smarter she replied: it doesn't really impact me in anyway to be honest i think something's impact the way we learn but i don't think all the things today help, sure they make life easier but that means that we're not really challenging ourselves to do stuff, somethings today confuse our brains to do stuff like how adds make us believe in a simple product.

In describing her favourite book, Skulduggery Pleasant, she mentioned that the ‘noun groups and vocabulary is very strong’. In this case it would appear that the popular culture in the form of the book is actually making her smarter by reinforcing noun groups and vocabulary which is great.

I won’t tell her this as personally, I think sometimes it’s best to leave popular culture as an “enjoyable” part of life, not an “educational” part. When I studied popular culture it actually first made me hate it/myself as every time I would watch something I would be analysing the social and cultural background and see how it was portraying the contemporary time. It took me awhile to be able to simply enjoy movies again.

Some things in life don’t need critical thinking/analysis all the time and sometimes learning can be done unconsciously. I do think encouraging children to critically engage with books and movies is important, but don’t take away from them the right to just simply vege out and enjoy something that might not be incredibly wholesome or education (especially when they’ve been at school all day!). I enjoyed books as they took me away from my world (and still do), asking me to critically engage that world with the real world probably would have made things depressing as it would have ruined the escape it offered me.

I would love to have sat down with SV & LV to do this interview in person, but unfortunately when it’s a single parent family, time isn’t a very accessible resource when their mother works full time and doesn’t live close. However, I still think they have provided me with some food for thought on popular culture and young people.

Questions:

What are you currently reading? Do you like it, why?

What’s your favourite book and why?

What are your favourite TV shows and movies at this time?

Why do you like them?

Are there any shows or movies that other young people are really liking which you hate? If yes, why don’t you like it?

If you could be any character you want, who would you choose?

Do you participate in any online communities where you discuss your thoughts on movies and shows?

Anything recommendations on shows or movies I should be watching?

Do any of these shows, movies or books influence you?

Do you think popular culture is making you smarter? Examples?

Week 10: Pinterest

So I was finally forced to join Pinterest for uni (I swear they must want me to fail!) and create a board showing what I thought was big with young people these days. Firstly I had to get past all the gardening pins which were absolutely amazing and I was so tempted to quit uni and become a professional green thumb... Before I remembered the only time I have had success in the garden is when my green thumb boyfriend does all the planting and sets up the water system. So that was a kick in the face...

Anyway, back to Pinterest and uni. As I am still waiting to hear what my lovely interviewees think of popular culture, I wasn't exactly sure what they are watching and I don't have many young people to ask. So I ended up guessing, and I will admit, my guesses were probably pretty stereotypical - One Direction, Hunger Games and J-Law, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

I apologise for this, I should probably be more active in knowing what is cool with young people so I can encourage them to read and get involved... But my personal restrictions (I ban myself from reading books during semester as otherwise uni gets very neglected) do get in the way. When I worked at a school library is was easy to keep up with things. Hopefully when this course is over I can catch up on all that I've missed (not the Twlight movies though, I was about for the hype of the first release, that'll do me just fine).

What do you think? Have I missed something crucial that young people are totally addicted to?!

Week 8: What helped me understand Learning Pack A...

I chose to do my critical essay on Learning Pack A as I feel that this was the most engaging pack offered in the first section of this course. My essay looked how popular culture increased civic participation in youths. One article which I came across really helped me to see this link was an article by Henry Jenkins in the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures called "Cultural Acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance. Mind you, that entire issue from the Journal of Transformative Works and Culture was a great asset. In this article, Henry Jenkins, the man behind 'participatory culture', explores how popular culture can make civic participation or activism attractive to young people using the case study of the Harry Potter Alliance (http://thehpalliance.org/).

'Fan activism pushes deeper, dealing not with isolated references but with the full content world, recognizing and rewarding fans who know more and imagine better. Certainly, some of the HPA's allusions are widely recognized—Dumbledore's Army, perhaps—facilitating meaningful partnership with nonfan organizations that value the creative energy the Harry Potter books unleashed. Yet, as fan activists, the HPA members mobilize obscure characters and events, even quoting specific dialogue, and thus reward fan mastery. Fan activism works because of its fannishness. This fannishness extends beyond specific ways of reading texts to specific forms of fan participation (including cosplay, Wizard Rock, fan fiction, and fan vidding), some of which may look strange outside the community. But each contributes to fandom's ability to organize and mobilize quickly, to frame issues and educate supporters, to get the word out through every new media platform and channel. This ability is what ultimately distinguishes fan activism from more casual deployment of pop culture references.' (Jenkins, 2012).

For me, this article helped me to better understand participatory culture and how it can benefit young people. Contrary to what people say, young people are finding a way to connect with real world concerns in an online environment, one that is possibly more accepting than the physical world around them. They are developing skills, making friends and connections based on mutual trust and interests - all good things. Don't assume that I'm saying that an online life is more important than the real world, but for some kids this is probably the better option while they are growing up. Hopefully from this participatory culture and the experiences had, they will learn those skills which will guide them later on when they leave school and face the real "real world".

And good on those teens and young adults for getting active on matters of social and cultural importance through the Harry Potter Alliance, it's more than I ever did. I think sometimes we don't give teens or young adults the appropriate knowledge to deal with those issues. A lot of young people I know, ones who are contributing to today's society, know nothing on politics and all that is involved and are so not keen to learn. Maybe if we had had the participatory culture using popular culture to engage us like the HPA, maybe now we might feel more credible having our say and taking a stand on issues that are important to us.

Ultimately, this article highlighted to me the possibilities of using popular culture to engage youths, not just in civic participation but in general social environments. This was something that the essential readings did hint at but did not go into great depth - or if they did, they just weren't that interesting to me... See, already an example - using the Harry Potter Alliance to explore this issue actually made it attractive to me!

Reference List:

Jenkins, H. (2012). “Cultural acupuncture”: Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance. Transformative Works and Culture, 10. Retrieved from http://journal.transformativeworks.com/index.php/twc/article/view/305

Week 7: Introducing Me...

My name is Susan and I am currently studying a Masters of Information Technology in Library and Information Science at Queensland University of Technology.


This blog is for my reflections on CLN647 Youth, Popular Culture and Texts. This class is probably more specific to teacher-librarians, but I've always liked encouraging teenagers and kids to read is a really important aspect today. As the role of a Young People's Librarian looks attractive to me, I thought this could possibly benefit my future career.... Also it was nice to step away from library specific content!

I think it's important to appeal to young people to read and if pop culture is going to reel 'em in, let's do it!