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 12: Gateway Books

In this blog entry, I would like to talk about controversial books and authors for children or young people. As you can see in one of my earlier posts, I’m really passionate about encouraging kids to read and one of the questions I found myself asking was whether it was okay to encourage kids to read books which may not be any good quality.

Courtesy Google Images (Ferguson, 2011)

Take for example the Twilight series. The main character, Bella Swan, is not a role model that I would like any young girls or women to be reading and aspiring to. In fact, she’s practically the opposite of what my mum has encouraged me to be – a strong, independent woman with the ability to do whatever I want (within reason obviously) and especially, to have a career, travel and a life of my own before shacking up with some sparkly dude. In fact, I see a lot wrong with just about every character in Twilight, and personally, I think the entire series was written so that Stephenie Meyer could have some Mormon approved soft porn to wank to. No Fifty Shades of Grey for her!

Courtesy Google Images (Unknown, 2012)

I apologise, I’m deviating by being a deviant and rude! One thing that I can’t refuse is that Twilight, however bad I rate it, did encourage a huge range of young girls to read the books. It may have even turned that whole “reading is not cool” crap around at high schools. May have, I make no illusions to knowing anything except when I worked at a school we had to continuously buy more copies of Twilight for the kids to read because they kept reserving it in droves!

I’m now going to make a really bad and inappropriate analogy here. In my mind, Twilight is like marijuana, it’s the gateway drug which will let to the hard stuff, the Literature and books with decent messages (like Harry Potter – friendship and love all the way!). So, by encouraging and allowing young girls to read Twilight, as librarians we then have the opportunity to do two things: encourage critical reading and the option to expand their current reading list.

By engaging in casual discussions about Twilight, we could be surprised at how well the kids have realised how little of a role model Bella is (which is actually what happened to me, I do have hope for the future!) and also to encourage them to questions stories and books and to make them critically reflect on what they have just read.

Courtesy Google Images (MemeBucket, n.d)

From there, we could say – ‘why don’t you try reading this novel which is about this strong, young woman who overcomes great adversity to triumph’ (for some reason all I can think of is Jane Eyre right now). But the option is there, once they get past that first bump of ‘reading isn’t cool, it’s so boring’, we can use this to our advantage and engage with them and hopefully, get them reading more.

I would like to note that young boys will most likely definitely not be interested in reading Twilight, but maybe motorbike magazines, science fiction, horror novels or non-fiction books. As librarians for young people, we need to be talking about what they like and reading it to engage with them. We have great responsibility on our shoulders.

IMAGES

Ferguson, S. (2011, November 16). Twilight book series [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://www.badhaven.com/books/book-features/books-vs-films-a-twilight-retrospective/

MemeBucket. (n.d). What if Twilight was written [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://www.memebucket.com/what-if-twilight-was-written/

Unknown. (2012). LOTR vs Harry Potter vs Twilight [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013 , from http://funny-pictures-blog.com/2011/11/21/lotr-vs-harry-potter-vs-twilight/

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 9: Reading for Life Starts Young

I am a huge believer in the importance of reading from a young age. Such a huge believer that I was buying books for my eldest nephew before he was born… He and his younger brother are always, without fail, always read at least one book each night before bed. They are nuts for it. My nephew recently turned four and he knows what he wants – two books and a song before bed. He has even worked out that by choosing books with lots of pages and words means more reading time before. Clever, but annoying. Some of those Thomas books are so repetitive! I can’t complain though, because this love for reading is only ever going to help my nephew in school and the real world.

Earlier this year I attended the Read for Life - Early Childhood Symposium hosted by the State Library of Queensland in Mackay (more info available http://www.plconnect.slq.qld.gov.au/news/2013-news/read-for-life-early-childhood-symposium). The guest speakers, Jay Laga’aia and Dr Susan Krieg, spoke on the importance for reading to children from a young age. One fact which really struck me was that a child should have read at least 10,000 books by the time they start school. For my nephews, no drama. For other kids, probably not so good.

However, it’s come to my attention that not all children are lucky like my nephew to be raised with a love of books. This is a shame, and even more shameful is that the general public don’t seem to realise on what these kids are missing out on. By not encouraging children to read from an early age, we’re contributing to the declining rates of literacy within Australia.

ABC News reported in 2010 that Australia was one of the only countries in which reading literacy levels have declined (McDonald, 2010). In this article, Geoff Masters, chief executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research, stated that it is mostly related to how highly education is valued within Australia (McDonald, 2010). One of Master’s main points was that there was a huge gap between low socio-economic groups and Indigenous groups with higher socio-economic groups. In the recent election a huge emphasis was placed on education reform.

Now that the election has finished and the new prime minister will be sworn in this afternoon, it will be interesting to see how he values education. One of statements on the ABC News website has spike my interest though. The Coalition in their view on education aim to ‘give school principals more control of their schools and parents more say in how schools are run, devolving responsibility from bureaucrats’ (ABC, 2013).

To me, this doesn’t seem to be the best way in close the gaps that Masters mentioned. By giving responsibility entirely to the school principals then it would all depend on that particular school and community. What happens when kids get lumped with a lazy principal who’s holding out to their retirement? Or if their community doesn’t value education? Or their local MP is a t*sser? There needs to be a balance between government and schools in order to provide the best for the children. As they always say - Children are the future!

So maybe take the time to sit down and read a book with a young child. It’s a rewarding and fun experience (for the kid too!)

Reference List

McDonald, T. (2010). Australian students’ literacy levels declining. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-12-08/australian-students-literacy-levels-declining/2366804

Lane, S. (2013). Education policy: where the parties stand. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/policy/education/

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!