Teacher’s College Press approached me about the possibilty of co-publishing Partners in Literacy. A partnership with the American Library Association was a sensible idea for a publisher for the education market addressing, as the subtitle states, schools and libraries building communities. In evaluating the possibility, I first looked at the quality of the press and then author credentials. Impressive. Publishing for more than a century, Teachers College Press is affiliated with Columbia University and its leading graduate school of education. The authorship is a compelling father-daughter partnership. They write in the acknowledgments, referencing their strong relationship and good communication, “It was a natural next step for us to dialogue about similar problems we were wrestling with in different, but closely related, community-based institutions, and roll up our sleeves to write about.” Sondra Cuban is a librarian with 14 years experience in public libraries of Hawaii. She holds a Ph.D. and focuses her research on adult literacy. She served 4 years as a research associate at Havard’s National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy. Larry Cuban is professor emeritus of Education at Stanford University, a historian by training, and former high school teacher.

As I read through manuscript I noticed a difference in perspective that was subtle, yet striking, ideas about the profession and its practices, expressed from the outside looking in. That’s what clinched it for me. We’re proud to bring you this co-publication with Teachers College Press.

While I note the new, I can’t resist a plug for the old. Natalie Ziarnik’s School and Public Libraries is a beautifully written book. I farmed her manuscript out to a freelance editor who liked it so much she wanted to buy a copy for a teacher relative of hers.

Judi Moreillon’s has created a Web site here to complement her book Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension.  Individual chapters focus on one of seven strategies and include lesson plans for reading developmental levels of emerging, advancing, and advanced. Teacher-librarians have field-tested the lessons. The Web site features feedback, photographs, student work, and testimonials of their experiences.

I took a few hours away from weeding in the garden yesterday to attend the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, which will be heavily blogged, Flickred, and Twittered. (See Michelle Boule’s notes at Wandering Eyre.) Opening keynoter Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT’s Interactive Media Comparative Studies Program, spoke about games, media literacy, and participative culture.

Jenkins shared ideas that are in a MacArthur Foundation White Paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.” He made the point that young “digital natives,” who we might regard as advance and adept beyond our help, in fact, badly need the guidance of adults—parents, teachers, librarians—in social skills and cultural competencies. Students need help with research and critical thinking skills, particularly those with least access to computers. If you only have 20 minutes on the computer in the library for your homework assignments, you’re more likely to take the top hits. Also, students need a nudge to transfer the knowledge or skills from a gaming environment to real life. Finally, young people need help developing ethics in their participative environments.

ALA Editions author Joyce Valenza has been exploring these issues for some time. I recall her concern years ago that students weren’t nearly as good with Google as they thought. Now social software raises new issues. For ideas on guiding digital natives, listen to the podcast of Joyce’s 2007 National Educational Computing Conference presentation with English teacher Ken Rodoff “Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0” (courtesy of the Apple Distinguished Educators series.) Joyce posted an accompanying wiki pathfinder here.

Jenkins mentioned a couple interesting projects for educators. Icue, a collaboration with NBC News, will use blogs, social networks, and games to connect kids to events in U.S. history. As an example of creative mixing, he described a theatrical adaptation of the Moby Dick story created by teens in Rhode Island. See more in the blog post here. Jenkins is looking for partner libraries who would explore new ways of teaching Moby Dick.

See the Project NML website for more ideas on new media literacies.

I had the pleasure of working with Gail Bush on her book The School Buddy System: The Practice of Collaboration. I admire Gail’s organization and focus. I remember meeting with her in my office while her manuscript was in process and being so impressed when she pulled a binder for the project from her brief case. Yeah, I’m a sucker for a binder.

I notice that Gail is working with the same focus on advancing the cause of social justice. On Wednesday, along with colleagues at the National-Louis University Center for Teaching with Children’s Books, she will convene the symposium INDIVISIBLE: Teaching for Social Justice through Children’s Literature (K-12). A year ago, Gail wrote for Knowledge Quest an article (PDF) positing a tenth information literacy standard that would address social justice. She writes:

School Librarians work for a better tomorrow every day. We ply our trade with future young leaders as if the world depended on it, and for good reason.

I’ll take testimonials for our books where I can get them. A couple weeks ago, Sara Kelly Johns, American Association of School Librarians president-elect and a library media specialist in Lake Placid, New York, walked by my office and stopped for a moment to chat. I keep our most recent titles faced on my bookshelf, and she noticed New on the Job, by Ruth Toor and Hilda K. Weisburg. Sara told me she has shared the books from her professional collection with a soon-to-be-certified colleague who is educating herself with library literature. This reader praised New on the Job for its practical overview of the field. Her regret was that the book wasn’t around soon enough to be the first that she read.

I asked Sara to talk it up, and she must have. We recently received a state-wide order for 150 copies. Wow! Talk about results.

New on the Job is the latest iteration in ALA’s tradition of offering a basic manual for school librarians. I can trace it to the 1975 publication Steps to Service, by Mildred Nickel, who revised the book in 1984. The two editions sold 25,000 copies. It was succeeded by Policymaking for School Library Media Specialists (1989), which took a more philosophical approach, but was decidedly less popular. Early on in my time at ALA, Don Adcock, then deputy director at AASL, urged me to publish a successor. Then, maybe still, the most common information request to AASL was for advice on basic procedures of how to run a school library media center. He recommended Ann Wasman as an author, and we published her New Steps to Service in 1998. Also successful, the book is often used as a complement to Information Power in introductory courses on school librarianship. Wasman is retired from the field, and when it came time for the next book, I needed to look elsewhere.

Consulting editor Susan Veccia recruited long-time writers Toor and Weisburg to the task. For more than 25 years, they had been publishing practical advice for the field in their newsletter School Librarian’s Workshop, and they delivered as we knew they would.

It’s job-hunting season for school library media specialists. If you’ll be new on the job this fall, take a look.

I’m working on a building design process at home, and it has been slow going. Careful and thorough in our decision-making, my wife and I reminded each other, “We’re only going to do this once; we better get it right.” We have never done it before either, which can make the process stressful. What struck me about Rolf Erikson and Carolyn Markuson, authors of Designing a School Library Media Center for the Future, is the number of design projects, they have have been involved with. I looked back to the proposal for the first edition, and it was an even 100 between them. He had 35. She had 65. He claimed several more in the proposal for the revision. Together, 107 projects, at least, but who’s counting?

I think it’s tempting, when interacting with teenagers, to draw back on our own experiences as teenagers…to remember what we thought and felt…in order to figure out what they’re after. Or, because they tend to look something like adults, we assume that their development is almost “done”, and that, save a few minor tweaks that have to do with “sowing of the wild oats” in these years, they pretty much think like we do.

I’m reading a fascinating manuscript by Jennifer Burek-Pierce (working title: Sex, Brains and Videogames) that basically will serve as the librarian’s guide to the teenager. She pulls together research from education, neuroscience, psychology, and other areas to provide a good look of today’s teenager. Along the way, she asks librarians to question their own assumptions about these sometimes moody, sometimes rambunctious, often unpredictable patrons they serve. And, some of the questions she asks will likely stir debate and healthy discussion among librarians for years to come.

The chapter on brain research is especially interesting. (It reminds me of the brain research done on babies that spawned the “early literacy” movement…I wonder if brain research on teenagers will lead to something similar). Brain development in teenage years is not like building a house, where you start with a foundation and progress until it’s done. Rather, it’s a process of “proliferation and pruning,” as Burek-Pierce points out. Fits and starts and development and redevelopment (no wonder they can be so moody with all those “storms” going on in their heads). Nowadays, researchers are saying that the brain reaches adult form at the age of 25 years of age (when I presented this project to my colleagues, I teased our young assistant with this fact). “Plasticity” of the brain refers to developing, then diminishing connections in the teen brain. Teen brains are constantly changing in their ability to process of convey information.

There are many many implications of this. But, one surprising result? They’re not always very good at reading facial expressions. Often, teens complain that librarians aren’t friendly or approachable. Could it be, Burek-Pierce asks, a function of their inability to interpret the expression on the librarian’s face? Could they be seeing hostility on a face that’s truly expressing concentration or, perhaps, even boredom? (Is this why my nieces and nephews can seem so sensitive when an adult in their life doesn’t appear to react the way they expect to bad or good news?)

This manuscript provides plenty to think about. Marketers think they know how to reach teens, but, after reading this, I’m convinced they’re way off base. And, I’m convinced that knowing more of this research will help librarians, who are better in tune with what makes their patrons tick anyway, to serve teens even more effectively.

We rarely change covers after a book is promoted. We did this time though. Judi Moreillon argued that we had missed the point when we designed a cover with a stock photo of a woman reading to children in a classroom. Why only one teacher? It’s all about the librarian being in a classroom with the classroom teacher. And she sent this picture. Well, I can’t say it won the day.

We don’t involve authors in our cover designs for a number of reasons. (Judi knows them.) I argued that she was being too literal, that the collaboration was “off-stage.” In the end, we went forward with a new cover with no photo. Judi believes teacher-librarians need to be true partners in reading instruction, in the classroom. This is what collaboration looks like. Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension: Maximizing Your Impact is due to be published in a couple weeks.