Reflection+on+Community+Engagement

**Artifact #1: Community Engagement Reflection**

 Before enrolling in this class, I had very little experience with community engagement, especially in terms of how it interacts with libraries. To be honest, I didn’t even entirely understand what the term “community engagement” meant. I just felt that there had to be a way to connect my belief in public service and community works with my desire to find a career as a K-12 librarian in a public school setting. Over the course of the semester, among other things, I read about Jane Addam’s work with early American immigrants, engaged in discussions with classmates about reading materials for prisoners, investigated the needs of my own neighborhood in Wicker Park, interviewed school librarians about both the frustrations and joys of their work and spent hours reading with second-graders through a community engagement project called Open Books. Through these discussions, readings, and, above all, experiences, I believe I have developed a better understanding of what it takes to incorporate community engagement into the school library setting. There are inherent problems within the educational setting and the school culture that views students as problems. However, through my recent exposure to various community engagement programs, I can better envision ways in which I can engage youth and the community through the school library setting. What I have learned through my experiences this semester has ultimately changed my ways of thinking and has instilled in me a desire to change my ways of teaching, as well.

Without a doubt, there are problems within our educational system, our school communities, and our overall ways of dealing with youth. In my recent experiences, I have come across many of these stumbling blocks. In investigating my own neighborhood for a needs assessment, I discovered that the dwindling number of students has created an intense competition among school administrators for resources and, as a result, lessened the availability of quality educational opportunities for the students. Furthermore, as schools close, students are forced to travel greater distances, decreasing parental involvement from families who may not be able to travel the longer distances to be involved in their child’s school. According to a school librarian I spoke with, children frequently exhibit greater behavioral problems as a result of these forces, thereby making the school environment less productive for everyone involved. This comment reflects an attitude I’ve witnessed over and over this semester through my practicum experience in a Chicago Public School. Rather than viewing the students as assets, the school culture dictates that teachers view students as potential problems to be managed and handled. In the library particularly, which often serves as a prep time for other teachers, the librarian may be just trying to “make it through,” rather than working to actively engage students in information literacy skills. This missed opportunity is the most serious problem that we create for youth. When we think of them as trouble makers that do not deserve a meaningful, relevant education, we do everyone a disservice. Likewise, readings in this class have introduced the concept of “adultism,” in which individuals hold prejudicial opinions of young people as impulsive or immature. This deficit view of youth limits our ability to fully understand what youth are capable of, both in schools and in their communities. When teachers and librarians hold these prejudices and opinions, they create a hostile learning environment in which active engagement is not possible.

Despite this bleak outlook, there are numerous programs and initiatives working to improve the quality of education and society’s overall attitude toward youth. Through the investigation of a civic renewal movement, I encountered Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), a youth-led organizing collaborative made up of students from community organizations and Chicago Public High Schools that work together to address the high dropout rate and low college enrollment rate for Chicago Public Schools students. This was perhaps the most exciting program I encountered this semester, as it implements a “students-as-assets” model to form partnerships between adults and students. These partnerships allow the students to investigate and strategize to solve real-world problems that affect them, such as the high dropout rate. This program greatly inspired me to work with students to help them create a meaningful education. Likewise, my work at Open Books, the program I profiled in my create project, inspires in me a sense of activism. This organization is a nonprofit social venture that operates a literacy bookstore and provides community programs such as “Reading Buddies” through a volunteer workforce. This program is exemplary in the partnership that it creates between the young people and their reading or literacy tutors. As with VOYCE, this initiative considers youth to be allies and assets and helps them solve problems through information literacy. Through the various articles, studies, and research we’ve read this semester, I’ve also encountered a host of examples of how youth community engagement should and can function. For example, in The Architecture of Ownership, Adam Fletcher argues for active engagement in education. Through this method, students engage in purposeful activities that make their learning more meaningful and that help them take ownership of their own education. He presents four roles – planners, teachers, professional development partners and decision makers – that can help students take a more active and meaningful role in their own learning. Through readings, discussions, interviews and practical experiences, I have had the great fortune to witness successful youth community engagement projects in action. After an examination of problems inherent in our cultural dealings with youth, as well as an investigation of programs that successfully engage youth in the community, I have a better developed idea of how I can combine social activism with information literacy in a school library.

Focusing on youth as assets, rather than as problems, and making them partners can be difficult in schools, where the culture tells us to manage them, keep their behavior under control, and fill them up with our own knowledge. However, I believe that school libraries can be instrumental in turning this traditional notion on its head. In libraries, we teach students how to research. We teach them how to create a question and answer it for themselves. As a teacher-librarian, I do not want to provide my students with an arbitrary question that they must answer in order to learn research skills. Rather, I would like to meld together research skills, information, and each student’s individual goals and future aspirations. In other words, when I ask students to do a research project in the library, I do not want them to spit back to me the state capital of Idaho or the tallest ten volcanoes in the world. Rather, I want them to think of a problem they want to solve or a question they want answered. When they have that, we will work together to develop the information literacy skills needed to go out and find their solutions. This solution research model will better serve students in their educational goals because it is a meaningful task. In other words, they’ll learn research skills more effectively because they are using them in a context that has meaning to them. Likewise, it establishes the school library as an actively engaged place. There, the students learn that they have the power to change things and to create and answer questions for themselves. This knowledge will alter their self-image and abilities for the rest of their lives and better prepare them for the future. The school library becomes an active place in which real work can be done, rather than a passive environment in which students learn about the Dewey Decimal System or cataloging protocols. The ability to research and the belief that you can effectively find information is crucial to social change. By instilling that knowledge in youth, I better prepare them for a future of change.

Through this course, I have learned a great deal. Some of it has been troubling, but much more has been inspiring. What I have learned in this semester and my overall time in library and information school has changed the ways in which I think. More importantly, however, it has changed the ways in which I plan to teach. For many children, the only access to a library or to books or computers they may have is through the school library media center. As a school librarian, I intend to make that experience a positive and, most of all, engaging one.