Multi-cultural multi-lingual – Informative Flights

By what are we known?

For a while now I’ve been wanting to highlight the curation of books related to the countries and cultures of our students, and finally this year I got around to creating posters “Celebrating xxx” which I post to our school bulletins for students and adults respectively. It’s been a bit of a chicken and egg project – knowing how many students we have from each country / culture – which in itself is truly not as simple a task as it may appear. We use the proxy of first, second and third passports, but as anyone who lives internationally knows, life is a tangle of multiple strands with immigration, migration, expatriation, languages, refugees, fleeing and arriving, births and marriages and transferences and identities. So in the last two years, using this list I’ve been scouring book lists, book catalogues, recommendations, book prizes to where we finally have, for most of the countries with more than 2 students, at least a couple of books besides a travel guide.

A couple of books. How easy that rolls of the tongue. But anyone with a conscience and an iota of empathy will know that that is another potential landmine. I have carried shame for my country of birth, South Africa, for decades, and still often have trouble admitting to its citizenship since I still feel the personal burden of all the wrongs committed by people of my race. It is right that a representative sampling of literature of my country includes reference, analysis and depictions of the pain and despair that apartheid has wrought. But that is not all we are as a nation and people.

I have not yet made the list for South Africa. But that was the dilemma I faced when curating the poster for Germany. A country with a 1000 years of literature beginning with the Nibelungenlied. Whose literature I studied in translation at UCT while ignoring my true passions suppressed doing a commerce degree. Yet looking at the books we have in the library, it appears that the war years, in particular the second world war, and specifically the war atrocities, is the primary lens through which our students form their Germanic world view. Again, it is right and proper that authors, beginning with people like Günter Grass, who, in his time was vilified for daring to address the near past, should shine a light on a terrible past. But that is not all by which they should be known. And more than anything students need to become aware of nuance. By the realisation that it is possible to hold two opposing views in one’s mind simultaneously. And if not through literature, how will they learn that? How sad is it too, that all the books we have about Armenia are about the genocide?

So far I have received nothing but gratitude from our community for both curating / purchasing these books and highlighting them as their national days come by. It is I who is filled with doubt and desire to be able to offer more. And despair that in many cases there isn’t more as countries are ravaged by war and poverty – at times literally with bombs and other times with the devastation of censorship, cultural and monetary poverty and lack of access to publishing and translation of the words that need to be heard by their people, its diaspora and the rest of the worlds children and young adults / adults. We deserve more than the “lonely planet” and “countries of the world” as nice as it is to at least have that.

This is a sample of a few of the posters. Feel free to copy and use / adapt these posters for use in your own libraries. As the year goes on I add to the posters on their national days based on what we have in our library.

#NotOurDiversity

I’m busy preparing for next week’s library lessons. G5 has one of my favourite units in “How We Express Ourselves”

People create messages to target specific audiences

Ostensibly it’s about advertising, as the lines of inquiry indicate,

1. Advertising techniques can be used to influence society (Perspective)
2. Critically evaluating messages presented in the media (Reflection)
3. Ways adverts can cause people to form opinions (Causation)

however to paraphrase and misquote Twain I’ve never let reality get in the way of a good lesson. So I’m loosely interpreting “media” to include books, and advertising to include things like book covers.

My opening salvo last week was “Cover Bias” where we looked at the cover of a book as the way in which it was advertised and I showed the class some more egregious examples of stereotype and bias in the creation of book covers

This week is my chance to tackle something I feel very strongly about – how the concept of children’s book diversity has been cornered by a very specific type of diversity – i.e. the North American type, which to be honest in the lives of my students is #NotOurDiversity. So I’d like to provide a counterbalance to that, as well as to start my students and everything thinking and curating resources that do reflect their diversity.

This is tomorrow’s provocation:

And I’m hoping at the end we can start creating a padlet of the books which they consider to be their mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors.

What do I think their diversity looks like? Some of it is typical to 3CK (3 culture kids), but each place I’ve lived has delivered its own nuance:

Product of multi- cultural / linguistic parentage and heritage (including multi-racial if that is even a term that is at all relevant – I don’t think it is to them, but probably in other contexts, countries it would be)
Multi-national residential where home is defined more by current location of self, parents and siblings than by family and passport
Financial privilege that transcends typical migrant / immigrant issues and trauma
Underlying uncertainty on matters of identity and lack of sense of “place”
High expectations of resilience, grit and adaptability to constant change

Before anyone thinks that the market is too small to matter for book publishing for example should have a look at the numbers – 56.8m people estimated by 2017 and even more importantly the demographics of expatriation has changed dramatically and will continue to change – no more British administrator, the reality is more likely to be an Indian IT specialist or Korean Engineer. And so too our literature should be evolving to provide their children in international education the mirrors, windows and doors they are entitled to.

Educational advice – from Facebook?

I subscribe to way too many Facebook groups. I need to stop it actually, they’ve become like women’s magazines. But worse. You keep seeing the same things come up over and over again, but instead of ignoring them you can actually have a say, which is giving yourself the delusion of helpfulness, but actually the smartest person in the room of Facebook groups is not the room itself, to misquote David Weinberger.

Some of the smartest people I know don’t do Facebook and when they do, they’re lurkers not participators. So I guess that’s making me stupid. I just can’t help myself because the fact that someone may actually genuinely want an accurate answer AND follow up is illusionary enough to put up with the ignorance of echo-chambers and the chance that you may learn something.

No where is worse than education groups, and within those groups nothing is worse than questions and answers about bilingualism and language. Except perhaps dinner parties between parents of children of roughly the same age that are excruciating examples of passive aggressive one-upmanship. Right now the sum of my parenting advice can be summed up as:

It’s hard to kill a baby (i.e. CTFD)
Regularity, sleep and reading (and don’t be too poor)
Avoid dinner parties with other parents unless their children are at least 10 years older than yours
Pick two languages and give them all you’ve got

It’s the last point I’d like to write about today. On one of the groups the following was posted:

2yr old (born NOV 2015) who is trilingual (if you can even say this about a 2yr old). German mum, French dad, English spoken with nanny and language between parents. I’m looking for kindergarten options from around next summer … have no idea where to start.
No preference towards public/private or towards any language even though I’m wondering if adding mandarin might be a bit confusing given that there are already the other 3. What do you think? Focus is more on play/social activities rather than academics

This is a pretty typical question and the answers were also pretty typical – a combination of shouting out school names that have either French or German, alternating with saying that children can easily learn any amount of languages (the number 12 was even suggested), compared with humblebrags about how “fluent” their 5 year old was in any number of languages.

I must admit to entering the fray and suggesting that they chose the language of the school based on their future plans if known – i.e. go back to a French / German speaking environment or continue in the international sphere, and based on who would be at home to support the homework and reading. And to choose 2 languages and do them properly. There are language experts who can help people on this. There are books and research papers written on this. And don’t ask parents of young children – they know not what they say. Don’t even talk to educators in primary schools. speak to parents with teenagers, preferably at the point where they have to choose their IB language. Talk to teenagers, and talk to teachers of IB languages.

Being bilingual is NOT just speaking a language. It is reading and writing. Being literate. And that takes formal lesson time, time spent reading and writing AT grade level. There are so many barriers to that. I’m now talking general international schools, of course there are exceptions / bilingual schools. If you’re lucky you’ll get 40 minutes a day in the language at school. Probably in that language as a SECOND language, i.e. language learning may just be a combination of groundhog day (learning the same things year after year) and/or teaching to the lowest common denominator. So you’re going to have to supplement at home. Either by classes in the afternoon / weekends, online or with a tutor. Besides having to read to and with your child in that language. And dedicate at least part of your holidays to immersion in that language environment. As one expert who recently visited our school said “language is not buy one, get one free”. My personal statement is always “you don’t learn a language by breathing the same air as others who speak it”. Bottom line is it takes planning, time and money.

As I write (Saturday afternoon) my husband is in my son’s room reading in Dutch with him. He’s 14. He has in-school after hours Dutch classes for 3 hours a week plus out-of-school additional tutoring for about 2 hours a week / fortnight depending on his needs. According to his Dutch teacher there are many students who cannot enter the program as the level of their “literate” Dutch is too low. And many of the students in the program are doing Dutch at a much lower level than their chronological age. We took action when he was 9 and started intensive work on his Dutch after he was failing at Chinese. It’s been expensive and time-consuming but he’s on track for a bilingual diploma plus he can communicate with his Dutch family and if necessary could student there in Dutch at university level.

My daughter thrived in the bilingual English-Chinese environment in Hong Kong, hated the only alternative of Chinese second language at her primary school, Had me nagging her to continue reading and writing chinese in her spare time with a tutor until middle school, got into the native stream for middle school / iGCSE where she’s the only caucasian / non-Chinese-heritage child left in a class of about 8 students only. This is only because she’s an exceptionally diligent child and kept up her reading and writing. She bemoans the low expectations and standards at school. Most of the students in her class are only doing Chinese on the insistence of their parents. She may do first language IB and has been recommended for it, but has lost motivation.

All of my French friends who have had children come up the system internationally have, to their regret, children doing French second language.

If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, I’ve read, thought and written reams about it.

Meting out diversity

The whole diversity thing bothers me. Has for some time. We seem to love the optics of diversity, but not so much the reality. And so we mete out our diversity in acceptable chunks at acceptable moments. And in doing so we can fool ourselves – most of the time. We also mete out our encounters with diversity such that they don’t necessarily have to touch us in ways that are meaningful. We thereby send clear messages to all our students, diverse and – well what is the word not for diverse – dominant? Oh, begin to define dominant in an international school and don’t bother looking at the nationalities of the students, or pictures of them. You

probably need only to look at a handful of people. Those in leadership. And chances are they’ll all be white male of a certain age, background and education, with a judicious sprinkling of women.

Before anyone gets excited about that, think about the following reported encounter by prospective parents in an ethnically mixed marriage. The primary school I’m at is wonderfully diverse in the composition of the teacher body. On entering a classroom with a caucasian teacher, one of the parents exclaimed “at last, a proper English teacher” (for the record, she wasn’t English, but obviously appearance counts). When at the Neev festival in Bangalore, I remarked to my friend how gorgeous and natural she looked in her salwar kameez and asked her why I hadn’t seen her wearing one at school in Singapore while working for a big name, self-proclaimed “diverse” school. She looked at me aghast and said there was no way it would have been possible outside of the UN celebrations and that all staff was expected to dress professionally and adopt the school values and world view irrespective of their personal beliefs or experience. Now this is a school that prides itself on the fact that they have a uniform but don’t police the interpretation of its manifestation. Where I attended a lecture today, and saw every possible variation in student “teen dress expression” but not so in the teaching body.

So we get to the mundane part of throwing some books in the library that reflect the culture, language and backgrounds of our students. Can we even do that without breaking through the cultural myopia? I still have to keep thinking back to this experience when I realised that truly we are up against so much, and putting books in the library is a bandaid on the wound of an amputee. If we struggle even conceptually with putting textbooks from different countries whose educational philosophy we “disagree” with (how dare we?), what happens with literature, that is so much more subversive?

I recently purchased around 100 books written and/or illustrated by Indian authors. It was hard work “selling them” to my students. Even the Indian students. Especially the Indian students. I used the above infographic to explain to students how skewed their world view is. And the worst of it all, is this in itself is a North American view. Let’s not even talk about the fact that most of the 73.3% white characters and 12.5% animal, truck etc. characters are male. By the end of the week, after discussions about being open-minded and balanced and being a risk-taker, most of my books were borrowed.

A few of my students exclaimed they “loved” one or another of the authors. Some parents expressed surprise that I had so many books, and amazement that I’d used my 30kg luggage allowance to lug back books. Now Indian books are possibly one of the lowest barrier “diverse” books an international school could add to their collection. Quite simply because English is a common language. No translation is required. There is a thriving publishing industry. A huge diaspora. Many schools have 25-30% of their student body from the Indian subcontinent. And yet, until a month ago I probably had fewer than 10 “Indian” books in my collection. Most of them picture books from Tara Books. Little to nothing in Junior fiction and a few Ash Mistry books in fiction. And now? I have the books. Students have borrowed them once. Will they go back into the shelves along with the Diwali books only to make a reappearance next year this time when it’s acceptable to celebrate and embrace Indian culture?

Any literature on language and culture will quickly point to dominant / aspirational and socio-economic preferred language and culture. As a South African who spent most of her life mired in shame, unable and unwilling to admit to my heritage, I truly “get” the ambivalence (while remaining astounded by continued British bluster – particularly here in Asia).

And that is the problem with every article ever written about diversity. We lament the absence of the optic. We gloss over some of the “hardware” issues (authors, illustrators, translators), we may even get to structural problems (publishing houses, editors, market sizes). But we neglect to think about how the structure of our education and schools will support those tender shoots, will allow our communities to claim not just their heritage, but current philosophies. We close down libraries, we limit budgets, we operate in echo chambers, we fail to make library education affordable and accessible to local staff. We concentrate our online efforts to gadgets and gizmos instead of access, community and understanding.

What do I do in our library / school?

Of course the five f’s: food, fashion, famous people, festivals, and flags. Mea culpa here. I have books about (just about) every nation in our school, and scramble each year to make sure there’s at least one book by the time Uniting Nations comes around.

I buy all the books suitable for my elementary school from the USBBY list – cognisant of the fact that it is the US – i.e. pre-digested for USA sensibilities.

I follow blogs of avid supporters of diverse literature such as Dr. Myra Bacsal’s “Gathering Books” and Rachel Hildebrandt ‘s Global Literature in Libraries (seriously, I’m one of only 200 odd people following this AWESOME Blog?? – they also have a facebook page btw if that’s more your thing). Who give exposure to people like Avery Fischer Udagawa with her new list for 2017 of 100 more works translated for kids, following Marcia Lynx Qualey’s 2016 100 Great Translated Children’s Books from Around the World.

Following what’s being published via the Bologna book fair. Reading reports such as those created by Wischenbart.

And then I devote part of my budget to buy the books, and make sure they’re slotted into resource lists for our units of inquiry, and read them aloud, and “sell” them to teachers and my PYP coordinators.

Put out google alerts for diverse books, join FB groups of librarians around the world. Ask, ask, ask, in the community, parents, librarians, teachers, students.

Write about it. Write about it again, and again.

What more can we do?

Hard stuff. Advocacy. Fostering a sense of national / cultural pride in all our students – not just those from the dominant / desirable communities. Conversations with teachers and administrators. Looking at what our students are writing about – who are the characters in their writing? Ignoring the deluge of books from BANA countries. Being tireless. Fighting even with institutions doing brilliant work like “Global Readaloud” about the choice of their books that are NOT global. Even when all of this is very very tiring and makes you seem like a harpy.

No excuses: Syndetics

It must be an age thing – but as I’m getting further into my 50’s I’m becoming less tolerant of fancy sounding reasons and explanations that are actually just excuses for staving off change. This is the first of a series of posts on things that really annoy me as an international librarian, with a smattering of understanding of technology and a desire to serve ALL students, teachers, parents and administrators in my community as best I can. I have an overdeveloped sense of fairness and justice and I sometimes feel that librarians as a group are just too nice and suck up way too many things.

I’ll also admit to being emboldened by a FABULOUS new biography on women called “Brazen” (coming out in English next year – thank you Netgalley for the preview copy) You can preorder your copy now – suitable for High School 13+. And in fact this book just highlights what I’m going to write about today. This book originated in French. I’m currently totally inspired by the Guardian’s World library list and wanted to replicate it, adapted for primary school, particularly with a view to Uniting Nations day coming up in November.

Now I work really hard at trying to transform my library into one that is representative of my students. I love the fact that my one Bangladeshi student asks me every week if I have any new books about or set in Bangladesh. And that at the beginning of term she came to proudly tell me that she was no longer the one and only but had been joined by another family. And when I showed her our new book about Bangladesh she took time out of her library browsing time to show me all the things the book depicted that were special to her.

I also work hard on my libguides to make sure that my books are showcased graphically and visually to make perusing them interesting for primary level students. So this is when I get really annoyed that Syndetics, the one interface for front covers that just about every system, from OPAC to libguides to LibraryThingsforLibraries uses does NOT seem to recognise that there is a publishing industry outside of the BANA (Britain, Australia, North America) countries – in fact they even struggle with Australia most the time. And don’t let me even consider China – well they cheat a bit – a lot actually – thinking that one ISBN number should suffice for a whole series of books – even if there are 57 books in the series.

This means that my libguide with my books from and about other countries, my catalog and my destiny discover new books respectively looks like this:

Spot the problem? And Syndetics actually prides itself in the fact that the covers of the coverless books are now colourful with title and author. NOT GOOD ENOUGH! For my catalog, my library assistants spend hours manually inserting the covers, and for the much touted, over promised under-delivered Destiny discover it’s just a blue boring nothing. So 5 of my 8 most recently purchased books are just blue blobs. So if you’re a librarian trying to diversify AND to make your new purchases appealing the cards are stacked against you.

Before I started writing this post I thought I’d do a bit of research into Syndetics, and the whole cover image thing. And then I thought no damnit. I won’t. I don’t really care what the reason or excuse is. They’re selling an expensive service. They’re complicit in not improving the marketing of diversity of literature and I’m just going to put it out there and they can do the explaining, and hopefully a bit of soul searching on how they can make this better. What BIG things, what IMPORTANT and sea-change things they, as a big corporation as opposed to me as a little librarian in a little library serving 650 students from 40 nations can achieve.

Scheduling – priorities and dissonance

New year, new chances, old problems. The perennial one of scheduling library time. I kind of started commenting on people’s posts and questions on FaceBook and then decided it merited a blog post on its own. There is also a whole discussion on libraries and librarians going at the IBO level where priorities, recognition, roles, responsibilities etc. are also being hashed out. But coming from a corporate background and not an educational one, I sometimes can’t help seeing things a bit differently.

One of the most useful courses I followed during my librarian studies was “Designing spaces for learning”. And spaces weren’t just physical spaces, or even physical and online spaces, it includes temporal space – as I wrote about here and design thinking. The thing is that time is the great leveller. We all have 24 hours of it a day, but what we choose to do with it is telling, because it will determine who we are as librarians and display our priorities more strongly than just about anything else we do. I could even put money on the fact that if you walked into a school where there was a troubling relationship between the librarian and staff / admin and you asked to see the library timetable it could be used as both a diagnostic tool and a cure.

So I’ll begin this post by giving a shout-out to my principal who gives me the autonomy necessary to both think all this out and then to discuss it with her and implement it. She also gives me the support I need when things are not working optimally, if I’m reasonable in my requests and it supports student learning. My PYP coordinators who are allowing me to be their educational partners also makes things a lot easier. And the school I’m at that generously allows for 3 support staff members in the library in their HR budget to open up time for me to be doing higher order teacher-librarian things rather than processing and circulating books. Now apologies for a barrage of management-type speak and jargon, please bear with me.

In library scheduling there are two main schools of thought, primarily defined as fixed scheduling (you set up a schedule each year / term, and every class gets their time to go to the library at that designated time) and flexible scheduling (the librarian’s time is bookable, on demand). Each have their benefits and drawbacks – with fixed you get to see everyone regularly, but in a large school you have no time left, or go on a two / three week schedule. With flexible you run the risk of never ever seeing some kids depending on the teacher’s ideas of the library, priorities etc. Most larger schools where the ratio of librarian to students is low (e.g. 1 librarian to 1500 students) opt for a flexible schedule. Our ratio is 1:630 with 34 classes so theoretically a fixed schedule can work, and I’ve tried to build some flex into it otherwise I’d never do the things that differentiate me from what a teacher or library assistant can do.

Priorities

The first part of the process is to decide what your priorities are. Now in education this is way harder than in corporate life, since often many of your priorities are set for you. It also took me a little while to get the experience and confidence to actually realise what my priorities should be and to advocate for them. And also to decide what my priorities shouldn’t be and to draw a line in the sand. Part of your priorities are governed by your school’s mission and value statement. Part is about your integrity to yourself as a professional (teacher) librarian and part is about the resources physical and financial your school has.

My personal priority statement is “I am about literacy“. So everything that has to do with any of the literacies (alphabetic, informational, numerical, multi-lingual and to a certain extent digital) I will prioritise. I steer clear of discussions on makerspaces for that reason, partly because we have a dedicated STEAM department, and partly because if it has nothing to do with creating some form of reading, writing or research I consider it outside of my ambit. OK, shoot me, but you have to draw the line somewhere or you’ll have to compromise on something else, or just never stop working 24 hours a day.

The next thing is to think about how you are going to integrate yourself into teaching and learning in a collaborative way. There are two frequent laments heard in this regard “I don’t have time for meetings” and “I don’t get invited to meetings” – and here is where a supportive principal comes in. The very first thing that went into my timetable this year were the days and times for co-planning for each grade. It’s taken 2 years to get to this point and I only need / want to go to the meetings once a unit – usually a week or so before the unit starts so I’m involved in hearing where the team wants to go with the unit, what digital and physical resources they need and how I can meaningfully integrate information literacy or other ATL skills into the unit. I also only need to be there for about 10-20 minutes depending on whether it’s an old or new unit. So what about the other 4/5 weeks? Well I’m using the time to DO what the team needs. And if I’m teaching in that time, I can’t be doing. Doing includes making library guides (that’s how I have time for them), curating resources, ordering new resources, weeding old resources. Although I am not considered a HOD, my principal also kindly invites me to the weekly lead meetings so I know what is going on and coming up, and can involve the library in any way that is meaningful.

Then comes the fixed part, which fulfils my literacy priority. Since I do have a manageable ratio / number of students / classes, I have a fixed part of my schedule whereby each student gets to come to the library once a week. How has this been engineered? By chunking time and students. 40 lesson periods and 34 classes would mean no time for co-planning, co-teaching, own planning let alone the library facility management stuff. So, based on the advice of my predecessor and in the face of intense resistance from teachers, the timetable was split into 20 minute library times from G4 and under and kept at 40 minute sessions for G5 & 6. The compromise for lower level teachers is they can pair up with another teacher in the same grade had have 40 minutes with 2 classes. It’s not my preference, but they may choose this. I do this because I want to see every single child every single week and make sure that I am helping them with free voluntary reading. In Krashen’s (2004) words ” evidence from several areas continues to show that those who do more recreational reading show better development in reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary, These results hold for first and second language acquisition, and for children and adults. ” I am an unabashed book pusher. I do everything I can to put books in the hands of children that they want to read. And to do that I need to see them and I need to know them. Especially the ones that will only come to the library that once a week.

Yes you can do a library lesson in 20 minutes, if you have staff who can do the check-in / check-out and shelving while you’re doing the reading, the mini-lesson and the reader-advisory, and if your teachers are in the library helping. Yes I do get that much support from my school and I’m very grateful for it.

Another small note on this section – switching costs nearly killed me in my first year. I was doing a G1 class then a G6 class then a G3 class then Kindergarten jumping around day in and day out. So I asked teachers to try and schedule in the library so that all the classes in a grade (or 2 grades, depending on number of classes) were on the same day. It worked last year and we kept it up this year – it was actually easier timetabling that way – constraints work. There were only 2 exceptions where the larger school timetable and teacher preps meant that I’m taking a class to help them out on a day different to the rest of the grade. That’s not bad going.

My next priority is multi-lingual literacy. Actually part of it comes in the fixed part. We are a bilingual English/Chinese school. I am the parent of two bilingual children. A child is NOT bilingual unless they are bi-literate. I will not compromise on that. I faced fierce opposition from parents complaining via teachers when I insisted that every child in the bilingual program had to take home a book in each of the languages irrespective of their ability to read in that language at that point*. I am very uncompromising on some things and this is one of them. At home, I have two bilingual teenagers, one in Chinese, one in Dutch who are still doing their languages as a first language only because I am uncompromising on the fact bilingual has to be bi-literate otherwise you are fooling yourself. And bi-literate means reading and writing. The classes that have “first dibs” on the library timetable are the bilingual teachers. One of my library assistants has to be fluent in Chinese and able to read aloud to my students and help me curate chinese resources.

So those are the bilingual classes. We also have ELL (English Language Learners) and students doing French as a second language. Their teachers also have (and take) the opportunity to bring their students into the library (or the library classroom where my world language resides) with their students every week. Language can just not be taught in isolation from books and reading.

The learning eco-system priority. Teaching and learning does not occur in a vacuum. Children are part of a family, a linguistic community, a social community, a cultural community. At the primary level, besides teachers, parents are my best allies in my literacy goals for my students. So they get two periods once a week for library information sessions, for time to drop in for some reader advisory, for meetings the school needs to hold in my space for them. I am a neutral zone. I am there to help them realise their goals for their family.

Then there is my co-teaching / information literacy teaching priority. I’m listing this last just because it’s last in the process, not because it’s last in priority. Doing all the above, specifically the 20 minute slots with the younger kids gives me 8 x 40 minute periods where I can make myself available for whatever lessons my teachers would like me to teach in the library or in the classroom. These are not used every week, but now that we’re integrated the research ATL into units they will be used far more.

My library facility priority, means I’ve blocked off 2 periods for inter-campus meetings, either by google-hangout or face2face with my fellow librarians and with my own staff.

These are my priorities and how I’ve structured my temporal space to accommodate them (see below). I’m in primary school – people in MS or HS may have other priorities and concerns. People in larger or smaller schools will have other issues. But the bottom line is your priorities need to be worked out (it’s taken me 2 years to get here and to articulate them), and reflected in your timetable. And you need to articulate them well so that if necessary you can argue your case with whoever is getting in the way of allowing you to reflect them in your timetable. Things may and probably will change, but that’s it for now.

As a closing note – another part of the IBO library/librarian discussion was about the “super-librarian” archetype. I don’t want to be a super librarian. I want to be a great librarian. When Clark Kent is busy being superman, he neglects being Clark Kent. We cannot afford to be super-librarians because super librarians can and do burn out. And while everyone around this type of librarian says how super-librarianish they are, I don’t think they get the recognition they really deserve as librarians. And their successors have big shoes to fill, but not necessarily the right shoes to fill.

* Why do I insist on this? Often they can’t read the book, sometimes/ often their parents can’t read the book. Because they can’t read the book YET. Just like my kindergarten and pre-kindergarten children take home books they can’t read, so too my English / French / Dutch speaking kids take home Chinese books because the assumption has to be that they WILL be able to read those books. Otherwise get out of the bilingual program. Seriously. What do we do with mono-lingual kids who can’t read? We read to them. What if we can’t read? We sit and page through the books with them and we ask them to explain the pictures to us. We ask them to point out the words they do recognise. We ask them to point out the letters they recognise.

MLA8 and Chinese …

A fellow librarian in Shanghai and I have been working on creating some new MLA8 posters in Chinese for her bilingual school / library. It’s been an interesting process to put it mildly.

We started off with the MLA posters I created with Katie Day about 2 years ago, and which she updated recently to reflect the MLA8 changes. Now translation is as much an art as a science, and, with the help of a Chinese library assistant we made some rather silly mistakes along the way which in retrospect are obvious. Each round was accompanied by the refrain of my Chinese speaking daughter of “but they just don’t have that /do that in Chinese”

Round 1 – we just translated the English posters into Chinese – well duh, why on earth would you take an English book / video etc. and cite it in Chinese?

Round 2 – finding suitable Chinese originated materials in each basic format and creating citations for them. It may sound easy, but it’s actually harder than you’d think. I worked on the newspaper one with my daughter, and it took a whole evening! Then there was a great NatGeo chinese video, but it was way too complicated as it was a documentary with a director quoting from an interviewee – yes a nice challenge for advanced citations but not suitable for a beginner “basic” poster to get the main ideas across.

Round 3 – punctuation. I’m not entirely sure we’ve nailed this one completely. We ended up making an executive decision on making the in-text punctuation follow the Chinese punctuation – particularly for the full-stop / period “。” and the English punctuation in the “works cited” section. What we didn’t do, and my daughter insists we should have done, is to put the titles of the book in the chinese brackets instead of the inverted commas, i.e. 《。。。》instead of “…”

Round 4 – italics. MLA8 asks for italics, and initially I spent a lot of time trying to italicise in IOS10, which an afternoon of searching will tell you is not possible. Along the way I found out some truly fascinating things about Chinese fonts and typography, which you’re welcome to read up on – it really is very interesting. I learnt a new word – glyphs, and the fact that you need around 20,000 of them for a Chinese font! (I also coincidently found out how to add phonetic marks above characters in Pages – never know when you’ll need that!)

Two things cinched it, a comment on a CJK font forum (Chinese, Japanese Korean) ”

“I’m not solving your problem, but to remind you that this kind of “programmatic italic font” has really bad readability.
For CJK text, the right way to express emphasize (or quote) is to use another font (usually serif font). Especially for Simplified Chinese, use Songti, Fangsong, or Kaiti instead of italic font if your text font is Heiti (iOS default). I know it’s a little bit complicated, but this is really how we do italic.”

and secondly from the MLA itself (which is where I really should have started, but sometimes you go off on a tangent without really thinking properly).

Q: Do I italicize Cyrillic book titles in the list of works cited?

In the past, titles and terms in the Cyrillic alphabet were not italicized, partly because it is based on the Greek alphabet, which traditionally is not italicized (on this point, see Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., sec. 11.131). Letterspacing instead of italics was traditionally used to emphasize a word or phrase.

Today, Cyrillic cursive (the term italics is usually not used in this context) for titles and for emphasis seems to be used often in publications, including scholarly publications, perhaps because of progress in digital typesetting or because of a global trend toward standardization.

Note that there are many languages in the world that do not have an italic font—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Armenian, for example. Arabic sometimes uses a typeface that slants to the left instead of to the right.

Given the complexity and specificity of historical, cultural, linguistic, and printing practices throughout the world, a writer should not use italics when a book title is in a foreign language that is not written in the Latin alphabet. If a work is being prepared for publication, let the author pass that buck to the publisher.

Round 5 – checking and checking actually we just finished this now – with adding the last missing closing bracket – and voila, the posters may see the light of day.

And now, I nervously exhibit them for comment and criticism and correction by my peers! All posters are creative commons with attribution please. My next post will be what I refer to as “MLA8 Lite” – the posters I’ve made for my G6 PYP exhibition students. Just the works cited, without the in-text citation, with explanations in the form of the MLA8 Elements.

L1 and the role of the school

I received an email last night from someone who had read my blog on Building a LOTE collection in an international school and she quite rightly pointed out that it’s a relatively easy thing for a librarian thing to do. Here is her question:

I am a school librarian in an IB candidate school. We are trying to find strategies to promote mother tongues within the school. As far as the library is concerned, I can develop LOTE collections as you call them, but I was wondering would you know of strategies that would help teachers develop their foreign students’ mother tongues.
Thank you very much for your help.

Now fortunately for me (since I’m chest deep in pre-library renovation stuff I’d just run a PYP connect workshop on the very matter 2 weeks ago, and that question prompted me to put this out! So I’m going to embed the presentation here for everyone to see my (sometimes controversial) views. And I’ll explain my philosophy and “ingredients” a little.

Ingredients for a successful L1 program in any school

A champion. A committed champion
A supportive and imaginative leadership
Knowledge and information & the dissemination thereof
A committed language group

1. Committed champion

I think the cartoon below will explain this. Although the metaphor I always use is that one cannot be a little bit pregnant. Asking a mono-lingual to be your language champion is probably not the way to go.

The champion does not have to be a teacher or in admin – at my last school I did it as a passionate parent working part time in the library. I’d like to think that, in conjunction with our mother-tongue coordinator we made a huge difference. But I ruffled a lot of (mono-lingual leadership) feathers and perhaps I could only do what I did do, because my job was not at stake. But that’s another story. This point sounds very easy but it’s not easy being a language champion, even in an international school. I’d even dare to say especially in an international school. Because unfortunately most of them are run by an ‘elite’ corps of white anglo-saxon middle aged monolingual men who are exceptional in paying lip service to language and particularly bad in putting their money (or even support) where their mouths are. There are exceptions. But usually the person is not mono-lingual. The champion needs to be exceptionally knowledgeable, very thick-skinned, very imaginative, networked, and not willing to see problems but only possibilities.

2. A supportive and imaginative leadership

As said before, leadership is the elephant in the room of L1 support. Scratch the surface of almost any international school’s language policy (outside of non-British Europe, since they “get” language) and you will find immense resistance to the language factor unless it serves marketing and certification requirements. Similarly you will see that very seldom do former language teachers rise to power, and existing language teachers are often not power-mongers (research bears this out, but don’t have time to find the citation).

I keep telling leadership at my schools that the lack of a L1* program is a failure of imagination rather than a lack of resources. I think every 50-something year old knows people who learnt English through bootlegged Beatles cassettes or French learners through chansons. I find it incredible that we think it is so hard now when it’s never been easier to access resources and people at our fingertips.

3. Knowledge and information and the dissemination thereof

We need to make sure our language champion is “powered up” with what works, and what doesn’t and what the potential issues and pitfalls are. We similarly need to educate our educators, from the top down and our parents. Way too little time is spent on this. Instead we send our leadership to leadership PD, our math teachers to math PD, our teachers to “making the PYP happen” countless times in 100s of variations and our language teachers to language PD. And we never talk to our parents about language except when they’re struggling as ELL (English Language learner) students. As Virginia Rojas always says “Every teacher is a language teacher”. I have railed countless times against our echo-chambers in education!

In my experience over the last 5 years, if you just bother telling and explaining the whole language thing to parents on time – i.e. when the students are still in primary you get a moment when suddenly you see the cogs in the minds of your audience ticking in over-drive. They totally get it. And the most important messages you need to give them are things that are glaringly obvious to any high-school language teacher but NOT on the radar of a parent concerned about bed-wetting or why Johnny didn’t get invited to Sven’s birthday party:

You need 2 languages for IB (I cannot tell you how many early primary or even late primary parents don’t know this. Yup, it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true)
One of those languages COULD be your L1, either school-or self-taught
BUT Language takes time – 5-7 years for CALP (i.e the level you need for IB) and YOU (not the school) needs to make sure your child is functionally literate, by the end of primary (i.e. reading and writing at or near native level) because
THERE IS LITTLE OR NO TIME even with the best will in the world by the time they get to middle school to catch up. Plus, your influence over them and how they spend their time will diminish rapidly the older they get so you must make sure they have the necessary autonomy and mastery by then.

4. A Committed language group

Ok, so after your meeting or session with parents it will quickly become apparent who cares. In my experience over the last few years, I can make a guess at who will generally step forward. Usually it’s the French, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese. Sometimes the Dutch and Scandinavians (depending how long they’ve been abroad). And we do a huge disservice to these communities by not making it easier for them to get to full native literacy by the end of primary.

We force them into one of the school languages, (in my children’s personal instance it was Spanish, Chinese or French). Then we teach it as a “fun” and “cultural” experience – something that frustrates both the teachers and the committed students. We teach it as an initio course nearly year after year – ground hog day. So we don’t get the mastery, our students don’t see any purpose. And worst of all, we don’t cater for the ‘natives’ in that language so they either give up and learn a 3rd or 4th language rather than endure the frustration and boredom of their L1.

But there are possibilities. There are schools with “one room school-houses” with different students learning different languages at the same time in small groups.

It can be expensive – personally our family has paid the equivalent of an extra term’s school fees in private tuition for one-on-one Dutch classes to get my son up to speed on his Dutch. It takes time, time that kids would otherwise be playing around, doing sport, watching TV, hanging out. Commitment is hard. But it pays off. Speak to any IB student doing self-taught L1 and you will see their pride and accomplishment.

How to create commitment – I have just one question that usually decides that matter

What about your grandchildren?

When I ask that suddenly parents decide which side of the fence they’re on. Because that really is the bottom line. Kill your language with neglect and the chances are your grandchildren will have neither your language nor your identity. Some people are totally fine with that. They’re not committed and probably never will be. Don’t waste your time with them. Some care very very deeply and they will be the sparks that will ignite your L1 program. Use them, work with them, allow them to help you talk about and frame your L1 program.

Amazing things can happen from small beginnings.

* I prefer L1 to mother-tongue as my household speaks the father-tongue as well as the mother-tongue

Beyond “delight and inform”

I had the privilege of attending a presentation by Dr. Myra Bacsal of the NIE at Tanglin Trust School last night about how picture books can be used to promote SEL (social and emotional learning) and the work she is doing to bring both the “hardware” and “software” into the Singaporean school system. I’m totally in awe of the scale of this project, and suspect the slick presentation she and her co-researchers gave is but a tip of the iceberg of what it must have taken to get to this point.

First there is the creation of a framework – as any librarian, or tech person or well, anyone who is capable of hierarchical thinking knows, it really helps to be able to have large conceptual boxes to throw things into. And making it up in an adhoc fashion as you go along (looking at my resource lists I have a distinct sinking feeling that’s what I’ve been engaged in) actually just doesn’t really cut it.

Then there is the curation. Yes I have lists. I have lots of kindness books. And friendship lists, and bullying and emotion books. But “a lot of” is sometimes too much of. Instead of 100 books, one perhaps needs multiple copies of the two or three books that really make a difference and that really touch kids (and their adults).

And the dissemination. Not just presenting to groups of librarians who know some or most of the books you’re introducing, but actually integrating it into the practice of teachers who may or may not be readers, may or may not have a library / teacher librarian on hand! That I think is harder than it seems. Like most things in education (and life), a lot depends on the goodwill of the people around you. On their openness and receptiveness. This morning I was lucky enough to bump into our school counsellor and mention to him that I’d been to the presentation. He got it immediately and we quickly went into my office to discuss how best we could create resource lists together, pool our budgets to ensure that copies of the most relevant books were both in his counselling room and in the library and then, once the infrastructure was in place, start rolling out the reading and introduction of the books in a pre-emptive manner.

I’ve had an ongoing challenge to find and introduce books outside of the BANA (British, Australian, North American) realm, and have been delighted with the books that I ordered from the USBBY 2016 list – as gratifyingly have my students (double win). Dr. Bacsal pointed out that the White Raven list was also worth looking at – particularly for International schools that could justify having excellent picture books in different languages. The European selections usually push the envelope (and a lot of buttons along the way) and as this article on the translation of Elena Ferrante’s Beach at Night show. Of course a sub-optimal translation is a by-product of a generally mono-lingual (mass) reading market needing a translation in the first place. She showed a short extract of an animated movie of the book Sinna Mann (Norway) that left us gasping.

Another special book was “Migrant” by José Manuel Mateo and Javier Martínez Pedro a concertina style bilingual “codex”

Another very special thing was the interview Dr. Bacsal did with the author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sàenz – (see the details of it on her blog) – I’m so glad she’s said she wants to publish a transcript – it was one of those things where you kept thinking “what a wonderful quote” but I was too entranced watching and listening to actually take notes.

Well, my work is cut out for the next few weeks! Checking what I have, what will work in our context, what I need to put on my next book shopping list.

Read around the World

With view to the fact that our school is celebrating uniting nations week in October, this year we’re trying to add a literary bent to the proceedings.

There are a number of steps to this, which are easy or complicated, depending on how “ready” your collection is.

A little while back, I created resource lists on Destiny, and a visual search button for “read around the world”. Since I didn’t have a lot of time I grouped them by continent, with a separate section for Singapore which is where we live. It involved doing subject searches on our catalog for various countries on each continent and then grouping them together. Actually this wasn’t that easy. A book like “Inside out and Back again” – takes place in USA, about a Vietnamese immigrant – where do you put it and its ilk (of which we have many). What if an american author is writing about Africa? Generally I tended to put the books according to where they took place rather than the origin of the author. But I’ve allowed my students to decide how they want to categorise it when they add a comment to their shelfie (more later).

Before the summer break, I also ordered all the books suitable for primary school on the USBBY list for 2016 so they were ready for the school year. Again I didn’t have anything specific in mind, except to diversify my collection. As an aside – I must say I’m incredibly impressed with the selection in this list and I’m going to order from it again this year, and from the backlists of prior years. Books like “My Two Blankets” are just phenomenal and just so appropriate for a multi-lingual environment.

This term, I joined the UN committee and put my idea forward to do a “read around the world” as part of the activities so it would not just be a “costume, food and flags” affair. I also convinced the parade organisers that it may be a nice idea to parade by country grouped by continent (to tie in what was feasible in the library with my limited display space).

Next I created a library guide and a padlet so the students could put up their pictures (we’re an iPad school so that’s one of the easiest ways).

Then last week I started introducing the concept to my students in the library lesson. I adjusted it according to the age. For some, I asked how were ways we could find out about people around the world. We got the usual, go there, live their, eat food, have a friend etc. Then I introduced travelling their through books (depending on the age I told them the library was a magic travel machine), then I read a book from South Africa, my home country (Niki Daly’s “Where’s Jamela”), and then we had a tour around the world past all the displays and they could pick up a “souvenir” book on the way of whatever they liked.

For other classes my colleague met them at the door and said she was a tour guide and would take them around the world and they could pick up books along the way.

We then showed the library guide and explained how to get a picture onto padlet, and that they could then put a sticker on the map.

Some classes were more enthusiastic than others – generally the younger students were not very interested in books from other places, they wanted a book from the country they came from – fair enough.

It was interesting to see where students put books when they made a comment – the aforementioned “inside out” was labeled “Vietnam” by a student, while “Amulet” got a Japanese label based on the author name and origin (although born in Japan, he has lived in the USA since he was 10).

We’ve agreed that for the actual UN week each class well get a bundle of 20-30 books from various countries delivered to the classrooms to read during their DEAR time (they get 20 minutes a day).

Hopefully it will all work out! I’m also hoping our parents will want to get involved with their children.

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What do I do in our library / school?

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Priorities

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Ingredients for a successful L1 program in any school

1. Committed champion

2. A supportive and imaginative leadership

3. Knowledge and information and the dissemination thereof

4. A Committed language group

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