Tag: Sustainable Development Goals

Picture books as a panacea?

maia and what mattersI’ve always been a huge fan of picture books. I’m the librarian that will read “Maia and what Matters” to a group of Middle School teachers and struggle to continue through tears. I spend a reasonable chunk of my budget on picture books (or as some librarians like to refer to the “sophisticated picture books (SPB)” I’ve never see a book deal with anxiety with as much compassion and understanding as Mel Tregonning’s “Small Things”. I maintain a libguide for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) that relies heavily on the work of Dr. Myra Bacsal and her SEL booklists. 

So what is the problem? I’m worried that publishers are becoming complacent about plugging the gaps in information / knowledge / awareness of really big and worrisome things by having a picture book in that space. A case in point is my (and most librarians) quest to curate books related to the Sustainable Development Goals. And I’m afraid even the UN with it’s SDG book club plays into this.

It is easy enough to find a picture book about Wangari Maathai, about the plastic bags of Gambia. It is way harder to get a good (recent) nonfiction book geared at 11-14 year olds on deforestation or plastic bags for example. It seems the nonfiction publishing cycle is around 8-10 years (I found plenty from 2009-2011) between updates whereas the actual issues are accelerating faster.

Follow Your stuff

As mentioned in my previous blog – a big change has occurred in the presentation and design of nonfiction books, so it is important not only from an “up to date facts” point of view that we have these books, but also from an “enticing to read” point of view. When new books exist in a space (trees in this instance) they are truly fantastic. Like “Can you Hear the Trees Talking” by Peter Wohlleben – the young reader version of “The Hidden Life of Trees”. But that’s not really about deforestation, just a very positive reminder of why trees are so awesome and special and worth saving. Or Annick Press (one of my favourites) with Kevin Sylvester’s “Follow your Stuff” an exceptional book for the humanities tracing common items including T-shirts; Medications; Technology; books through geography, production, labour and economics.

The last thing I was looking for included something on sustainable cities and homes. The books in my collection were from 2007 and sorely needed updating. As is the case when a book is older than the students reading it. It’s a fascinating area. It’s something that most major cities in the world are pouring money and resources in. But you can find lofty tomes, heavy text books, coffee-table photo books and very little else. A fellow librarian pointed me to “No small Plans” which looks amazing, but very specific to Chicago, and not so easy to get to China.

Rebecca Sjonger has written a new series of books around the UN Sustainable Development Goals which combines goals and is an overview. I’d argue that’s a good beginning, but actually each goal merits a well researched, curated and presented book for each of the different levels of education. Our world in Crisis is another recent series that covers pollution, poverty, health & disease, civil war & genocide, immigration and terrorism in an age appropriate but informative way.

Our world in Crisis

So there is a huge amount of hope and great steps in the right direction. But if we want to keep middle graders curious and inquiring beyond the hook of picture books, we need to keep feeding them nonfiction of this high calibre in all and any direction they want to research further.

I want it to be that the picture books are the appetiser and a couple of Youtube videos are the amuse bouche but that excellent nonfiction books are the main course, supplemented by databases (for context) and news (for the latest updated information).

What are your favourite books to support understanding the SDGs in Middle School?

SDGs in the library

Many schools, and particularly those following the IB (International Baccalaureate) framework are attempting to incorporate Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their teaching and learning.  The library can play an important role in supporting this through curation and discoverability.

Our G6 students used the SDGs to focus their research during their PYP Exhibition Project. I’d been meaning for the longest time to curate a list of books around the SDGs and this was the ideal opportunity.  In curating the list there were actually two phases. In the first I was looking for books that would act as provocations and allow students to form a feeling of empathy and identification with the goal. In the second, when they’d chosen their area of focus, it was to find books that would aid their research and investigations.  These are two quite different goals, with very different resources.

During their exhibition “kick-off” library lessons I did a different book with each class, One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia
by Miranda Paul and Elizabeth Zunon (Illustrator); and Emmanuel’s dream : the true story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah by Laurie Ann Thompson and Sean Qualls (Illustrator).

 

So that everyone could see the images clearly, instead of a read aloud, I projected a YouTube video of the books being read.

We then discussed which SDG’s were covered by the respective stories, which was easy enough for them:

IMG_7869

Empathy Map (1)
Empathy Map

After the story I introduced the concept of an “Empathy Map”. There are many different versions of the empathy map, (the original is from Dave Gray) but I wanted it to be as visceral as possible. Students were each given 4 sticky notes to write what they thought the main character in the book would “say / do”, “think/feel”, “see” or “hear”. Now this may sound quite simple, but the exercise is very effect just because this is way harder than what it seems. Students had to really get out of their own heads and it took a bit of prompting by the teachers and myself to put themselves in the character’s shoes and consider things from the protagonist’s perspective. The map was just a piece of flipboard paper with the name of the book and the 4 quadrants written in.

At the end of the lesson it looked like this:

 

The follow up to the lesson was to create a page on my PSEL library guide to include the books I’d curated for the SDGs. The images are linked to my resource lists in our library.

As the students decided on the focus of their research, and narrowed down their central idea and lines of inquiry, I helped them to find relevant books in the library, or, for quite a few we needed to purchase additional books.  I also started (but have not yet finished) making lists on EpicBooks (e.g. SDG7). EpicBooks is simultaneously a wonderful and very exasperating resource due the inability to tag resources and easy group and regroup them.

With the G6 teachers and some of the exhibition mentors we also started a flipboard with appropriate news articles related to the student choices.

View my Flipboard Magazine.

Move forward a couple of months and within the #IntlLead group we’re currently trying to initiate an International Libraries week with a focus on SDGs, and so to write this post I started uploading all my lists onto my Library Things account. I’ve put them into a collection called SDG and tagged them SDG1, SDG2 etc. and the name Zero Poverty, Zero Hunger etc.  Since LibraryThings can be quite geeky for the non-librarian I’ve also created a TinyCat for this collection, which is visually much more appealing. It’s also not corrupted by the 1000s of other books in my collection.

What else is going on in the world of SDGs and libraries and schools?

Please comment if you’ve got anything else to add.