There was a great article by Jonathan Douglas, Director
of the National Literacy Trust, in the Telegraph yesterday; if you haven’t read
it, this is the link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/10035473/The-importance-of-instilling-a-need-to-read.html
Jonathan has long been a proponent of school libraries,
and the NLT carries out valuable research and has some fantastic resources; if
you haven’t joined their School Network, I can thoroughly recommend it. But
reading this article, I can’t helping thinking that much of what is said has
been raised so many times before yet we are no further forward to having the
benefits of libraries and librarians recognised within schools and you have to
ask, what next?
Working with teenagers all day, I know you can’t force
them to read. Okay, you can make them choose a book and sit for 30 minutes, one
hour even, staring at it but that doesn’t mean they’ve read any of it. Or they
read the first few pages of the book closest to their chair (regardless of what
it is) and then put it back, never to be picked up again. What a waste! And you
can maybe get them to engage more with rewards but once you remove that
incentive then they’ll stop reading. The only way you’ll turn a teenager into a
“reader” is if they manage to find “their book” – the one that introduces them
to that immeasurable experience, the “joy of reading.” And for some of them,
this never happens, at least not while they’re at school. But that doesn’t stop
me trying!
There’s an incredible array of books published today
for the teenage/young adult market; almost too many, if one could actually have
too many books! But for those who aren’t readers and who don’t know how to
choose a book, this range can be confusing and rather off-putting – which is
where we come in, of course, knowing our stock and knowing the student we’re
able to guide them. But they have to want a book
in the first place and for many, they’re just not at that stage yet. I’ve
noticed that the balance of my stock has slowly changed; I have fewer
non-fiction titles that support the curriculum and far more (what I call)
recreational reading books – things like extreme sports, gruesome facts,
fascinating lists, annuals, etc. And my magazine subscriptions have also
increased. The result of this is that I now have more students engaged with
some sort of text during their library lessons; it doesn’t bother me that they’re
not reading a book; the important point is that they are “reading for pleasure”!
But if reading for pleasure is so important to the
future success of a child, and one would assume that Ofsted have realised this
as it’s now a focus of their new guidelines, why do they still inspect schools but
go nowhere near the library? Why is the research carried out, not only by the
NLT but also other organisations, which shows the benefits of school libraries
and their impact on reading, ignored?
Jonathan’s article also raised a couple of other points.
If initial research shows that reading digital literature does not have the
same benefits as reading a physical book, then this needs to be investigated
further before even more schools get rid of their libraries and make the move into
e-books for all. I’m not against e-books (in fact, I’ve just ordered myself a
Nook and have Kindles in my school library) but I think that schools which
abandon their traditional libraries are not giving students any choice – there’s
a time, place and need for both hard and electronic texts.
I was also struck by his comment that “teachers’
knowledge of new writing is patchy.” This was based on the list of top 100
books that was recently published – though to be fair, they were asked to name
their personal favourite and not one that they’d recommend to a student. But
the subsequent list created by school librarians showed a far wider range of
contemporary titles. In some schools, teachers recognise that their school
librarians are “book experts” and use them as such but, unfortunately, too many
teachers ignore the experience and expertise that is available to them and you have
to wonder why? Is this due to ignorance or do they somehow feel threatened by
us?
It doesn’t really matter. The bottom line is that we
should all be working together for the benefit of the students; using whatever
resources, skills and knowledge we have to increase their literacy levels
because an increase in literacy results in an increase in attainment across all
subject areas. And this means using the school library and librarian.
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