Dear Dara,

Is there such a thing as too much reflectivity? Our school system has recently been encouraging culturally reflective practices and analyzing all of the books in classroom collections. The process is now bearing down on the school library and I am starting to feel very defensive. First, the audits of the classrooms did not include my expertise or that of any other librarians in the district. The audits were instead conducted by a committee of teachers and parents. I have not seen the criteria, but I did see a lot of the books that were discarded. Several parents and teachers are now insisting these titles be removed from the library and I strongly disagree. The titles are well reviewed, meet the collection development policy of the school and the district, are current, and have high circulations. Should the school library have to adhere to the same culturally reflective guidelines as the classroom?

Sincerely,

Confused and Reflective

Dear Confused and Reflective,

Several years ago, I too was overwhelmed with the onslaught of culturally reflective practices and culturally responsive pedagogy. These new terms were seemingly brought up at every professional development meeting with little explanation. Professional titles pushed out to all teachers and continuing education workshops insinuated that everything we had been doing up was culturally insensitive and in some cases, biased, or at worst racist.

I took it upon myself to research, learn, and evaluate the school library through the culturally reflective lens provided to me. I then shared how the teaching and learning in the library setting was culturally reflective and the collection was developed to be a diverse reflection of the community, exposing kids to mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. However, these ideas fell on deaf ears despite my twenty years as an expert librarian. When terms like racism and bias are brought up many tend to cower in their wake. Contrarily, librarians have the opposite response and typically put on their intellectual freedom hat.

The experience left me frustrated and feeling reminiscent of the Emperor's New Clothes. Books I deemed as diverse were not meeting the standards the administration put forth as diverse. At that point, I chose to conduct my own diversity audit of the collection reviewing every book on the shelves. I extended my lens of diversity to include race, gender, own voices, and looked at secondary and tertiary characters. I did not limit the audit to a quick review of the cover, but dove in deeper to the content and the voice of the author and the purpose of the book.

The take away from that experience left me with more questions and frustrations. Although we live in the time of demand for diverse titles such as #weneeddiversebooks, the industry is still dominated by a culture that produces a lot of books that appeal to a White audience. Without firing all the professionals at the top, we need to recruit diversity into the profession and continue our appeal to publish books representative of all cultures in authentic voices.

However, we also need to take a step back, relax, and remember why we entered the school library profession in the first place. One of the reasons I became a librarian is my love of finding that undiscovered author, connecting them to a kid that insisted they hated every book they ever came across, and watching their minds open up wide and ask for more.

I know there is a lot of controversy, a lot of racism, and a lot of cultural insensitivity. Yet, sometimes a book just has an endearing story to tell by an author that happened to capture a creative spark. We are taught to not judge a book by its cover. We also need to remember not to judge a book solely by its author. Fiction is fictional and authors writing fiction have the ability to flex their creative muscles and simply write a story that captures an audience when their pen meets the paper.

Sincerely,

Dara