During the Young Adult Library Services Association Institute last month (Shelf Awareness, December 4, 2008), three panels discussed how to reach teens by communicating with them in the places they already go (their phones and computers), with covers that look like them and with books that reflect their experiences.
In her presentation, "Reading: It's Not Just About Books Anymore," New York educational technology consultant Linda Braun began with the thesis that teens are reading more than ever--just not exclusively books. In a hands-on demonstration that encouraged audience participation, Braun asked for examples of how we read today. Kindles, cell phones and podcasts came up as other ways to "read."
Aside from extolling the virtues of technology for her personally, Braun also suggested its potential in trying to reach students. One example was a project called "Many Voices," begun on Twitter in an eighth grade class at a school in Maryland. Because Twitter allows only 140 characters per entry, the students were challenged to further the story line while remaining succinct and leaving their entries at a point where the next student could pick up with his or her contribution. More than 100 elementary and middle school students in six different countries contributed to the project using Twitter.com. (Go to lulu.com/content/2245575 to download "Many Voices" for free or to order the paperback for $5.42.)
Braun called this a perfect example of Gene Luen Yang's point earlier at YALSA that students today "expect to participate" in what they read. Why not capitalize on this and use Twitter for book discussions, she suggested, or to ask reference questions at the library? Having to pare down the question to 140 characters forces students to get to "the meat" of it, Braun said. She mentioned other means of communication and social networking on the rise: Tumblr.com, a microblog or what she called "a gateway blog to blogging"; and Utterz.com and Utterli.com, whose virtue is the technology to post podcasts and video footage in a microblog format. Braun suggested that communicating with teens in a way that feels comfortable to them helps them feel "less marginalized."
Speaking of marginalizing students, author Mitali Perkins in her presentation "Books Between Cultures," warned audience members about the importance of examining books' covers and content for overt and insidious stereotyping. One tool she offered for this analysis is her "Six Questions to Ask About a Story." For writers, she offered "Ten Tips on Writing Race." The most dramatic response from the audience came when Perkins showed the 7-minute-and-15-second film called "A Girl Like Me," made by 16-year-old Kiri Davis, in which the teen conducted the same "doll test" that Kenneth Clark conducted as part of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. (Clark asked a group of black children to choose between a white doll and a black doll, and the majority chose a white doll.) Davis's repetition of the test, conducted 54 years later, yielded the same results. Perkins has posted the "Six Questions," the "Ten Tips" (under the heading "Straight Talk about Race"), and the film on her website, mitaliperkins.com/yalsa.htm.
"In Cleveland, Ohio, 65% of the population is African-American, and there are no chain bookstores in the Cleveland city limits," said Rollie Welch, collection manager at Cleveland Public Library at the start of his presentation, "Just Keepin' It Real: Teens Reading Out of the Mainstream." Welch has the challenge of fighting for the books that he knows kids in his 28 branches will read, even if the books use rough language and tackle tough subjects; he also took books into the juvenile detention center. He's learned a lot about what circulates and what doesn't. Now in his second year as chair of the Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA) committee of YALSA, he said, "Out of 1,000 books submitted for BBYA, less than 20 feature an African-American protagonist. Teens want books with kids who look like them and have experiences like them."
Welch devised a Jeopardy game with street lit titles to test the audience's knowledge, and quite a few of the librarians knew many of the books (editor's note: we took a lot of notes and learned a lot!). He said that plot always trumps character development, so books by Walter Dean Myers, Jacqueline Woodson and Sharon Draper do not circulate as widely as books such as Acceleration by Graham McNamee, Naruto and Hellsing (Welch said that anime and manga in general go over better because they are "racially neutral and adults don't get it"), Chameleon by Charles R. Smith Jr., Black and White by Paul Valpone, The Skin I'm In by Sharon Flake, Midnight (a companion to The Coldest Winter Ever) by Sister Souljah, Tyrell by Coe Booth, No Choirboy by Susan Kuklin, Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter and any book about Tupac or Lebron James. Rather than a list of all the books Welch discussed, here instead is an ongoing resource: Welch writes a column called "The Word on Street Lit" for Library Journal's BookSmack e-newsletter, and you will find an archive of his columns here.
The common thread in Braun, Perkins and Welch's talks was to ask their listeners to step back from whatever preconceived notions they might have about reading and books, to put themselves in teen readers' shoes and to place uppermost in their thinking how best to keep teens reading and feeling confident as readers.--Jennifer M. Brown