GSLIS Assistant Professor Kate McDowell recently discussed the importance of inclusion in her teaching and research with Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre. McDowell’s remarks are part of the interview series Reflections on Inclusion, which explores the School’s efforts to respect varied perspectives and diversity of experiences.
McDowell teaches courses in storytelling, literature and resources for children, and fantasy literature and media for youth. Her research focuses on youth services librarianship; children's print culture history; controversial topics in children's literature (evolution, race, gender); public libraries as cultural spaces.
When I think about inclusion, I think about past practical examples from my courses as well as global issues of being able to address issues related to identity in all its forms in educational environments. So I’ll start with practical examples from a few of my past courses. In terms of inclusion challenges, teaching the Storytelling course has posed some interesting challenges in the past. I find that one of the most exciting aspects of pedagogy in this class is that the content and issues that arise are as complex as the world itself.
Storytelling (409)
Description: Fundamental principles of the art of storytelling including techniques of adaptation and presentation; content and sources of materials; methods of learning; practice in storytelling; planning the story hour for school and public libraries and other public information settings; and audio, video, and digital media.
I teach the Storytelling course via LEEP (our hybrid distance education model), and I’ve taught three Deaf students, each of whom operated with different modes of experiencing the course. An interpreter worked during the live sessions and the on-campus session to caption content for one student; another student had a cochlear implant; and a third worked directly with an ASL (American Sign Language) interpreter and lip-reading. To make the course and its content (much of it listening to students tell stories) as accessible as possible, I modified some of the course requirements using “universal design” principals by requiring all students to post brief story synopses in advance of class. This gave my Deaf students another mode of access to the live in-class content that reinforced the work of their interpreters, captioners, and/or their own listening. These synopses also gave all students access to another brief version of the story that could help nuance their listening and understanding. To add to the complexity, one male Deaf student pointed out that his “voice” was almost always interpreted by female interpreters; this student also brought the rest of the class a sense of etiquette in Deaf communication, which is that the hearing audience should watch the Deaf ASL speaker, even while her/his interpreter is speaking for her/him.
In this course we read work by Betsy Hearne and Rudine Simms Bishop, among others, on ethical issues in storytelling, story re-telling, and story appropriation. The content of the course provides students with foundational concepts of children’s librarianship and empathy with young readers. We think in terms of a complexity of different voices and perspectives. However, I’ve found over time that commonsense approaches relying exclusively on empathy seem to be less effective and may run the risk of further alienating minority students. For example, when discussing how to tell a story about a culture not your own, we frequently run into historical racial and ethnic tensions that are beyond the scope of what we can comprehensively address, and some of them directly impact class participants. I create a baseline of shared expectations in my classroom with one rule to keep the tone of our discussions professional rather than personal. This all-important ground rule is: students must restate criticism of a tale or a teller in the form of a question. That is, rather than tearing someone down, I ask the critic to formulate a question and ask the teller for more information. This allows storytellers to clarify their own intention, forces the listener to articulate their assumptions in a question, and frequently opens a discussion of what strategies might help improve the story toward the teller’s best intentions. In some cases, the teller may have intended confusion, creating an open-ended moment or tension—related to what Barthes calls the writerly text—and so we, as a class, are faced with understanding that story is what the audience makes with the teller, not only what the teller creates. My one ground-rule—if you have a criticism, ask a question—also keeps the already vulnerable new storyteller in a position of relative power, allowing him or her to respond to feedback. So far, this has worked reasonably well, but I’m always working on ways to improve the inclusive climate in my classroom.
Other teaching issues relate directly to course content. After spring 2011, when students concerns brought to the Curriculum Committee culminated in Town Hall meetings, I listened to what the students had to say and took them very seriously. I spent the summer reviewing the syllabus they contributed to crafting for a new course:
LIS 590IL: Local, Regional and Global Intersections in International Library and Information Science
https://apps.lis.illinois.edu/wiki/display/LIS590ILsyllabus/Home
Using related literature, I redesigned two syllabi—Literature and Resources for Children (403) and Fantasy Literature and Media for Youth (446)—and constructed a third new syllabus. In both of the extant courses, I made changes to the assigned children’s- or young-adult-literature texts, revamping about 25% of the texts to reflect greater social diversity in characters, authors, or both.
Literature and Resources for Children (403)
Description: Evaluation, selection, and use of books and other resources for children (ages 0-14) in public libraries and school media centers; explores standard selection criteria for print and nonprint materials in all formats and develops the ability to evaluate and promote materials according to their various uses (personal and curricular) and according to children's various needs (intellectual, emotional, social and physical).
Fantasy Literature and Media for Youth (446)
Description: Selection and evaluation of historical and contemporary fantasy literature and media for library collections aimed at children and young adults. Texts examined include books, movies, and games.
In addition, I changed the frequency with which we addressed issues of identity as related to youth. The syllabi I had inherited included one session covering approaches to cultural/racial/ethnic diversity. My first change was to ensure that these topics show up throughout the readings and therefore throughout the course discussions. In both courses, I have paid close attention to providing a diversity of titles—both in terms of authors and of the children represented in the texts—throughout the syllabus. Key to both courses is my commitment to informing students about debates around cultural authenticity.
In 403, we engage with e-readers and emergent forms of apps for reading. This course doesn’t focus exclusively on text, though it forms a base. As many researchers have shown (and as some of our doctoral students such as Karla Lucht and Regina Sierra Carter are continuing to show), representation of minority groups in the literature for young people is not yet representative of American demographics today. Books that represent may or may not also provide culturally authenticity and/or culturally relevant content for young readers. We read books by authors like Kadir Nelson, Grace Lin, Jacqueline Woodson, Thanhha Lai, and Janice Harrington (who teaches poetry at UIUC).
In 446, authors we read include Marjorie Blackman, Virginia Hamilton, Nnedi Okorafor, and Julius Lester. In the novel Black and White by Malorie Blackman, students engage with a fantasy/romance perspective on a scenario where racial dynamics are reversed; gender and class issues are also covered. Lester’s fantasy Time’s Memory involves following the journeys of an African spirit who came to America during slavery and inhabits body after body to the present day.
My new service-learning course, Youth Service Community Engagement (490YS) examines youth services by exploring how young people’s information and educational needs are met by community institutions and organizations.
Youth Services Community Engagement (LIS490YS)
This service-learning course will examine youth services by exploring how young people's information and educational needs are met by community institutions and organizations. We will draw upon youth services librarianship and youth informatics concepts to explore youth informatics in after school programs, community center programs, and other institutions that serve young people. A significant portion of coursework will take the form of service learning or community-based research via approved projects that match students' interests.
We draw upon youth services librarianship and youth informatics concepts to explore after-school programs, community center programs, and other institutions that serve young people. Influenced by the student syllabus created in Spring 2011, I developed course units on “Local to Global Youth” and “Theorizing and Inclusion,” which bring in Critical Race Theory in readings by Sandra Hughes Hassell and practices of inclusions in readings by Kafi Kumasi. A significant portion of the coursework takes the form of service learning or community-based research via approved projects that match students’ interests.
We discuss the varying cultural expectations of library and non-library institutions serving youth. For example, at the Boys and Girls Club, the director may change 2-3 times a year. Typical youth services locations in libraries and schools don’t encounter these rapid changes but still must engage with funding issues from year to year. By understanding these practical issues, our students can be better prepared to make cross-institutional connections that will further diversify cultural institutions like libraries.
I continue to bring diversity into scholarly conversations around young people’s literature, which has led to two research projects: one on fantasy and race (in progress) and the other on race in the history of children’s book editing that I presented at the Children’s Literature Association conference:
“Slipping into Whiteness: May Massee, Rebecca Caudill, and their 1947 Letters about the ‘N’ Word,” Children’s Literature Association (ChLA), Boston, MA, June 2012.
Our students engage with diversity writ large—including race, class, gender, sexual orientation—at GSLIS, at their jobs, at their practicum sites, and at the information organizations that will hire them when they graduate. Year by year, I continue to encourage my students to grapple with complex issues of cultural diversity by revising my syllabi, by taking on hard conversations in classes, and by grappling with cultural diversity myself, sharing resources. and modeling being as open as I can be about my own struggles and experiences as an instructor and a member of our academic community.