Ah yes, it seems so long ago, the month of February and our wonderful guest speaker Vicki Brown, and our discussion of book clubs and socratic seminars. But, what a great class. Vicki was a tremendous asset to our topic and brought such practical knowledge it is hard to imagine what just reading about library book clubs in a book would be like. I learned a lot of valuable information from her and her handouts. The book club kits were a new idea to me and I found myself thinking of lots of ways that communities could engage via this type of book club format (across disciplines, workplaces, schools, community centers, etc.).
One thing I'm particularly focused on right now is engaging teens with libraries which is why Susan's question was interesting to me. I am a HUGE believer that we need to empower youth however we can, and was slightly disappointed to hear that the teen book club program was primarily run by librarians instead of teens. I understand why at least it would need to start that way but see the book club as a way for teens to bring one another into the library instead of librarians leading all the time. Of course the librarians can still promote and monitor the sessions, but I think teens can do anything and should have the opportunity to. Other than that (which wasn't even part of Vicki's presentation) I loved it and learned a lot!
Our discussion about book clubs and socratic seminars was also very interesting. It was helpful to learn about the types of questions, and then employ this while developing our own book club questions. It was also pretty awesome to hear the socratic seminar modeled in class... it was a great way to see the possibilities involved in this method in a real way. I did not ever really participate in such an activity in my schooling so it was helpful to both read about and see this in action! Now, I'm excited to run our book club!
I also like the bookclub kits and I think the AADL needs to market them a bit better because they don't seem to circulate quite as much as you might think. I imagine it's challenging to keep churning them out to reflect really timely, hot material.
ReplyDeleteI also think the ideal thing is for teens or really any discussion group to take over and run it themselves. That does take a tremendous amount of motivation, time, and effort on people though, and I would understand that getting a self-sustaining group together isn't always viable, especially if you're trying to get people outside of Oprah territory. I guess to look at the bright side, I always valued the input of a librarian in discussions as they tended to have a lot of knowledge about surrounding topics, so even though having a group run itself is ideal, having a librarian lead isn't a total loss.