Conversation around Reading in our Community
Conversation around Reading in our Community
~Marc Crompton - St George’s Sr School
At St George’s Sr School, we started the year by making a commitment in the Learning Commons to increase the conversation around reading in our community. We have been faced with the situation of knowing that there are a lot of readers in our school, but circulation has been slowly declining. How could it be that reading, seems to be thriving, but the numbers tell us otherwise? We asked ourselves how we might get people talking more about what they’re reading and how we can make those discussions more public.
Our first initiative has been to start a “You Are What You Read” campaign. We’ve been asking our community to describe themselves in 5 books. We worked with our school’s literacy coach to come up with this prompt and it has been an interesting way of potentially getting away from the “5 Best Books” or a “Deserted Island” list. People have found a wide variety of ways to respond, from titles that describe them, to books that have been inspirational, or to simply books that they’ve recently enjoyed. We started with each of the library staff and our literacy coach writing our own lists and then inviting 2-4 others to submit their own lists. Once we had a critical mass of lists, we were able to start publishing these profiles.
We currently send out emails to the entire community generated through EBSCO’s Library Aware. Along with the profile of one of our readers, we invite others to submit their lists. The lists don’t have to include any descriptions of the books or why they chose them, but many are motivated to do so. Another popular use of these lists has been that our Library Clerk has been able to use the same Library Aware software to create bookmarks that were launched as part of our Canadian School Libraries Day festivities. Students and staff are equally thrilled to see their name in print and it’s been great to hear all of the discussion around the emails and bookmarks as people start talking more about the books that they are reading. I love that I’ve overheard or participated in a number of conversations where this campaign has been the catalyst. I hate the fact that my to-read list has been rapidly spilling over because of some of these conversations!
Our next challenge has been to figure out how to extend the conversations either through different ways of using these submitted lists or by taking a similar concept and engaging the community in a new conversation. And, the upside has been that our circulation numbers have also been increasing.
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