Exploring Family-School-Library Partnerships: A Librarian’s Guide to Engaging Families in Learning

Sherri Wilson:

Welcome, everyone. As everyone is filtering in, I want to welcome you to our webinar today. I’m really, really, really excited about this session. I think you’re going to get a lot out of it, and we have an incredibly beautiful and talented panel who are going to share with you the lessons they’ve learned. So it’s going to be really engaging and informative. As you come in today, take a minute and introduce yourself in the chat box. As you do, just know that the default is for messages to just come to the panelists. So make sure you change the drop down screen in the chat box so that it says everyone. And that way we can all see who’s here with us today. So welcome, again. I see Charlotte from Amarillo, Texas. Hi, Charlotte. Thank you for coming. Everybody else, please let us know who you are, where you are. If you want to tell us where you work or what you do, that would be awesome.

Sherri Wilson:

I am Sherri Wilson. I’m the director of engagement and training at the National Association for Family, School and Community Engagement. And it is my pleasure and my honor to welcome all of you to our webinar today. This is our last webinar in the series that is sponsored by CAFE. We do have another webinar with the Department of Education next week. You should have seen the email for that going out already. Please feel free to sign up and register for that one as well.

Sherri Wilson:

So again, welcome. Use the chat to introduce yourself so we can see who’s here. Couple more housekeeping items for you. As we go through the session today, the chat will move very quickly as you can already see. So if you have questions for our panelists, please put those in the Q&A box. That way we can keep up with them and make sure that we get to them during the session today or respond to them afterwards, if we run out of time. So use the Q&A box if you have questions, use the chat box to engage with us and engage with each other as we go through the session today. Remember to change the drop down menu in the chat box to everyone, so that everybody can see your messages.

Sherri Wilson:

And one final reminder, this session is being recorded. And once it’s over and we process the whole thing, we will send out a link to the recording as well as the PDF version of the slides. So you can ask us in the chat box or the Q&A box, if you like, but just know everybody will be getting that. We will be sending it out in just a couple of days.

Sherri Wilson:

So with that, I would like to start our webinar today. Today, this webinar was brought to you because of the work that Maggie and Elena did on the book, A Librarian’s Guide to Engaging Families in Learning. And they have worked with their publisher to give us this code so that anybody in the session today can buy the book at 20% off, just in time for the holiday season. Makes a lovely gift. So please feel free to access that code. We’ll also include the code when we send out the recording after the webinar is over.

Sherri Wilson:

And now I want to introduce you to our panelists today. Moderating for us today, we have Elena Lopez. She is an independent researcher whose work focuses on the ecology of learning, which includes the home, school and community. She’s published extensively on family and community engagement and learning, and has served on the Mountain View library board in California. We’re really excited that Elena’s going to moderate this conversation for us.

Sherri Wilson:

We also have Bharat Mehra. And Bharat, I apologize if I mispronounced that. He is a professor and EBSCO endowed chair in social justice at the School of Library and Information Studies at The University of Alabama. Among his many research interests are diversity and inclusion advocacy, intercultural communication and action, social justice in library and information science, community-engaged scholarship, and critical and cross-cultural studies. So you can see why we are super excited that he’s with us today.

Sherri Wilson:

Also someone that I truly love and adore, Maggie Caspe, who works with us here at NAFSCE and is one of the smartest people I know. Maggie’s an educator, a researcher, a writer who focuses on how families, early childhood programs, schools and communities support children’s learning. She’s the co-editor of Promising Practices for Engaging Families in STEM Learning. And her work has appeared in the Public Library Quarterly, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, School Community Journal, young children and childhood education. Maggie’s a treasure, and it is really a pleasure to have her here with us today.

Sherri Wilson:

I’m really excited also that we’re joined by one of my neighbors here in Chicago, Tamela Chambers. She’s the manager of the children’s department at the Woodson Regional Library, which is part of our Chicago Public Library system. She has over 18 years of experience serving children in their families, in both public and school library settings.

Sherri Wilson:

And many of you may already know Dorothy Stoltz. Dorothy is the director of community engagement at the Carroll County Public Library in Westminster, Maryland. She connects with people of all ages with resources to enhance their lifelong learning. She was the chair of Every Child Ready to Read library committee in 2014, 2015, and is currently the co-chair of the Maryland Family Engagement Coalition. We also work with her a lot through the CAFE, which is the group that’s sponsoring this webinar. So we love working with Dorothy. She’s an author of Inspired Collaboration: Ideas for Discovering and Applying Your Potential and other books on early learning and the art of librarianship.

Sherri Wilson:

Finally, we have K.C. Williams-Cockfield, and she is a delight. She has over 25 years of work experience in the US and in international library settings. That includes public, academic, school and corporate institutions. Her research areas include public libraries, social justice and sustainable communities, and school media center impact on student test outcomes. She’s an adjunct instructor for the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, but preparing for a massive Christmas tea in Mississippi today. So we’re really excited that she’s here.

Sherri Wilson:

So as we begin, they wanted to get a sense of who in the room with us today. So we’re going to do a little poll. And we want to know, and you can pick as many of these as you want, who’s in the audience today? So just take a minute and respond to the poll. We’ll give everyone about 30 seconds. And Alice is back with us. Those of you who have been coming to our webinars all along know that Alice was out for a short time having a baby, which is family engagement. So we totally support that here at NAFSCE. We are delighted that she’s back with us. Alice, let me know when you feel like we have enough responses.

Alice:

Will do. So far, nobody has participated. So get started.

Sherri Wilson:

Oh, it says the poll is closed. There’s an error. It’s not letting them vote.

Alice:

Oh, no. Okay. Let me end it and try again.

Sherri Wilson:

Let’s try one more time, you guys. That was not your fault.

Alice:

No, not at all. Okay. Relaunch.

Sherri Wilson:

Okay. Can you guys vote on that one?

Alice:

It looks like it. People are participating.

Sherri Wilson:

Oh, thank God. That’s awesome.

Alice:

I’ll give just 10 more seconds.

Sherri Wilson:

Fantastic.

Alice:

Okay.

Sherri Wilson:

All right. So we have quite a few librarians today here. That is fantastic. We have a few educators, some researchers, some parent leaders. We have a huge number of others. So if you are an other and you want to put that in the chat box, we would love to know who we didn’t include in the poll. Retired judge and community advocate, grant manager, student family engagement coordinator. Wonderful. It is so nice. Thank you all so much for being here with us today. I’m going to close this out now and hand it over to the lovely and talented Elena Lopez, who’s going to moderate our discussion today.

Elena Lopez:

Thank you, Sherri. First of all, I want to thank our sponsors, NAFSCE and the CAFE, for this opportunity to have a conversation about family, school and library partnerships. So why partner with libraries? I think there is no better person to respond to that than one of the parents who contributed to this volume, this monograph that we just published, A Librarian’s Guide to Engage Families in Learning. Her name is [Marily 00:10:19], and let me quote what she writes. “It is not easy to be a parent, and the library is one place to help our kids with education. I cannot help my son with his homework. I have no family here to ask for assistance. My son uses the library program with live online help from expert tutors. We go to the library because it is a safe place. It has a calm atmosphere, and I find welcoming persons. I do not have family, but in the library, I do not feel alone. I meet other people like the parents of my kids’ friends.”

Elena Lopez:

So why partner with libraries? I think [Marily 00:11:12] answered it all. Libraries compliment the work of schools. They offer spaces for community learning and connection. Libraries are not just a collection of books. They offer a wide range of programs and services that expand and inspire our desire to know. Libraries also expand learning beyond school. We know that children learn anywhere and any time, and libraries are open in the evenings, during the weekends, and during the summer. Libraries also promote equitable access to information. Our book is based on the premise that social justice is an aspect of leadership in public institutions like schools and libraries. Research shows that participation in after-school correlates with student achievement, yet not all families can afford to pay for after-school activities like music lessons or art lessons. But libraries offer a wide range of programs, including homework help that are open and free and also are safe spaces so that parents can work and know that their children are safe while also learning. Next slide, please.

Elena Lopez:

Let me start by giving a little bit of back background on our interest in libraries and family engagement. About 10 years ago, Maggie and I worked on a project that looked at state initiatives for early childhood education. And we came across in Maryland with the Maryland Library Partnership, which was a partnership of the State Department of Education and the state association of public library administrators to promote early learning. This was really the seed for us to go deeper into looking at the role of public libraries in learning and family engagement. We partnered with the Public Library Association, which had an initiative, Every Child Ready to Read. And Dorothy was part of the committee for this initiative of the Public Library Association. Together with the association, we published a call to action, which is called Public Libraries: A Vital Space for Family Engagement. We interviewed over 40 librarians across the country and came out with an idea book of Promising Practices. And then after that, we also produced a journal article about preparing librarians to build and strengthen their relationships with families. Next slide, please.

Elena Lopez:

So what we learned from all this research and documentation are there are at least four ways that libraries support family learning. They promote lifelong learning for all members of the family, adults, as well as teens and children. They support families learning together through story times, maker spaces, arts and crafts, and even cooking lessons in the library. And it is through these activities that families develop strong bonds that support learning. And finally, families build community through the informal networks that they form through these programs and services. Next slide, please.

Elena Lopez:

So the goals of this session are to identify community assets to better serve families, and to learn from various vantage points how we can know and understand families, build trusting relationships, and lead for impactful family engagement. And these vantage points are represented by our panel who represent researchers, library leaders, and representatives of intermediary organizations.

Elena Lopez:

But first, let me just say that family engagement in library settings is both similar to and different from family engagement in schools. There is more of a relaxed and calm atmosphere, but also it’s about the relationship of families and librarians to promote children’s success. And for families, that means using their knowledge, their values and their attitudes to enable children to become inspired and motivated learners. And for libraries, it’s about using their vast collections of books and media resources, as well as their programs and services to promote family learning. And family learning means all members of the family are learning. They can learn together or co-learn with both the adult members and children, guiding and scaffolding one another. But it’s also about adult members of the family engaged in lifelong learning and serving as role models for their children. Next slide, please.

Elena Lopez:

So with that, let me start our conversation, and I will ask Maggie to help me here. Maggie, can you tell us about the organization of the book and what was the reason for the choices made in how the book is organized?

Margaret Caspe:

Absolutely, Elena. Thank you. So our book is really organized into three main sections, which are knowing families and communities, building partnerships, and leading for impact. And these three sections really emerged from conversations and research that Elena just shared that we’ve done over the years, and all the listening and learning from library staff about what it takes for libraries to be truly family-centered, and also what competencies or knowledge, skills and dispositions librarians bring to this work. And I just want to mention here that, although we write with librarians in mind, these competencies can also be applied to nearly all the spaces that reach out to engage and support families. And for those of you who are familiar with NAFSCE’s work with the body of knowledge for family facing professionals, the ideas we’re going to talk about here really align nicely and cogently.

Margaret Caspe:

But getting into these competencies, knowing families and communities is about librarians really taking the time to uncover real life experiences of families they serve and using that knowledge to create more diverse services and collections, and really promoting dialogue with the community to deeply know value and respect the strengths that families bring. Building partnerships really just means that library staff are engaging in deep listening and developing services and programs based on what families desire, not just what librarians think families want. And the third competency is about leading for impact. We’ve really heard from so many librarians and library staff that it’s so important to remove barriers to participation, reimagine partnerships, and create possibility.

Margaret Caspe:

And I thought I’d shared just one chapter from the book that really stays with me, because I think it really illustrates all of these ideas intertwined so powerfully together. And it’s written by Felton Thomas, who is the executive director of the Cleveland Public Library. And in his chapter, he really writes about an experience in one of the summer kindergarten clubs that the library runs. And these clubs are basically a summer program where children about to enter kindergarten and the entire family come for a few hours of family learning programming to get ready for kindergarten.

Margaret Caspe:

And one particular week, the librarian running the program got a call from a grandmother saying that she was sorry that she had missed the session the week prior and hoped that she would still be able to participate, to which of course the librarian assured her that it was fine. But the librarian was caught off guard when she heard the reason the grandmother hadn’t been able to attend. And in essence, it had been rain heavily all week and the grandmother had to take two buses to reach the club, and she didn’t want her young grandson out in the rain. And the librarian agreed. She said she understood. But then the grandmother shared something else that really made an impact. And it was that even in the rain, she would’ve come. It’s just that she didn’t have an umbrella.

Margaret Caspe:

And from this story and that of many others of the community, Cleveland Public Library really embarked on a transformation to make itself accountable to finding more ways for the library and staff to truly understand and know the community and to listen and learn from them, to build partnerships with families, to understand what information and resources they need, and how to provide those services without barriers. Barriers as small as umbrellas, to as big as going fine free, which the library did in 2019.

Margaret Caspe:

So thank you to Felton Thomas and Laura Walker for sharing their story in this chapter. And we really tried to frame the book around these three competencies, because they’re at the core of what libraries are doing to engage families meaningfully, equitably, and what makes libraries really such powerful partners.

Elena Lopez:

… ask Dorothy, what are the ways that these competencies that Maggie mentioned can be learned and applied among aspiring as well as practicing librarians?

Dorothy Stoltz:

Well, thank you, Elena and Maggie. First, I’d like to say that I think libraries are designed to triumph in the community and to apply their resources as best as they can, pending staffing and everything. The resource that you all have published is a marvelous guide to help us triumph. So thank you very much for that.

Dorothy Stoltz:

I’d like to suggest three ways that I think librarians can learn and apply these competencies. The first is to commit to ongoing relationships. The second is energize gratitude for our work and our communities. And the third is through peer coaching or peer learning. So with the commit to ongoing relationships, this is based on a librarian’s reference interview, which is that interaction between the librarian and a community member. And there are specific skills that librarians can use, and it includes meet people where they are, listen and respond, maintain objectivity by remaining neutral about the nature of the person’s question, and then finally to ask open-ended questions to help clarify the information need of the person.

Dorothy Stoltz:

A colleague in Skokie, Illinois Public Library, Amy Koester, puts it this way. Librarians can be present when conversations take place around arising needs, and they can leverage the library’s resources to support those needs for families. So I may be sitting in a community meeting or I may be staffing a library table at music on main street and have a conversation. And I can say, “Hey, have you thought about the library? We might be able to help you with this. We might be able to do that.” So it’s being poised and ready for those conversations and to respond. And that energizing gratitude, that can always seem like a intangible thing in life, but it’s not frivolous. And it can energize problem-solving and meeting challenges. So communities are often very grateful to have libraries, and librarians are grateful to have opportunities to sit on nonprofit boards to participate in these community events. So in this way, gratitude can really help families thrive.

Dorothy Stoltz:

In that last piece, the peer coaching, the peer learning, for colleague to colleague, it’s job embedded, confidential, it builds skills and it is peer to peer, not supervisor to staff members. So that’s enormously helpful in getting librarians to learn and to improve their skills. But that peer to peer learning also reaches out from librarian to family members so that we are mentoring families as peers and learning back and forth, learning from each other. It’s like drawing forth what I call the love of learning.

Elena Lopez:

Thank you, Dorothy. You mentioned leveraging community assets, library assets, as well as problem-solving, which is a nice segue to my next question which will go to both Tamela and K.C. We all know that libraries provide information and connection in order to meet family interests and needs. And that often means working with other agencies, individuals, organizations in a community. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your initiatives and programs and why you develop partnerships with schools and other community organizations. Let’s start with K.C.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

Okay. My program is called One Read, and it occurred when I was director of the Blount County Public Library in Maryville, Tennessee. And as a former director of multiple libraries, it has always been my position that the library staff needed to be part of the community. And so we had, I guess, a goal that the professional staff and any non-professional staff that were connected to the community through service and organizations, we provided time and support for them to be part, because one person can’t do it all.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

So when this project first came to my attention, our connections were already in place. The assistant superintendent with Blount County Schools who was sort of the activator force for this was on my board of trustees at the time. So it was like we had a conversation and we said, “Okay, let’s have a meeting of people that will be involved.” And so we had a meeting at the library. The library became the central or organizing entity, and we scheduled meetings and all of that. But then all of the partners involved were responsible for determining how they were going to participate in this community read, which was for middle school students. And specifically the content of the book, which is Refugee by Alan Gratz, was chosen to address some of the issues that we had in the community culturally. We don’t have a lot of minority in the community or minorities, but we have a pretty large disadvantaged population. But also we do have an Asian, Hispanic, and African American, but the communities don’t mingle. They’re very separate.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

And so we wanted to use the book content and the schools, because that is the common meeting ground to bring everyone together to try and bridge the barrier of mixing and working together with these learning experiences. So it was a serendipity thing. The library, I think, is the heart of the community anyway. And if we function as the connector and the amplifier within our community and work to have those partnerships, then when we have the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon for this kind of program, the infrastructure’s already there.

Elena Lopez:

Tamela?

Tamela Chambers:

I agree with just about everything or almost… Not almost everything, but everything that K.C. has said. And I think as applies to my own work, that active listening and communication is very much at the heart of it. So when we were developing the Reading is Grand! initiative that is referenced in the book, I was a librarian in the south district office at CPL. And my duties at that time included filling in at various libraries on the South Side of Chicago, which is composed primarily of black and brown populations. And during that time, I started to take notice of who was coming in at certain locations and what their needs were. And there was a common thread of grandparent as caregiver at that time in my interactions with the families. So this led to an interest in the way that I could serve these families. And a collaboration with Karen Lemmons who’s the other person who wrote the essay with me and Dr. Claudette McLinn through my participation at BCALA, Reading is Grand! was born.

Tamela Chambers:

So I think aligned with creating programs to meet the needs and interests of populations we serve, I believe that schools and community organizations naturally share clientele. So it lends itself well to pulling together resources and collaborating to carry out our respective missions. Because a lot of times there is a lot of overlap with the mission. Everyone wants to serve the community, so why not join together or join forces together to do so?

Tamela Chambers:

Many times with schools and libraries and community organizations, those missions are to create lifelong learners. Public libraries and schools are very much aligned with that. Or enriching the lives of the community members in some way. And I think that schools and library partnerships oftentimes happen very organically. The kids come in and they’re coming in with their assignments or the parents are coming in need assistance. And it just kind of goes from there. So if you are actively engaged and actively listening to who’s coming in the door, then that gives you the feel to go out and reach out to the schools and kind of get to know what their needs are and even learn more about what their focus is and seeing how as a connector, we can now meet the needs there.

Elena Lopez:

I saw heads nodding, Tamela, when you mentioned that these partnerships often then arise organically based on listening and learning to the community. And in that respect, we have a question from our audience. How could we begin a partnership with local libraries? So Tamela, would you like to respond to that question?

Tamela Chambers:

I’m sorry. Can you repeat the question?

Elena Lopez:

How can we begin a partnership with local libraries?

Tamela Chambers:

So I would say librarians love, love, love, love, love, 100% love partnering with other people. And we really do like teaming up to problem solve and figure out ways that we can take our resources and leverage them to meet whatever needs that you have. So I would say the first step is often just to go to your local library and speak to someone about what your needs are, and I guarantee you that the librarian will be all in.

Elena Lopez:

K.C., you mentioned the partnership of the library and the school district. I know from the chapter that you had a broad range of partnerships with, including the friends of the library, the business community, and so forth. So what worked and did not work in this partnerships and what do you think needs to be in place for partnerships to meet their goals for family engagement and for children’s learning?

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

Okay. This project was very time-intensive, but it happened organically and through serendipity. I promise you. We knew from the relationships that were already built who needed to be at the table at that first meeting from everyone. And it’s like, okay, the friends are going to provide the money to fund the author coming in. Businesses can help us get the books for each child to have a copy of the book. The schools are going to embed this One Read, the content and what occurs in the book into their curriculum across the board for one semester in all classes. There are going to be art projects and live performance projects and writing. We knew big picture right off the bat. So we started working through this. We would have an organizing meeting and then each person at the table would then go to their respective groups. And the responsibilities and task assignments would filter down with the goals being very different for each participating group.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

And the classroom instructors were free to interpret how they wanted to incorporate the book into their curriculum because there was that freedom and that lack of control. It was just like, okay, here it is. Let’s see where we go with this. I think that made it very, very, very successful. The flip side of that is it was very time-intensive. Teachers still had to meet their strands, teach their strands. And they were looking at what they already did and how they could overlay this content and work in all of these integrated activities that brought in parents. So there were activities within each of the schools that brought in parents and they worked and experienced some of these learning activities together.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

And then we had the writing workshop with the author at the library with a set of students. And then we had the author presentation, and we had families. We had parents and children together, as well as we had the international festival that kicked off that week, the weekend before. And we had a lot of adult activities at that. We had actual refugees from our area who came and did presentations. The school, Culinary Institute, cooked. And these were the middle school children. They cooked foods from the different countries that were represented in the book. There was all these learning activities, and it was probably one of the most successful events that we had, but it kicked it off. And so there was something every day during that whole week at all of these schools. It wasn’t just one place. And the parents were all involved.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

What didn’t work was our capacity to reinvent it every year. If they wanted to keep doing the same book, they probably could. It probably could be repeated, but you don’t want to do that. You want to have different ones. So we thought we could do something along the same lines, but not quite as intense on an annual basis. Then COVID hit, and things are kind of on hold. I will hope that something like this will come back because it was very, very successful.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

For me as a library director at that time, I wanted to see families in my library who didn’t come. That’s what I wanted. And so we’d already gone out and I wanted them in, and it worked. I’m going to tell you that I could sit in my office and I could see the family dynamic change in terms of who was coming in and using the library. We opened the doors and made the space comfortable and let them have ownership in it. And that was what I wanted. So I think it’s definitely worth it. If you were going to have this kind of program all the time or on a regular basis, then there would need to be a lot more work upfront, some standardization of things. So it’s not so time-intensive for everyone who’s trying to implement their parts.

Elena Lopez:

So it looks like in terms of partnerships you build on the assets of the different community organizations, you have clear roles and responsibilities, and you also have clear actions. And I think for me, all of this paid off in terms of the outcomes for the library, at least for that one partner, in terms of seeing people who had never come to the library before. And, of course, we all understand that it is difficult to replicate or do the same thing, given the resources of the community. But I think you did a great job.

Elena Lopez:

Since we’re talking about partnerships, maybe we can go to the next poll which has to do with partnerships. Could you just please click off the types of community partnerships that you engage with? And Alice, let us know when you have enough responses.

Alice:

Okay. I’ll give about 30 more seconds. We’ve got about a third have participated. (silence) All right, I’m going to close it.

Elena Lopez:

So we see a lot of partnerships with schools and libraries, and in fact, with different organization, health and social services. Again, if you have other partnerships that you would like to put in the chat box, please do so.

Elena Lopez:

Now I’m going to turn to a different topic, and could we have the next slide, please? This question is directed to Bharat. We researchers are often reminded that we need to produce research that is clear and how the theoretical and empirical findings can be relevant to practitioners. So what is that connection between research and practice? One chapter in the book is about research paradigm. So Bharat, could you describe these paradigms and how they might apply to further the development and assessment of library initiatives like the ones that K.C. and Tamela shared with us?

Bharat Mehra:

Sure. Thank you. Just to give context, emerging from family of child abuse and domestic violence back in India, I think social justice aspects flow in my veins. How to make the world a better place in terms of fairness, equity, justice, community engagement, empowerment, change agency. And so all the time as I was a faculty member at the University of Tennessee, I was able to work with racial ethnic minorities, international populations, low-income families. We talked with working with LGBTQ populations, working with rural communities, small businesses in rural areas and librarians.

Bharat Mehra:

And so in all these different projects, libraries and librarians played a significant role of partnership. Whether it was in terms of projects, some of these projects which were IMLS funded. Looking at training librarians towards adopting progressive mindsets in terms of technology training, management training in rural areas and in Southern and Central Appalachian region. Projects which were related with extending themselves outside the bastions of White middle class privilege, for example, small business, and being able to partner with them in terms of development of public library, small business toolkit. Looking at the whole notion of engagement and how libraries were involved with partnering with different stakeholders related to different facets of life, whether it’s in rural area, especially. Agriculture, to education, to health, to economy, to diversity, to social justice, to policy formation, government, et cetera.

Bharat Mehra:

And so in all these different projects, the idea was to tell the story of what the libraries are doing, what are the challenges they’re facing, what are the partnerships and collaborations that they’re developing in all these different domains, and what are the actual outcomes and results that are emerging? So now to connect to this particular project addressing as a gay person of color, my life has been intersectional and experiencing different oppressive reactions and biases and prejudices in shaping how people respond to myself. And in those ways, libraries have been instrumental in establishing some of the collaborations and partnerships in terms of shedding their hats that they wear of neutrality. Stop being passive receptors and playing active roles in shaping how progressive positive changes can happen in society.

Bharat Mehra:

So looking at this particular paper kind of emerge from this aspect of elitism and exclusivity that academic institutions of higher learning in the United States and which are all Anglo Eurocentric, which were for a long time close to only White males long time then of course, women were then permitted and allowed. And people of color became part of the academy pretty close in terms of time in our current time. So only recently that has been an existence or a mechanism that has an openness that has emerged.

Bharat Mehra:

How I’m connecting this to this topic is that, what was considered research? What was considered practice? What is considered theory? What is considered methods? What are the constructs that are of importance as products within the academy have been biased and have only accounted for certain groups of people thinking in a particular manner? We see the siloism that has also got translated in terms of disciplines. Sociology is different from psychology, is different from community work, is different from health, is different from biology, is different from physics.

Bharat Mehra:

And then further the last angle to this is that what research and scholarship is all about has been, oh, this is not connected to changing power inequities and social imbalances that we encounter in society. And so it’s different. We can talk about it abstractly and theoretically, but action oriented research and scholarship was considered for a long time outside the domains of privileged traditional research. So now this paper actually emerged from that, that this whole aspects of paradigms that is understood in research and scholarship that is… Paradigms means a certain way of being, a certain mindset, certain assumptions that go behind shaping what traditional scholarship and research has been. That’s what the notion of paradigm says. Of course you can very well read the details about these paradigms, the three, which are listed in our chapter.

Bharat Mehra:

But the idea was that it is not different from real life practice and especially in the librarians’ work and in other settings. And so the paper, of course, the chapter explores some of these paradigms, to start with, and then of course you need to know what’s there in order to deconstruct and dismantle it. And so that’s what this chapter talks about that traditionally, you had this post-positivist and positivist research. Oh, we’re looking for this objective reality. And then of course, emerging from laboratories and in the Natural Heart Sciences, that these can be observed and measured. And there is this absolute objective reality, and the role of the researcher is to find that.

Bharat Mehra:

The second strategy, interpretivist and constructivist. That reality is subjective. It is changing, and different people have a different mode of understanding about that. And it is our role as researchers and scholars to understand what that is. Constructivist has shades of meaning similar to it, that life experiences and the phenomena on the study are shaped by social, cultural, political, economic factors and you need to acknowledge that.

Bharat Mehra:

And then of course the third one is critical. Which is, how do you bring in the aspects of social political in inequities, challenge the structures to be, and make efforts to change and dismantle them? So that’s kind of where these three paradigms have been documented in the chapter, but in relation to public libraries and how they can adopt these in ways that would help them make a greater impact.

Bharat Mehra:

And of course, I can quickly, according to limitations of time, share with you case examples of the three mechanisms quickly. So the post-positivist slash positivist, which is looking for an absolute reality. We need to tweak them, extrapolate them, and modify them, because they do bring some values. The positive that they bring is assessment based on clear, measurable learning outcomes and goals, development of skills such as literacy can be quantified, et cetera.

Bharat Mehra:

So how does this translate into the librarians work? Quantitative counts and observations during the suburban public library event, the library staff member observes for 15 minutes at the top of the hour throughout the course of an event. Data are collected for the number of people attended, where they live, what transportation they took to get there, et cetera. So that’s kind of one dimension to the picture.

Bharat Mehra:

The second one, interpretivist slash constructivist. How does it relate to family learning and children and partnerships with school? Family is recognized as an educational institution. Processes involve interaction, collaboration, and sharing. Knowledge is created through observation and conversations, et cetera. How does the librarian translate this into their work? They organize focus group and users or specific rural public library services, such as storytelling event. Small groups of users are prompted to discuss feelings, perceptions and thoughts about the service and to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Bharat Mehra:

The third one, critical. What is critical? It acknowledges the deep differences that are there and tries to foster community ties not based on hierarchical structures. It promotes lifelong learning and engaged citizenship. It tries to dismantle power structures, including the power inequities that are there in the notion of entrenched whiteness in every aspect of a being. And how does that happen in the librarian’s work? Libraries work with students to conduct safe spaces as underutilized study areas. And again, there are more descriptions about that.

Bharat Mehra:

So now I’m bringing the question to my two esteemed colleagues here in this presentation. Really amazing projects that we had a chance to document in the chapters in the book. But the project that Tamela had authored, really valuable project in terms of intergenerational relationship building between grandparents and grandchildrens. Again, these are just ideas to take things further and push the envelope in terms of some of the introductory elements that I shared about. Recording oral storytelling mechanisms that were getting documented in the project, how do you rewrite history of the marginalized populations? How do you bring it central to the political advocacy role of dismantling the privileged biased notions that exist in society?

Bharat Mehra:

Through the process of archiving, the storytelling, the cultural legacy that is being transmitted through the older generation, the grandparents telling their stories to African American children, how do you make that the center of the school in order to create dialogue and discussion and discourse around, first of all dismantling White privilege, but removing the ignorance that is there in the political activist platforms that we encounter in the news channels nearly every day? So that’s kind of stretching it and pushing it further towards action oriented change that can happen.

Bharat Mehra:

Further I think in that project itself, multimodal. So for example in K.C.’s project where different stakeholders became partners to the enactment of the book reading event related to the schools, related to government policy makers, news media, and others in… The holistic impact that can get generated as a result could be another angle that could happen in the project that was articulated.

Bharat Mehra:

I think in K.C.’s project, an important angle would be related with, I think, that was mentioned in the chapter, evaluation and assessment. We librarians have been pretty slow in telling our stories through formal and informal channels, and especially in some of the rural areas. So using some of these strategies of documenting all the stakeholders perspectives, all those who are involved in playing a different role through quantitative, qualitative, informal, formal, ways would be a way to kind of continue to make an impact in terms of that particular project if it gets reiterated in the next times.

Bharat Mehra:

So those are some of my initial thoughts about that. Maggie, do you want to share how some of these paradigms might have influenced our shaping of the self-reflection tool?

Margaret Caspe:

Yeah, absolutely. So on the screen, you’re actually going to see the self-reflection tool that we’ve included in the book. And the tool really guides library staff to reflect and take action on improving family engagement and family learning in the library space. And it’s really organized, you’ll see, by the three main areas we have in the book. Knowing families and communities, building partnerships, and leading for impact. And you’ll see that column one represents ways librarians can partner with families and draws from the practices that you see in the book and that you’ve heard about today. Column two really asks librarians to reflect on the level of proficiency or engaging families and children’s learning. And column three asks librarians to consider the pathways that they can use to improve their knowledge and partnerships and policies and services for children.

Margaret Caspe:

In line with this post-positivist, constructivist and critical paradigm, I think that this tool could actually be used in a variety of ways. Librarians themselves might use it for self-reflection either as an entire staff or individually. I know there are a lot of librarians in this webinar today. But another way is also for librarian schools and other community partners who are here to maybe join together and potentially use the self-reflection tool as a starting point for schools and or community organizations and librarians to think about these ideas collectively, and think through the strengths of each institution and how each institution compliments and supports one another.

Margaret Caspe:

The tool could also be a real full starting place for professional learning, and perhaps professional learning that’s cross-disciplinary with library and school staff coming together to share ideas and resources with one another. I know that there are many of you who partner with universities in higher education, maybe even bringing that lens in an educator preparation can be an interesting tension to this work. And finally, I could also envision that this is a critical advocacy tool that families and others can really use to spark conversation about needs for change within the community. So seeing lots of connections here, Bharat, between your framework and paradigms and the tool that we’ve put together.

Elena Lopez:

Thank you, Bharat and Maggie. Let just turn to my last question, which I’d like to ask K.C. and Tamela, as well as Dorothy. Library leadership can and actually does foster social justice in communities. Based on your experience, what kinds of policies and supports can libraries adopt to increase access and engagement with libraries, especially among those families who additionally do not visit libraries? Maybe we can start with K.C.?

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

Oh, yeah. I’m going to make a broad statement first. And this is for all of my teachers that are joining us on this webinar. You know that when you start the year with your students, you develop ownership. They are your students, you own them. And you work to do whatever you can to accommodate what they need to learn. As a public library director, you should accept that role for the families in your community and look at them as your families, develop ownership, and then you can begin to look at them in terms of not how is the library going to serve the families in the community, but how are we going to serve our families? It gives you a different focus when you look at developing service.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

We have all of our policies and they’re very exclusionary. How hard is it to get a library card? What about families where the parents don’t have transportation or they speak a different language or money is an issue? How are their children going to get access to your services? Creative policies like we developed classroom cards with teachers where we gave each teacher four classroom cards and they could help students access materials on their computers or iPads, whatever they had in the classroom as a learning tool, without having the block of having the parent have to come and sign for their card and be responsible for returning and all that. We did it through online. And the teacher provided the check and balance for the material they were accessing.

K.C. Williams-Cockfield:

So there are lots of ways being fine free. Breaking some of your policy rules, making things a little messy, but adapting them to focus on your families, because they’re your families and your community.

Dorothy Stoltz:

And could I jump in, Sherri, real quick and show those two photos real quick?

Sherri Wilson:

I was going to say we’re running short on time and I want to see Dorothy’s photos.

Dorothy Stoltz:

There we go. This is a state project called Hatchlings where we’re reaching out to expected parents, and this was Prince George’s County and the program they had in the spring. And the next photo is what Carroll County did Maryland in the fall. And we were able to actually meet in person for four weeks. And I would just say that a call to action for librarians is to get excited about learning and thinking things through. So embrace that pure learning and mentor families peer to peer.

Sherri Wilson:

Thank you for that, Dorothy. Those are amazing pictures. And I’m sad that we ran out of time today because this was a really, really helpful session. I can only recommend everybody that’s still here, get that book. You’ve got, I think, it was a 20% off coupon. So now is the time. They make great stocking stuffers. Also, I want to remind everybody who’s here to please take our post-session survey. I put a link in the chat box, so it’s easy to access. Or you could just scan this picture with your smartphone and go right to it.

Sherri Wilson:

I want to say a huge, huge thank you to this incredibly beautiful and talented panel. You guys brought so much information today. It was a lot to go through. I’m going to watch the recording over and over and over again so I can soak it all up. It was amazing. Thank you all for all of the work that you do to support families in your communities, and thank you for sharing a little bit of that with us today. Huge special thank you to Elena for doing such amazing job moderating. It was really great. I’m sorry we didn’t get to the last two questions in our Q&A box, but I do thank all of you for attending today. And we will be sending out a copy of the recording and a link to the slides in a PDF format. So everybody who registered will get that. Thank you all so much. And everybody stay safe out there. Hopefully, we’ll see you next week on our next webinar.

Elena Lopez:

Thank you, Sherri. Thank you, panelists. Bye.

Margaret Caspe:

Thank you, everyone.