In the seventh episode of Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we dive back into our exploration of book bans and challenges throughout the United States. We sit down with Jen Varney and Barb Fecteau of the Massachusetts School Library Association, to hear about how the current climate is impacting the lives of school librarians, and their strategies for navigating these times. And, we talk to Sabrina Baêta, Program Consultant from the Freedom to Read Program at PEN America to better understand the current state of book bans, how they’re increasing throughout the United States, and what concerned citizens can do. Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
In the seventh episode of Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we dive back into our exploration of book bans and challenges throughout the United States. We sit down with Jen Varney and Barb Fecteau of the Massachusetts School Library Association, to hear about how the current climate is impacting the lives of school librarians, and their strategies for navigating these times. And, we talk to Sabrina Baêta, Program Consultant from the Freedom to Read Program at PEN America to better understand the current state of book bans, how they’re increasing throughout the United States, and what concerned citizens can do.
Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
Resources and Links
Learn more about PEN America’s important work on Book Bans
Find great resources from the Massachusetts School Library Association
Take our course on supporting youth activism at www.youthinfront.org
Pre-Order Justin Reich’s new book Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools
Watch our documentary film We Have to Do Something Different
Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/teacher-speech-e7/transcript
Credits
Host Justin Reich
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and Mixed by Garrett Beazley
Follow TeachLab on Twitter and YouTube
Follow our host Justin Reich on Twitter
Justin Reich: From the MIT Studios of the Teaching Systems Lab, this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. I'm Justin Reich. Welcome back to our series on Teacher Speech and the New Divide. This is our seventh episode. If you're just finding the series, make sure you go back and listen to the beginning. Today, we're digging deeper into book bans. They've been in our series. They've been across the news. They're impacting schools across the nation. They started primarily in the south of the United States, but now they're spreading to even unlikely places like Deep Blue Massachusetts. We had a chance to talk with Jen Varney and Barb Fecteau. They're both practicing school librarians. They're the past and current presidents of the Massachusetts School Library Association. Talking to them about how this new reality is impacting school librarians across the state. To get started, I asked Jen to talk about when things started to shift for her, and she recalled a meeting, a kind of emergency meeting called by the American Library Association for presidents of the State School Library Associations, and when she realized this was going to be everywhere.
Jen Varney: It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and I was sitting on this Zoom and I was bitter. And I thought it was going to be about contacting your legislators to support libraries. And then they just hit us with this like, "This is coming. Get ready." And I remember being stunned. In the nitty-gritty, how to prepare for it is make sure you have all your policies in place, and that sounds really boring and not very fun, but it's super, super important. What are you going to say when that conversation happens? Because it really startles you and it really takes you aback, but if you've already thought about it will be easier. Because one of the things that I think we aren't talking about so much is that when it happens to you, it feels crappy. It's really demoralizing. And so getting ready for the emotional piece I think is important.
Justin Reich: Can you say more about what exactly feels crappy? Because one thing you could say is like, "We want parents involved in our school system. We want people to come. We want feedback about what's in our libraries." My understanding of librarians is that they very much understand their role as public servants and as responsive to their community. So to some extent, it's great to be able to talk to patrons, talk to community members and have them tell us how we're doing, but there's something that feels different about these kinds of conversations.
Jen Varney: I don't want to be too negative, but it is negative in that recently so many of the conversations have devolved into people being very vicious. And there's name calling and there's a lot of groomer and pedophile and pervert being thrown around. People just attacking your professionalism. Librarians have master's degrees. We are trained in choosing books that are responsive to our communities, and that is one of the things that makes us unique in our roles as teachers and as educational leaders. And even if you know that the person saying those things on the other end is being maybe unreasonable, it's still, it's very harsh when someone says that to you.
Justin Reich: Jen sets the themes that we're going to hear all throughout this episode that dealing with book challenges, it's a technical problem, committees, meetings, processes, but it's also a deeply emotional issue that gets right into the heart of the professionalism of school librarians. We'll hear more from Jen and her colleague, Barb, later in the episode. But first, to help us understand the current state of book challenges and bans around the US, we spoke with Sabrina Baeta. She's from PEN America. It's a member-based nonprofit that works to defend free expression around the world. It was originally founded by authors. PEN used to stand for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists. We asked Sabrina, what exactly is a school book ban anyway? And how are things different today than they were even a few years ago? Sabrina Baeta is a program consultant with Freedom to Read at PEN America, where she engages in research and awareness building around censorship attacks on public K-12 education. She's also a poet, essayist, and writer. Sabrina, welcome to TeachLab.
Sabrina Baêta: Hi, Justin. So happy to be here.
Justin Reich: How do you all at PEN define a school book ban?
Sabrina Baêta: Yeah, so that's an important distinction, right? Book bans, it's a contentious term that has a lot of different definitions, but we're specifically looking at public K through 12 education book bans, and we consider any diminished access to a previously available material to be a level of ban. And we have different levels of ban. Some are more extreme, some of them are certain restrictions that are imposed, but anything that diminishes. So any book that was previously available to students that now has some extra barrier to having access to it is considered a school book ban.
Justin Reich: And how does that interact with curriculum decisions? So English teachers pick a set of books to read every year that grants a certain level of access to children. They might give away copies of the book or things like that. And then the next year they might change the list for any one of a variety of reasons, including whim, including, "I'm tired of reading Catcher in the Rye. Let's do something else this year." How do you all distinguish between curriculum changes, which I think most educators would think like, "Yep, that's just the normal order of we do something some years and other things, other years," and something that's more problematic.
Sabrina Baêta: Public awareness around school book bans have made a lot more people aware of the process that goes into curriculum, that goes into choosing school libraries and the collections that they keep. And there's processes in place to be able to either weed out materials that might be old, they want to update the collections. They don't have enough room. There's a lot of practical concerns or curriculum. They just want to change out the books for the summer list to make them a little bit more relevant to students. So that's all normal. That's all part of process. Teachers and educators have been doing that for as long as they've been teaching. They have systems in place for that. What we're seeing here is we're looking at the cause behind why a book was removed and how it's removed. And it's really when that cause is because the book has been challenged, particularly the content of the book has been challenged versus, "Okay, actually pedagogically, I would like to change out this material."
That's a different cause than, there's a single parent who's putting in a challenge who says, "Okay, I don't like this content." But instead of just designating or speaking to the educator about the relationship their own student has to have with the material, they want to make that material unavailable to all students in the district. Usually at a district level, sometimes at a state level. So that, to us, is the big difference between, okay, this is a normal process. We're going to go through the challenge process for this, or you're going to have that individual conversation with the educator, which is really, even though there's been a challenge process in place forever, we really didn't see it used that often because educators and parents had a great relationships and they would talk to each other and there were alternate assignments.
There were just other avenues to use versus now we're seeing a purposeful breakdown of those systems by outside instigators to flood a district of challenges so that the normal process would never work. If you have a hundred challenges and you need a review committee for each one of those, can you imagine trying to gather that many people together? So that's the biggest difference between like, "Okay, this is a normal turnaround of books to make sure it's still relevant to students," versus, "No, it's purposefully targeting certain content and it's purposely going with a lack of transparency to attack the processes that have already been put in place and should be followed."
Justin Reich: PEN America started tracking school book bans in 2021. And in 2022, they published a report, Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students' First Amendment Rights. Sabrina, walked us through some of the key findings.
Sabrina Baêta: We've been tracking this movement and each of our reports has been able to find one-key trend that has really affected it. So the first one was just book bans are happening, which now if you're very clued into the issue or if you're an educator who's in the middle of this issue, it might seem like, "Oh, okay, this an obvious, obviously book bans are happening." But at the beginning of this movement, it wasn't so obvious. People didn't understand that this was happening not only in their own districts but across the country and how often it was happening. So first we were looking at that and we were also trying to consider what books are being targeted, why are these books being targeted? And we found that the content, mostly books that had characters of color or dealt with themes of race and racism or had LGBTQ characters were largely being targeted in these attacks.
And when you think about a school library and how they're working on diversifying their collections to be able to better represent their students, it was just large swaths of books that were very targeted towards this. And you knew that that percentage of books wasn't the percentage of books that dealt with those topics in the library. So you knew that this was a targeted attack against these communities. So that was the first report. The second report, we were looking at this and we were saying, "Okay, we know book bans are happening, we see what they're attacking, but who was doing this?" Because there was this idea that individual parents or community members were bringing forth these challenges against books in their districts.
And we realized that there were groups across the country in different key states that had actually started coordinating their efforts together in these shared tactics, whether it be creating book review sites where they could quickly pull information so that parents wouldn't have to actually read the materials that they challenged. So we were able to prove that and we said, "Okay, we know that this is happening." Now, even scarier to a larger level, we've seen that go up to state legislation. So if you think about, you hear a lot about states like Florida and Texas creating state legislation that has censored books, but it's happening and being introduced across the country. And more and more these introduced legislation is being enacted.
So it's really creating this atmosphere of intimidation and fear when you have a state law that is creating parameters that weren't there before. It's oftentimes vague. There's no guidelines. This is not something that teachers and educators and librarians have had to contend with before, sends a very clear signal when the content areas are flagged there and they're not sure there's punitive action and they're confused and have no guidelines for what to do. So it pretty transparently, even with vague legislation, transparently you understand what it's about. And it's about creating this chilling effect of censorship across states so that they, educators and districts, are put in a difficult position and are forced to either potentially suffer bad consequences for their district or to self-censor.
Justin Reich: And when you talk to teachers about their experiences in districts where books are being systematically challenged or in states where new laws are being enacted or proposed, what do you hear from teachers? What kinds of positions are they being put in?
Sabrina Baêta: I mean, that's a thing is educators are just in such a vulnerable position because they're really being asked to put their livelihood on the line or the best interest of the student. And most teachers you speak to want to take the best interest of the student. And they're going to put their livelihood, but that's not something you should ever have to do in a profession no matter. And I think it's this idea that teachers are painted as martyrs and are going to sacrifice themselves for the cause, but they shouldn't be the first line of defense for this. They shouldn't have to be put in this position. And for teachers and librarians, they are the experts in the room. They're the ones who have often actually read the book. They're the ones who have selected it. They're the ones who have been teaching it for years a lot of times. And yet, they are some of the least heard from because of that vulnerable position. So when I get the chance to be able to talk to different educators, it's just a really intimidating position to be in.
Justin Reich: So Sabrina, listeners are probably familiar with book bans that are happening in Florida, in Texas, in other more southern, more conservative communities. How prevalent are book bans and book challenges across the whole country?
Sabrina Baêta: Yeah. So you hear these outlandish stories in these certain states, and a lot of people think, "Okay, but if I'm in X, Y, Z state, then I must be safe." But unfortunately, it is happening everywhere. It is a coordinated movement. The groups and the instigators are everywhere. So it's not something that we found has, "Okay, if this certain state legislation is blue, then we should be fine. We'll be covered." And that's absolutely not true because this vocal minority can crop up anywhere. And that's a lot of stories we hear are of these individual districts that reach out and say, "I thought this would've never happened here. I've grown up here. I know this community. Why is this happening?" Well, these are outside instigators coming in, so it really comes in from every angle.
Justin Reich: PEN America's findings pretty accurately reflect the experiences of Jen Varney and Barb Fecteau, the librarians that we spoke with from the Massachusetts School Library Association. I was curious to hear how these dynamics are impacting librarians out there on the front lines.
Jen Varney: I have heard of a story where a school librarian had a display out and there was a parent who was browsing the display while they were waiting for their kid to finish practice, picked up a book that he didn't like, which was about, I can't remember which book it was, but it was about race and it was about whiteness, I believe. And the parent just reamed the librarian in front of students and kept coming back. The librarian had to be escorted to her car. So it's like the atmosphere can be really vile.
Barb Fecteau: Here's the thing, nobody minds having a discussion with a concerned parent who finds a book in the library and says, "Hey, is this age appropriate?" I once had a really great three hour conversation with a parent who started with, "Why is there so much sex and violence and YA books, and ended with us starting a book club for parents. So that was a really useful and effective conversation to have.
Justin Reich: It must change the way librarians work in their space, move through their space. I could just imagine over the last five or 10 years, you put up a Black History Month display, you put up a Pride Month display. You assume that the people going over to that display are curious, are interested. They might not like every book, they might not like everything about it, but... I don't know. When you were describing the parent who was browsing the display and getting hot and bothered, after that I just imagine librarians must just have a very different feeling about patrons moving around the library. Which of these folks is getting ready to get really aggressive with me at any moment? Can you talk about how it might feel different now to be a school librarian?
Jen Varney: Five years ago, you'd put up that Pride display or that Black History Month display and not think twice about it. Now, people are pausing and going, "Okay, if I do this, am I ready for the pushback? Am I ready to have this conversation? And frankly, education is a stressful place to be right now for a lot of reasons. And they may not have the bandwidth and the emotional energy and they might say, "You know what? I'm going to skip the Pride display this year." I'm definitely hearing from other librarians, they're like, "Well, I scaled back my Pride display. I decided not to. When I'm planning my lessons, I work in a classroom, so that I'm not there after school when the parents come through," kind of a thing. It's sad that everyone is second guessing themselves.
Justin Reich: It really changes the dynamic when you're afraid of being attacked, not afraid of being questioned, not afraid of having respectful conversations about how to do this better but afraid of being attacked. That's different. How do you respond when people say they're surprised that this is happening in Massachusetts?
Barb Fecteau: Us, too. We're surprised.
Justin Reich: Are you all in touch with state representatives or other folks in government or do you hear from them about political responses in Massachusetts?
Jen Varney: We always are trying to get time with state legislators, and it's a little bit easier now because all of a sudden we are one of the hot topics, which is really weird for us.
Justin Reich: "We were trying to toil away in obscurity just helping these beautiful young minds experience books. We like that we were the only people who had our job. We had this little fiefdom of books, where children come and read happily. And if you could all please leave us alone and let us go back to that idyllic pre-2020 world, that would be..." I mean, the great thing is you will raise the battlements, you're going to circle the wagons, you don your armor, you'll ride nobly into battle because librarians are also fierce. You hope to just politely protect people's right to read, but if necessary, you will fiercely protect people's right to read, but really you'd prefer not to. It would be nice to just be able to do it in a lower key way.
Jen Varney: It's really true though. I mean librarians care deeply. And even before this happened, our conference, our listserv, all of our meetings were about how do we better serve our communities? How do we get information literacy to our students? How do we collaborate with faculty to make this happen? How do we make sure our book collections represent the kids in our school? But it's not the kind of thing that garnered a lot of attention before. So it is a little bit surreal now to be being called by aids of senators and people doing podcasts and journalists. And in the one hand, I think it's gratifying. On the other hand, I want to be like, "But we've always been awesome."
Justin Reich: Absolutely. We've talked a lot about adults so far in this conversation. How are students in Massachusetts impacted by book challenges, by a more confrontational environment?
Barb Fecteau: I had an administrator come to me and ask me when certain titles were first being mentioned in the news. And she came and she said, "Do you have any of these titles in the library?" And I had a couple of them. I'm like, "Yeah, what's going on?" She goes, "Oh, nothing." She goes, "I just want to be prepared to support you in case shit goes down, basically," which was wonderful. That was such a great moment for me. And it's really good to have supportive administrators. I feel like in middle school and elementary school, it's a little more difficult because people can misunderstand the idea behind certain books, and I don't know. I feel like every kid has the right to see themselves represented. And so if you take away the depictions of kids of different races or kids of different sexuality or even just families of different types, it's just cruel.
Jen Varney: This is where it becomes really emotional for us, I think. I had a little boy who was Black who came up to me with a book, and in the picture it depicted a black father holding an infant. And he said to me, "I just had a baby brother. And this looks just like my dad." Every kid needs to see themselves in books, and every kid needs to see other people in books. It's truly how small children learn empathy. It's how they learn about the world. I get angry 'cause I'm like, "Dang it. I know I have kids that come from gay families. I'm going to have books about gay families. I know I have kids that use they/them pronouns. I'm going to have books with characters that use they/them pronouns. This is all going to be in my library because it's in my school." And if there's parents out there that don't like it and they ask me to, I will guide their child to something else, but I'm not going to take it out of my library so that other kids can't read it.
Justin Reich: I've got a new book coming on September 20th, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. So for 20 years I've worked in schools on all kinds of projects, transforming curriculum, integrating technology, re-engaging students, making school meaningful and relevant to young people and families. And whatever you're working on, every successful school improvement effort that I've been a part of has one thing in common, they all improve one step at a time. My new book Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools is a playbook for making big changes in schools out of a series of small manageable steps. In Iterate, I'll share everything I've learned about design, collaboration, and improvement from educators all around the world and from my colleagues here at MIT. You can learn more at iteratebook.com. And you can pre-order a copy bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble's, target.com, and wherever books are sold. Let's get back to the show. For Sabrina Baeta from PEN America, the climate around book challenges is impacting school culture and it's making things more difficult for both students and teachers.
Sabrina Baêta: We always say it's never just about the book, so it's representative. So if you have a book that's being targeted based on themes of race and racism, even if that book ends up going back, it's still sending a clear message to the students that there's someone in their community who had a problem with that content, with that book specifically. So when they start to see things like a large amount of LGBTQ books being challenged, that combined with the current climate, the anti-trans climate of legislation, it just all becomes a mounting effect that it becomes clear that they themselves are under attack. And that's what I've been hearing from students. They're the most affected by this. They're the ones who are in the middle of it. They're the ones who are paying the most attention. And when a material gets removed, they're the ones most affected by that removal.
And then on top of that, if they see that the book that was pulled, maybe something they've read before, maybe something they wanted, maybe it's about themselves, maybe something they're trying to figure out, like their friends, just a viewpoint that they would like to have, then it really becomes a damaging experience for them and the culture of the school, especially between then teachers and students, which has always been a wonderful and uplifting relationships. That fear and intimidation then seeps into everything. So it really just, the distrust doesn't just exist between parents and teachers. It then naturally has to exist between students and teachers, which is obviously not very conducive to learning, but can also be a very dangerous environment for a lot of students whose reprieve is school. That is their safe place. That is where they find themselves. So it's been really terribly damaging for the culture of schools.
Justin Reich: I asked Sabrina and Jen to tell me about the banned and challenge books that stood out to them the most.
Sabrina Baêta: So like Tony Morrison, for example, Tony Morrison being banned. Just an American classic, just a true American writer. And for then American schools to go out and ban Tony Morrison, especially on the horrible grounds that they're banning, it unfathomable to me. And Tango Makes Three, which is about two male penguins that adopt a baby penguin is probably my favorite of the picture books because it's just so sweet. It's such a wonderful story. And a lot of the rhetoric that you hear used against it is saying, "Oh, this isn't natural. This isn't real. We're teaching children an unnatural process," when it's based on a true story, it actually happened. So I'm like, the lack of awareness of what's actually behind the book. And I think that's one of the main things is that people generally, if people read the book, they don't want to ban it.
A lot of these are just taken out of context or they're just looking at specifically what the themes of the book are, but they're not actually engaging with the material enough to have their own opinion about it. And one of the review process steps is to read the entire material. You need to take the full context of the work. So for me, those are the most striking examples as well as some American classics that actually warn of book banning. So if you think about like a 1984, some of those, it feels like a parody at times because if you actually read the material, would you not realize that where you sit in the story here.
Justin Reich: If you're banning books about book bans, then you have achieved a level of meta book ban. That is troubling. It's useful to think about the themes that are involved in books that are being challenged across the country. It's also important to look at the specific titles that are being banned to try to understand what are the sources of conflict and controversy in communities about them. I asked Jen from the Massachusetts School Library Association, for examples of what's being challenged in her state. And she talked for a bit about one of the most challenged books in the United States, Gender Queer, a graphic novel, a memoir by Maia Kobabe.
Jen Varney: There's one of the most challenged books in Massachusetts is Gender Queer. Gender Queer does have a panel that shows a sex act. That is the panel that everyone's floating around on the internet as being pornographic. It's a graphic novel. That's why I say a panel, because it's one square of the whole book. And we would say, "You need to look at this in context. You can't just take out one panel and say, 'That one panel depicts a sex act and therefore this book is pornographic.'" Because if you read the entire book, what's really happening in that book, is it is the story of someone coming to terms with their sexuality and their gender identity.
The act that's portrayed is a consensual act, which has been discussed in advance. Two people decide to try it, they try it. They decide, "You know what, this is not for us and we're just going to cuddle instead." And they do. And so the message that's actually sending to our teenagers is sex should be consensual. It should be discussed. And even in your most intimate moments, you have a voice and you can say, "I don't like this. Let's just cuddle." And the other person should respect that. That is the message that that book is giving our teenagers. And that is 100% the message we want them to get. And so when you take little snippets out of context, you're really misrepresenting the work.
Justin Reich: Are there any others?
Jen Varney: Yeah, I am thinking of a suburban district in Massachusetts. They had a book challenged last year on This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson. The people who challenged it were pretty proactive in that they showed up at a school committee meeting before it was even on the agenda and started passing out flyers about how harmful this book was. And it took the community a little bit by surprise. In this particular district, they had a very strong policy. They have a committee. The committee met and decided to keep the book. At the school committee meeting where they shared their decision, the community rallied. The high school GSA was there. There were all kinds of members of the community speaking out in favor of this book. There were rainbow flags everywhere. It was really pretty heartwarming. I think one of the quotes that stuck in my mind was the health teacher saying, "Sexual health is health, and our kids deserve access to this information because that is part of being a teenager."
Two other points, one is that that district had that book in both the high school, and the middle school, and they did decide to take it out of the middle school. They kept it in the high school, but they removed it from the middle school, which based on the reviews and the age that the book was recommended for seems to fall right in line. So I point to that as, "We are not trying to be completely unreasonable here. We do want people to have access to age appropriate information." That community decided that book was appropriate for high school but not middle school. The message you're hearing from the other side is, "We're not banning books. We are just curating an age appropriate collection for our children."
A, it is book banning when there's a book in the library and you complain about it and it gets removed. That is the definition of a book ban. And B, I don't think people truly understand the role of a school library, which is to provide access to books for kids who probably don't have it otherwise, because there are a lot of people out there that are not going to be able to go to the public library. There are a lot of people out there that can't just order it from Amazon for various reasons, whether it's financial or they don't want their parents to know they're reading this book for good reason, especially if it's This Book is Gay, you might not be ready to share that with your parents yet.
It's the school library is for in many cases, the only place where kids can get access to these things. And so if it's taken out of that school library, it is, in effect, removed from that kid's life. And I happen to be gay, so that's something I notice and take very personally. And it feels to me like it's blatant homophobia and transphobia. It feels to me like a certain identity has been sought out. And yet, that is an identity that a lot of our students have or have family members who have. And I'm frustrated that those titles are the ones they're going after. I'm frustrated they're going after any titles, but in particular, it just does feel very homophobic to me.
Justin Reich: Barb, you as a librarian have celebrated Banned Books Week for many, many years. I assume that's just part of your practice as a high school librarian, is to raise kids' attention to the history of book bans a little bit.
Barb Fecteau: Yeah.
Justin Reich: It must be so odd to have done that for years, to have the whole community walk by those posters and be like, "Yep, we agree, banning books is bad." And then to be getting ready to put up those displays in 2022, 2023, 2024, how does that feel different?
Barb Fecteau: It's really, really sad. I'm in a district where we have a very strong selection and reconsideration policy, which means if somebody wants a book removed from the shelves, they have to read it. They have to go through this process. There has to be a group that gets together and discuss it. But I have good friends who are great librarians who have had really, really bad things happen to them. And people talking about them on their... Putting things up on their private social media pages, just ugly behaviors. And it's not about protecting kids, it's about scoring points, and it's mean. And this would be the point in the movie of my life story, where the next scene is me being drawn and cornered in the public square, but I feel like I'm pretty safe because my district is very supportive. However, not everybody's that lucky.
Justin Reich: Barb, you were recently at the American Library Association Conference. Can you tell us a little bit about the overall feeling there?
Barb Fecteau: There was a lot of talk about intellectual freedom and there was a really interesting meeting where it was essentially talking about marketing your library in the face of these challenges and bans and owning the language. And so book ban, book ban, book ban, that's really a fraught phrase. So challenge takes a little bit of the fire off a little bit. Intellectual freedom, let's
Justin Reich: Yeah. I love both of those things. Being smart and being free are both great.
Barb Fecteau: I'm a huge fan. And so the phrase intellectual freedom is what I've just been scattering around like grass seed because that's really what we're talking about is, here's the thing, kids don't read books they're not comfortable with. So I don't like scary stuff at all. I will read 20 pages of any great horror book and then immediately hide it in the freezer like in that episode of Friends because it's just too scary for me. And kids do the same thing. If they're reading a book and they feel like, "Oh, I don't really get this," or, "This makes me uncomfortable," they can stop reading it and I make sure...
Justin Reich: They stop.
Barb Fecteau: Yeah. And so I warn kids, "Okay, listen, anytime you're reading, if you get to something and you think, 'Oh, there's a good chance I shouldn't be reading this,' you don't have to keep reading, unless it's Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade, they're going to make it and it does not end well."
Jen Varney: Spoiler alert.
Barb Fecteau: Yeah, spoiler alert.
Justin Reich: Spoiler alert.
Jen Varney: That's one thing that I think people don't understand is parents can call me anytime and say, "I would really prefer you not check out this book to my kid," and I won't, but I'm not going to take it out of the library and remove access to it for all of my students.
Justin Reich: And that really is a huge shift, I think, in these conversations is that, by definition, every community has parents with extreme beliefs on some dimension. We all don't agree, but we still live with each other. And one of the ways that we've historically managed that disagreement in schools is we've said, "Yeah, if there's some stuff that you don't want your kid exposed to, we'll figure out a way for you to not have your kid be exposed to that." Kids are pulled out a health class, sex ed class, sometimes part of science class. They don't read certain books in English class or history class or things like that. Some of these things are very famous. There are Jehovah's Witnesses who went to the Supreme Court to make sure they didn't have to stand up during the Pledge of Allegiance. And they're still part of our community. We all engage in these activities a little bit. We mostly all do the same thing.
And then sometimes we have folks who don't, and mostly kids look around and we're like, "Oh yeah, Tim doesn't stand for the pledge. Whatever. We still love Tim." But trying to shift the conversations from, "I want my student to experience something different," to, "I don't want any student to be able to have access," that is renegotiating the terms of the debate in a way, which just makes the stakes way, way higher. I mean, I think you said it really nicely. It's pretty easy for you as a librarian if a parent doesn't want their kid exposed to certain materials to be like, "Yeah, I'll help you do that." Jen, what conversations do you have with parents when they have concerns about a book in the school library?
Jen Varney: So, there are two frames of thought about how you respond to a parent. One is, can you sit down and have a rational conversation with them and are they ready to talk to you and listen? And if so, have that conversation because you'll probably find some middle ground that you can agree on. And in an ideal world, that's what would happen. But a lot of times what's happening now is that people aren't being rational and they don't want to listen and they want to call you names because of behavior they've seen elsewhere on the internet because, I don't know, because they think that we really are trying to harm children or something, which I can't understand. And in that case, that's when you say, "You know what, I'm going to take this to my principal and my superintendent and we will get back to you." And you shut it down because the frontline librarian doesn't need to be dealing with that alone. So that's when you go get back up.
Justin Reich: We know that communities states are out there pushing back against these book challenges and bans. Sabrina, Illinois recently passed an anti book ban law. Can you tell us a little bit about book ban legislation and anything else that you think librarians and other concerned community members can do?
Sabrina Baêta: Yeah, so we've seen now some of these anti-book ban laws passed in a few states, and I know there's a few other states that are considering or have put out resolutions if it's not a specific law. And it's interesting because when we think about the legislation around book bans, for me, I've largely been tracking the legislation that causes book bans, the legislation that then influences a district censor or directly asks a district censor. So it's been heartening to see that these efforts now, these politicians at the state level have been switching gears to be able to protect books. Every state has its own parameters. Every district has its own parameters for how to secure books, how to handle collections, how curriculum is done. So, a lot of people want one law that they can just implement everywhere, and unfortunately that is not the nature of it because their school systems are community based.
They mirror the community. So I would say that's probably the largest issue we face with legislation is just trying to make sure that it's appropriate. And just also trying to make sure that it doesn't create more parameters on teachers and educators and then create more actions that could potentially go against teachers, educators, school districts, because they're the ones facing the most pressure. But this legislation is absolutely a turn in the right direction and in safeguarding, and also sending a signal that this is not going to be acceptable in certain states, that censoring material is undemocratic, un-American, and that there are people who are working. We've heard a lot about the movement two ban books. We say every time there's somebody somewhere on the ground that wants to ban a book, there's a bunch of people who don't, and they're just waiting for their chance to be able to step up, and now is the time to do that.
Most Americans do not believe in book bans. I think there's a statistic out there that's like 70%. The majority of people are not for censoring this content, and there's trust in educators to do their jobs. It is a vocal minority that is really pushing this movement. But it happens everywhere, and it happens in states and districts where you think you may be safe and there's no reason not to just get in touch with your community, whether that's other librarians, other teachers. I don't think it's an unpopular opinion to be for books. So go out and find those people and already start connecting with them so that when the time comes, if a challenge comes, you already have that community formed so you can feel a little less isolated.
Justin Reich: Jen Varney also had some great advice about how we can support librarians in these challenging times.
Jen Varney: There are a couple of things you could do that seem really small but would actually have a huge impact. One is pay attention to local politics, city council meetings and school committee meetings. At least look at the agendas of those things so that you are aware if something is coming up in that regard. And you can go to those meetings and you can speak in favor of libraries and books and access to information and intellectual freedom. You can write if you don't want to go speak. The other thing you can do, which sounds really hokey, but I think it makes a huge difference. If your school librarian or your public library does something that you want to see more of, let them know, and let the powers that be know.
So if they have a Pride display, shoot a quick email and say, "Hey, I really appreciated that Pride display. Thanks a lot for making sure you represent that aspect of the community." And then copy your city counselor on it too, or copy the superintendent of the school district on it too. The majority of people, when you ask them in a survey, they don't agree with what's going on, but they're not vocal about it. You don't even have to be loud. Just make a point of saying, normally you would walk into a library and see a pride display and you'd be like, "Oh, cool." You wouldn't follow up with that if you supported it, but taking the time to say, "I'm really glad you had a Pride display." Telling people that you want those kinds of programming and that you appreciate when it happens, I think that's huge.
Justin Reich: So we all need to take a little time out of our schedule this year to appreciate in writing one thing that's going on in our local school library. I'm definitely going to do that. I love that. And it's one way for superintendents, for school board members to track the satisfied, supportive majority and to raise our voices. Another thing that I really like about that advice is a lot of times it feels like if I want to be a supporter of intellectual freedom in my local school library, I got to wait until some crisis comes along and then I got to be ready to react to that challenge, react to that event. I got to be ready to show up with my Pride flag when someone is challenging This Book is Gay. But I actually don't have to wait for that. I can proactively reach out to leaders, to elected members, school board members, elected town meeting members in Massachusetts, mayors, city councilors, whoever it is, and say, "Hey, I just want to tell you how important the work of school librarians really is to me and to our community."
Jen Varney: Yeah, that would be amazing.
Justin Reich: Let's do it.
Jen Varney: If we got 30 people to do that, it would really help turn the tide in a couple places. Yeah.
Justin Reich: Barb Fecteau, Jen Varney, both from the Massachusetts School Library Association, thank you so much for joining us on TeachLab.
Barb Fecteau: Thanks for having us. It was fun.
Jen Varney: Thank you so much. This was fun.
Justin Reich: This episode ends where a lot of our episodes have. Librarians are out there doing amazing work, but they can't do this work alone. If we want to have libraries that are great places for school librarians to work, if we want to have libraries that are great places for young people to explore, lots of different kinds of literature about lots of different kinds of people, then it's something we're going to have to organize for, it's something we're going to have to fight for. I'm Justin Reich. Thanks for listening to TeachLab. A huge thank you to our guests, Sabrina Baeta from PEN America, and Jen Barney and Barb Fact Dow from the Massachusetts School Librarians Association. We'll link to both of those great organizations in our show notes so you can learn more, support their efforts, and check out their terrific resources. Be sure to listen next week for a powerful story of another teacher on the frontlines in our final episode of Teacher Speech and the New Divide.
In the meantime, we've got some great resources out and forthcoming for educators everywhere. I've got a new book coming out in September, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. You can learn more@iteratebook.com. If you pre-order the book, you send along your order number, a little bit of information, I'll send you a signed book plate that you can put in your book. And you can register for a free online course in October about innovation in schools. That's all at iteratebook.com.
We've got another course that's running right now with our partners at Learning for Justice called Youth in Front, about supporting student activism. You can visit youth in front.org to learn more and check that out. And then you can see our documentary film, We Have to Do Something Different: Teachers on the Journey Towards More Equitable Schools at somethingdifferentfilm.com. You can find links to all this stuff in our show notes. And if you like what you hear on TeachLab, be sure to leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts. This episode was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley. The sound was mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe until next time out. Check out their terrific resources.
Be sure to listen next week for a powerful story of another teacher on the front lines in our final episode of Teacher Speech and the New Divide. In the meantime, we've got some great resources out and forthcoming for Educators Everywhere. I've got a new book coming out in September, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. You can learn more at iteratebook.com. If you pre-order the book, you send along your order number, a little bit of information, I'll send you a signed book plate that you can put in your book and you can register for a free online course in October about innovation in schools. That's all at iteratebook.com.
We've got another course that's running right now with our partners at Learning for Justice called Youth in Front, about supporting student activism. You can visit youthinfront.org to learn more and check that out. And then you can see our documentary film, We Have to Do Something Different: Teachers on the Journey Towards More Equitable Schools at somethingdifferentfilm.com. You can find links to all this stuff in our show notes. And if you like what you hear on TeachLab, be sure to leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. This episode was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley. The sound was mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe. Until next time.