Poor Mark Hasiuk - Wrong Again!

In his most recent attack on our beleaguered Social Responsibility Team, Mark Hasiuk of The Vancouver Courier ("Vancouver school bureaucrats unleash bizarre theories on race and culture: Budget cuts spare ‘Diversity Team", April 19, 2011) tries again to target the good work being done by our respected teacher colleagues.  Their work enables many students to thrive and succeed who might otherwise not; I can think of no educator who could support Hasiuk's position.  That includes me, the district librarian he refers to in his concocted account of the removal of books.  No such thing ever happened, in a district that annually celebrates Freedom to Read Week in February, nor would it, and it is upsetting to think that there are people who, perhaps because the system didn't offer opportunities to learn to think critically about issues and the importance of corroborating evidence, might just believe him.

Here is what Suzanne Hall, District Librarian in Maple Ridge, wrote in response to one of Hasiuk's attacks on the same target:  You, sir, are remarkably misinformed! Teacher-librarian Moira Ekdahl of the Vancouver School District has clearly refuted your claims about book-banning in her blog.  This letter was published!  Here is what she is sending in response to this most recent attack:

Dear editor:

Mr. Hasiuk’s latest misinformed, misleading rant about the Diversity Team certainly proves how important their work is. Again, his column reflects a lack of background knowledge, selective hearing, and the arrogance needed to make personal attacks. Why is his reaction so personal? Since much of the Team’s work is aimed at preventing all three of those faults, I am left to wonder: feeling threatened by a broader perspective, Mr. Hasiuk?

Suzanne Hall, District Librarian
District Facilitator: Mentoring
Chair of Professional Development Committee, M.R.T.A.

My full response to his last articles was posted during Spring Break in the Reader Soapbox section online.  "Vancouver’s teacher-librarians keep books in student hands: School libraries do not ban books, have plenty of works by Dickens" (March 23, 2011).  How insulting is that to be put into the soapbox category when you want to set the record straight and are a most credible source!  Forgive me -- soapbox, did you say?

VSB TL Cecil Baird sent a letter on behalf of the VTLA that was edited and published on March 23:  Teacher librarians enjoy autonomy.  While I take this section from Cecil's longer letter, the letter clearly indicated teacher-librarians are not under any mandate to remove books!  I don't think Hasiuk gets the "autonomy" part or the need we feel to ensure all students find themselves and people like themselves fairly portrayed within accounts and images they encounter in our schools and curriculum and resources and the particular attachment teacher-librarians have for freedom of expression. The last blast took place during Freedom to Read Week.  Cecil wrote,

Teacher Librarians in Vancouver have a great deal of autonomy and defend freedom to read as a major tenet of literacy.  In my experience, there are actually few books removed from shelves, which is testament to the fact that we are getting it right. Nothing gets weeded from the fiction shelves of my school's library that doesn't contain inappropriate content, meaning works that are not sensitive to genders, sexual orientation, or cultures, or that are not damaged beyond repair .... Teacher Librarians choose materials based on a wide set of criteria including quality, appropriateness to curriculum, and reader interest.


To say more, there is a cultural aspect beyond your own worldview that must be considered when making these decisions. Thanks to the VSB team for their consultations. Nothing is mandated by them, and we defer to their expertise in cases where we are unfamiliar with the subject area ....


Cecil Baird, Co-President, Vancouver Teacher-librarians' Association

Read also Steve Mulligan's letter to the editor, Diversity Team Saves Lives (March 23).

The Vancouver Courier editor Barry Link did contact me to let me know he does include my blog address so I know that inquirying readers could find the truth if they could find the soapbox.  Some besides our own district readers actually did, as Suzanne's response would indicate.

Did I forget anything?  No, except thanks again, Team, for what you do for us and for our students.

VSB READS ... and reads and reads and reads!

ON READING (was there any doubt?)


Thanks to Maryann for keeping an eye out for the stats that show just how good we are! If you read her MLST annual report, you will notice we discarded well over 100 000 dusty volumes from our various collections. BUT more significantly, we have again generated significant district circulation numbers of 1.7 million items in the 10-month school year, OR, put another way, we have the 10th highest annual volume of circulation of all libraries in the province, ahead of Coquitlam, West Vancouver, and the Thompson-Nicola Valley Regional public libraries! Imagine that. Keep 'em reading and researching with VSB resources in our school libraries, I say! Keep up the truly excellent work on the front lines of service delivery.


Dr Renee Norman, VSB Primary Literacy Consultant, and I participated in YSL 4: Reading, an international online school library conference, as hosts of a discussion on reading. We agreed: quality literature experiences and enabling adults, including teacher-librarians, are key to making reading meaningful and pleasurable for children and young adults. We have high school libraries so crowded at the breaks that crowd control measures are required ... these are the reading young people who will return to the public libraries as adults; we have elementary schools that circulate over 100 books per child per year. There's unequivocal proof that Vancouver students are readers. I was also the moderator of the session featuring Dr Stephen Krashen ... he's one of two of the world's leading experts on reading, along with Aidan Chambers, whose work I think so significantly underpins the work we do as TLs. Wasn't I happy to be asked!


We have moved into a world of e-reading possibilities. We are moving into e-texts in the district. Children who pour over computers are reading. Research shows that reading anything improves reading! And vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and so on ...


National School Library Day is Monday, October 25, this year; it is celebrated in our district with the BCTLA's Drop Everything and Read campaign, 20 minutes at 11:00 am on that day. On the Tuesday evening, parents and district teachers, trustees, and management are invited to hear a speaker ... TBA. Book these dates.


Michele sends you this youtube link: Teaching Content is Teaching Reading. Don't forget that any learning that contextually embeds learners' deep thinking with words, text, and image is developing important student literacies.


I spent Friday night at an annual Bar-B-Q dinner with the VTLA Executive. The evening took on a whole new fevered pitch of excitement when the topic of reading and great new books came up. There was keen energy to get back to putting hot new titles and fantastic new books onto the wiki. If you would like to be able to "write" in your suggestions, along with the heavy reading Jan, Mary, Gwen, and others, you can simply go to the wiki and request permission. I will activate you and send you the password. The TL Special Wiki is pbworks (as easy as a peanute butter sandwich -- pb, get it? --so it's easy enough for anyone ... WYSIWYG entry of data. We will have a chance to work on this at our Updates. See you there ... bring your favourite new titles.


Learning Commons / Refreshing Our Profile


Some amazing transformations have been happening in our school libraries. Often these re-transformed spaces seem to have emerged after a visit from Wendy usually accompanied by Linda. Wendy and Linda were the guest presenters for new TLs last week. Check out the Picasa volume that speaks and highlights volumes in new and attractive ways. Thanks are due to these amazing TLs whose spirit and mentoring has been so compelling for me and for others. Now I am wondering how you do with cubicles!


There are a number of school libraries as well facing seismic upgrades, including JQ, Douglas, General Gordon, Kitchener, U Hill, and Kitsilano. With US-based award-winning educational architectural consultants Randall Fielding and Prakash Nair on our VSB team, there are fantastic opportunities to transform more than the facility. In fact, the YSL 3: Designing School Libraries conference offered the notion that first you must tranform the teaching and learning. This year I facilitated the Kitchener Teacher Inquiry with Lisa Pedrini. Now there's a team putting the conceptual, spatial, and pedagogical together and "constructing" new ideas and ideals for what will take their students well along the continuum of learning for the 21st century. It's all a little unsettling ... in a good way, don't you think!


Have a good week, everyone.



Building our Community




The Vancouver Teacher-librarians' Association (VTLA) will have its Annual General Meeting later this month. There is a call for new faces at the meeting and on the Executive. We have had one key retirement this year, Pam, who was most important as an organizer of Winter Tonic. That's a great role for someone with new contacts and ideas.




The BCTLA Conference is in Kelowna on October 22: Kelowna Fresh. That's going to cost you $190, including your PSA membership. Some or all is reimbursed by school Pro D funding. There are to be three keynote sessions. I am finally going to get to hear Dr Jamie McKenzie. Carlene Walter (50 Ways to Love Your Library) and Donna Desroches are coming from Saskatchewan. And Dr Art Hister will be speaking too. Carpooling and room-sharing will be items on the email discussions soon.