Children and the library – a fresh future
Sujata Noronha
What is the difference between an adults’ library and a children’s library? I may ask and you are very likely to respond by saying, the children! As library practitioners who make a conscious choice to work with children, we need to examine more carefully what we mean when we say children, because we may all not mean the same thing and yet our understanding of this ‘construct’ underlies our work in the library.
Photos courtesy: Bookworm, Goa
Childhood
Children and the time defined as childhood are broadly understood through a biological or sociological lens. School libraries, for example, are likely to use the framework of human development (biological/psychological) of grades/standards determined by age to respond and interact with children in the library. These age levels have become normalized to some extent. However, even within this seemingly accepted framework there are differences – determined by combinations of geography/market/policy. For example, in Sweden, children begin school at the age of 7, while in the UK, they begin at age 5 and in India until NEP 2020, they began at age 5.5.
The market produces books that may map into this framework of age, like books for early years or middle school reads, and such. These age-categorizations also inform our library work. Every reflective, knowledgeable practitioner, however, knows that even if we accept the age grading, it is not a fixed category and children’s individuality reminds us about this.
One way to understand this further and expose the complications attached to the construct of childhood is to enter into the idea given to us sociologically. Childhood is socially constructed. What we do in the library and how we do it may draw from our views on culture that shape childhood (Stearns, 2009) and the way a society socially constructs childhood in turn shapes the cultural material and the engagement activities of library work (Martens, 2015).
For example, in the early years of the printing press, books were considered a high value commodity and children were considered to be ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. Sociologically, the ‘being’ child is seen as a social actor actively constructing ‘childhood’, the ‘becoming’ child is seen as an ‘adult in the making’, lacking competencies of the ‘adult’ that he or she will ‘become’ (Cross, 2011).
Early childhood was understood as a time where children potentially are unable to handle or care for materials like books, as they had no use for books, because they couldn’t as yet read and the market produced few books directed at the mind of the child. The role of the librarian was to safeguard and protect the books from the children. Books were not generously handed to children and rarely left the library space, if children were even allowed within, that is! When children were permitted to engage or the library had books for children, they were of a particular kind – instructive. However, as time has passed and social shifts have occurred, our culture began to recognize that reading is an artificial act stimulated by engagement with books from the earliest ages. We began to understand that the mind of the child is able and ready to process all types of narratives, and in fact is strengthened from it. Technological development in printing and emerging markets is producing more books directed at children. This, among other movements, results in very young children being welcomed into progressive libraries, products being made for this age group, programs and engagements designed to include. Such activities affect childhood and form new cultural practices.
Thus, we may come to recognize that childhood, as a, category is not fixed, it changes over time and geography, class and caste and is shaped by other movements in society. How then, does the library and the library educator respond to the child and to children?
Broadly, we may understand this by accepting that dominant society’s notions about childhood may fit one of these views:
Children as vulnerable and in need of protection Children as resilient and in need of freedom.
Children as potential human capital and in need of training and direction.
Children as future citizens and in need of nationalizing.
At different times in our relatively young history of library work and children, we encounter practices that harbour one or more of these childhood notions and we must compel ourselves to examine this if we are to interact with children.
Let us attempt to do this by focusing on a few aspects of the library by naming a library aspect and participating in a brief reflective exercise.
Space
In our work, we constantly encounter the practice of limiting library access during exam / test schedules in school. This is reinforced by parents and dutifully followed by children. What it may mean is that for general educators, the library space is not a cognitively serious space – it cannot be inhabited when there are high demands of attention, retention, reproduction, and examination.
However, conversations with children about the library during times of exam/test reveal different aspects of thinking.
- “I love the library period during tests, because for some time I can forget the stress and just be.”
- “If the sports ground is closed, then I would choose the library during an exam break because it feels more free than the classroom.”
- “I don’t know how to answer, because in our school, the library is closed during exams and tests but if it was open, I would go.”
None of these students go to the same school or would be considered deep readers but they all have absorbed an essence of what the library space can do. Their childhood experiences are being shaped by the culture of practice but the culture of practice around ‘exams’ is also shaping their childhood experience and the library.
An exercise: If libraries are open during exams, what risks or benefits to childhood would we incur? In trying to think of this, what do you recognize as your framework on childhood? Can you think of other aspects of space in your library that may enable you to examine deeper childhood notions?
Seating – is it fixed or open? Is it formal or casual? Is it rule governed or based on collaborative agreements? Is it padded, protected, colourful, and cartoony? Is it separate for different age groups? Is it individual or group? Is it uniform or varied?
Look around your library and identify spatial features that may enable you to examine how your library constructs childhood through space and place.
Collection
“Just because I like cricket does not mean I want to read books about cricket,” was a strong, brave comment that I heard one day in the library. In my frame of thinking of books and the child at the time, I imagined I would start with what the child likes and lure them towards a more varied selection. I was drawing on the construct of childhood aimed at directing the child, but the child read me quick and fast and alerted me to their own interests, which were more varied. I had to pause and re-examine and learn and it has been wondrous ever since. But, this may only become possible when the child and the collection in the library offer the necessary conditions of choice, space, trust, time, and such. Were I to hold tight and fast to the idea that children should be handed a text, based on some scheme or notion I hold unexamined, I would have lost a good reader and a wonderful friend in the library.
The construct around childhood that centers on the child as an active agent, the child as capable of choice, selection, articulation, freedom may enable us to socialize library practices that live up to the maxims we articulate around libraries being havens/refuges/paradise.
Sanitizing the collection, investing heavily in moral stories, selections only on biographies of ‘great’ leaders, stocking texts that only reproduce more and more dimensions of the lived experiences of dominant groups, having multiple retellings of a single mythology and gatekeeping access are ways that we may be subscribing inadvertently to a notion around childhood. Are we ready to examine this to fulfill the promise that Rebecca Lukens (2013) says about collection? To her, at its core, literature helps us to struggle with the question, What is it like to be a complicated human living in a complicated world? For this, our collection in the library has to be diverse, varied, and curated.
An exercise: Think of the books you promote or validate in your collection. What does this say about the notion of childhood that is influencing you? Do you desire to re-examine this? Why? Why not?
Many library folk we meet, subscribe to the idea of readers’ interests as a collection development principle. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this if one is truly subscribing to the idea of freedom and resilience. But it requires that this is cultural – in all aspects of the child’s world, which is not the case. The market, for example, will produce books that are selling, not necessarily books that are opening up different worlds to readers. So, popular demand becomes tokenistic in the library and also reduces the potential of what a good collection can do. How would you balance this?
Library educator
This concept and terminology – not a librarian but a library educator – is only a little over a decade old and was intended to be awarded to adults who had completed a rigorous, intensive professional development course, the Library Educators Certificate (LEC) course (Noronha, S. 2016). The full-grown human being (adult) in the library is considered to be critical, because the possibility of ‘becoming’ for the child comes alive through the adult. It is interesting to note that in the past few years, anyone who works with children and the library, is self labelling as a library educator. It fills me with hope because it indicates that the notion of childhood that dominated children’s library spaces – book keeper, child minder, surrogate teacher, disciplinarian, tuition teacher, art and craft ma’am, exam supervisor, clerk, laboratory assistant, free period in-charge, substitute teacher … are being cast aside. As a children’s library becomes a space of consideration with more awareness, and professional development opportunities are redefining the identity of the adult in the library, a fresh future is imagined for children and the library. It means that adults who work in the library desire to lift the library and all its possibilities as a progressive act of education. They also desire to define their identity within it more clearly. Something far more serious and purposeful than mere recreation or improving literacy and language skills or child minding, is being implied with the term Library Educator.
In time, this kind of naming movement may well shift the nature of what happens in the library space and with an active reflection on why we do what we do, we can move into an imagination where the profession of educators who work within the library is in conflict with the general social construction of childhood and the library of the past. But, how does one begin this shift?
An exercise: Listen to this podcast where I am in conversation with a remarkable child-centric librarian, Usha Mukunda, and reflect on what you can do to affirm children and the library. https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/livefromthelibrary
Conclusion
In a neo-liberal economy where society itself is a potential threat to the wellbeing of our children and our humanity we must examine what we want for children and the library. Can we consider a move beyond the limitations and rootedness of the library as a mere space of information, recreation, direction, and preparation for adulthood? Can we move towards the construction of a library that is held by a community of children, young adults, and adults with voice and agency, reflective and responsive at all times? Can we examine our notions around children, unsettle ideas we hold about cultures and childhoods and imagine a way forward? In even imagining this possibility, can we gift ourselves an affirmation that children and the library have a rich possibility of nurturing hope for a fresh future? I trust that when I ask this question, you will reply, yes, we can!
For further reading on childhood consider
- Ba’,S. (2021). The critique of Sociology of Childhood: Human capital as the concrete ‘social construction of childhood’. Power and Education, 13(2),73-87. https://doi.org/10.1177/17577438211011637
- Butcher,Lucy (2022). The Social Construction of Childhood explored with reference to Matilda. https://www.letterpressproject.co.uk/media/file/LB1.pdf
- Geetha,V (2020). Childhood in the Neo Liberal Age.
- Saraswathi,T.S., Menon,S., & Madan,A. (Eds.). (2017). Childhoods in India: Traditions, Trends and Transformations (1st ed.). Routledge India.
- Stauffer,S.M. (2014). The Dangers of Unlimited Access: Fiction, the Internet and the Social Construction of Childhood. Library & Information Science Research, 36 (3/4), 154-162. Retrieved from https://repository.lsu.edu/slis_pubs/35
References
- A Critical Handbook of Children’s Literature. Rebecca J Lukens 2013.
- Analysing the Role of Culture in Shaping American Childhood: A Twentieth Century Case. P. N Stearne. 2009.
- Childhood and Culture Reflected Through the Lens of LIS Education: Embedded Practice in Danish Library and Information Science Education. Marianne Martens. 2015.
- Children and Society. Beth Cross. 2011.
- What is in a Name? Sujata Noronha. 2016.
The author is an educator based in Goa and a founder of Bookworm, a not for profit library based organization. She can be reached at sujata@bookwormgoa.in.
