Join me! Trauma-Informed Care: An Introduction for Libraries

UPDATE 9/25/2020: The class is now full! Here goes nothing...

Trauma-Informed Care: An Introduction for Libraries, Oct 5-Nov 15 through UW-Madison iSchool.

 So. Things are interesting, to say the least.

For instance, Larry attends Zoom meetings.

When I last taught "Trauma-Informed Care: An Introduction for Libraries," one of my main objectives was to build empathy for people with backgrounds in trauma through sharing real-life experiences as myself, a person with a brain rewired to expect stress due to trauma. The course was approached with the assumption that there would be a mix of people who would see themselves in the content, people who had some familiarity with the content, and people who possibly needed some convincing that trauma isn't just some buzzword or excuse.

Well, times have changed since *checks post date* last September. My April 30 webinar on trauma responses during a pandemic has been viewed over THREE THOUSAND times. Only like 5 of those were my parents (Twenty, tops). Every day there's new evidence of a population whose brains are overflowing with stress and are acting on ill-planned, counter-intuitive, and counterproductive attempts at self-preservation (to be clear, I'm talking about people who ignore reasonable health guidelines and/or are violent about their need for a haircut, for instance; and not people protesting police brutality). Amid this backdrop public-facing service workers are being met with vitriol for trying to keep themselves and the community safe.

The need for a commitment to trauma-informed principles is, I'd say, pretty clear.

My course on this topic is not the do-all-end-all in healing the world, but it can help you and your colleagues approach work in a way that is helpful for everyone (including yourselves).

Topics I'll cover include:

New Course this Fall! Trauma-Informed Care: An Introduction For Libraries

As long-time readers may recall, I've been interested in and studying topics related to trauma since I first learned about the Adverse Childhood Experiences study in 2013.  I've written a lot related to trauma since, and to be quite honest my research has transformed the way I approach my work, as well as my relationships to other people and the world in general. In April 2018, I was chosen by Trauma-Informed Oregon to be trained as a community trainer, and have developed and delivered library-specific training to local library staff, which has been well-received.

So I'm so pleased to announce that I will be running the course:
Trauma-Informed Care: An Introduction for Libraries through UW-SLIS Continuing Education, November 4-December 15, 2019! Register before October 20 for a 10% discount!

Like my past, well-reviewed courses, this course is designed to have an extremely reasonable workload and will be a mix of reflection, action, and tips you can use right away. The class is asynchronous, which means we won't be meeting live and you can engage with each week's content when you can. Each week there will be one or two discussion questions. There will be final project that will consist of anything that will help you going forward (a presentation to your board, a letter to your director, a blue print, something else? It's up to you!).

As always with my courses, you're welcome to download all the material to share among others in your library, so I hope you will see this as a good investment.

I've said on Twitter previously that preparing for this course has made my Disability Community in the Library course feel like Sunday brunch. Like that course, Trauma-Informed Care: An Introduction for Libraries is steeped in my lived experience and so may be different from other training you may have gotten about these concepts.

Here's some of the topics we'll cover:

Rerun This Fall! The Disability Community in the Library: The Class

I am so happy to announce that this Fall I will be teaching the online course, "The Disability Community in the Library" with the University of Wisconsin-Madison iSchool Continuing Education program! The course will run November 5-December 16, 2018. Register by October 22, 2018 for a 10% discount!

Unsure if this course is for you? Need some help justifying this course to your admin? Read on for more information!

The Disability Community in the Library: The Class

A cartoon cat in a space helmet with a key, emerging from a fancy door with a galaxy pattern behind it.

(Accessibility series logo by Chris at On a Roll Designs)

(who also wrote this amazing post)

A year ago, after hearing about the massacre at Sagamihara  I felt a lot of silence from, like, everyone, but also specifically from my online library communities. A lot of feelings I've had in libraries since I began came to a very abrupt head.

I decided that the hurt I felt was powerful enough to identify myself plainly as the disability killjoy I've always been so scared of being.

Never feeling "disabled enough" to identify as disabled, and not abled enough to shake a person's hand, I fought my entire life to hold onto the illusion  of a modicum of abled privilege that passing gets me; only to live through experiences that reinforced, again and again, how little society regards me once it finds out I tricked it and ~SURPRISE~ I'm not the "normal" person you thought I was and HERE I AM, IN YOUR SPACE. OOPS. (oh, and also how little it regards PWD in general, usually while "passing").

No more of that. After a summer of near constant grief I realized I had no choice, as someone with privilege/power both socially and professionally, but to talk about my disability as openly as I could and amplify the existing voices of the disability community within the world of libraries. I was new, and learning, and I'm still far from calling myself an activist, but it was all I could think of to do.

The Importance of Deliberate Play Opportunities for School-age Kids and Teens

In the spirit of Summer Reading, this post will be filled with completely unrelated galaxy cats.

I’ve talked about the power of play in relation to early literacy and the Babies Need Words Every Day campaign. Today, I want to talk about the importance of the deliberate use of play with school-age children and adolescents.

When we talk about play and creativity in the library, we often talk about young children. And why not? Play is one of Every Child Ready to Read’s five practices. Once children hit kindergarten, though, we talk about makerspaces. We talk about STEM. Even though these are steeped in self-discovery in the library, the overt goal is to educate. Or, at least, add to our evidence that the library helps children “learn” by the academic definition. And for good reason:  It’s clear that libraries have resonated with stake holders about their role in early literacy education. The next obvious step is to show that we make an academic difference with school-age children. Some libraries do pre- and post-tests to prove Summer Reading helps prevent the Summer Slide. I’ve created outreach with measurable alignment to State Standards.

But it’s important not to lose the very real fact that play has non-academic benefits. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you may notice that even saying this signals a huge shift in my thinking over the past year or so. Down to the deepest parts of my heart and soul, I am an educator who was born out of the public school system and for all its faults I will defend what is considered a public school classroom until at least the end of this sentence, and probably after that. I will give you that it’s not for every single individual; but public education has never been about The Single Individual, anyway.

That’s why I think it may feel so critical to me that I separate the library from its possible academic benefits here.  Play has so many additional benefits, especially for school-age children and adolescents who come from backgrounds in trauma: those who live with food insecurity or transiency, those who live with toxic stress, those who live in volatile or neglectful environments. Those who may not have a space to play. Basically, a lot of the kids and teens who come into our libraries whether we’re aware of it or not.

If we wanted more deliberately center our school-age and teen programming around play in a non-academic way, what could we say to justify it?

Iron Fist:the Class II

HEY EVERYONE.

Didn't get a chance to take my continuing education course "Child Development, Library Space, and Behavior" last Spring? 

Have you been regretting it forever as your drown in a sea of disruptive children and your own tears?

Have stumbled on my Iron Fist posts since and would like to learn more about behavior management?

Or are you just looking to take a class about stuff in libraries that you literally won't find anywhere else?

WELL YOU'RE IN LUCK because I'm so excited to announce that Iron Fist: the Class is happening AGAIN March 21-April 29, 2016. Click here to get more information and to register.  Register by March 6 and get 10% off!

Need to convince yourself or the Powers That Be that this class is worth your funds/time? Here's a ridiculously stellar endorsement of this course by Rebecca McCorkindale, who I've dubbed The Librarian Who Saved SRP 2015. 

Here are a few more details if you're on the fence:

Kindergarten/1st grade Librarian Class Visit

Newspaper clipping of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist.
Headline reads "Old Man Yells at Cloud".

In November, a K-1 split teacher at a local parochial school wanted a tour of the North community branch library, which is about a half-mile away and therefore walking distance for the small class.

Except, you know, when the high is 17 degrees.

After the class rescheduled twice and cancelled at basically the last minute once, we probably could have just said, "hey, we'll see you in the Spring." But truthfully, this wasn't one of our "regular field trip patron" classes and I really wanted to seize the momentum, not letting them forget about us. So, with the promise that they would in fact schedule a tour in the Spring, I went about concocting an engaging visit that would get a bunch of kindergarten and first graders sufficiently pumped about the library without them actually getting to go to the library, where many of them had never been before. They didn't even have a library at school!

Tween Scavenger Hunt in the Library!

We have been fortunate enough to partner with many groups in the library. One group, and adventure camp with 10-25 kids, visited the library each week to look around. They were planning a biking tour of scavenger hunts around town for one of their final projects, and wanted us in on the action.

I met with the group leaders a twice before hand, once with Brooke. They were undergraduate students trying so hard not to look like they were undergraduate students. They came in with ideas that were SO NOT doable, I left the first meeting with a bad taste in my mouth. I wonder how often this happens in libraries, that University students ("on behalf "of their universities, of course) come into the public library asking for a hell of a lot, and we take it as kind of an insult: What do they think we do all day? What kind of partnership IS this? But then I remembered: I was a 20-year-old education student once, too, and I remember what it was like to dream of all this stuff I could do with kids but it was like really, really, a lot, and dependent on lots of factors that I could not control, but I assumed I could do it all JUST AS SOON as I got that degree. THEN I would change the world. WITH KNOWLEDGE. And that's where these kids' heads were at. Needless to say, there were no rhyming verses, or archives work, or riddles they would need to ask multiple staff members for, or any other of their (very good, from an idealistic perspective) ideas. I asked for their input without promising anything. They actually had really good insight on how well their kids could read (pretty well, with one reluctant reader), what their favorite spots in the library were (00s and the graphic novels), where they were having trouble (finding good chapter books and the catalog). I ended up incorporating this into the hunt.


I wanted to make sure what we did was engaging for the kids as well as super-easy on the precarious sanity of a short-staffed summer (say that five time fast). And then, I remembered there are actually two episodes of Adventure Time that take place in a library. And with a GIF, an incredibly easy-to-make/engaging Tween Scavenger Hunt was born.

"K-5 Programming": Differentiating in the Library

This week I had a program where I picked the incorrect book. It was a good book, and good for the topic, and a perfect read-aloud for 8-12 year-old kids.
...Problem was, the day of the program, 4-8 year-old kids showed up. I still "read" the book, skimming pages while following the story; but I left the program disappointed in myself. Why hadn't I prepared for this? Why didn't I just skip the book when I saw who was there? 

I'm kind of glad this came up, because another Iron Fist post has been rattling around in my head, this time about helping kids navigate your programming for success. Truly, the following post is probably step #1 in Traditional Programming Child Management: is your program developmentally appropriate? This is really important to think about now that we're all trying STE(a)M at our libraries. I'm not saying that toddlers can't love learning about the weather or that fifth graders can't love sensory activities; but: how are these ideas presented? Are you explaining clouds in a tangible way that toddlers can connect to their world? Are you talking to fifth graders about the weird things their senses do every day without their knowledge to screw with their heads so they're interested? If they're bored out of their skulls, kids will let you know by acting out. Chaos or disinterest in your program is not their fault, it's yours.

I don't say that to be harsh, I promise. I say that to empower us all: their interest in your program is under your control. 

As I thought about my book of choice, and how disappointed in myself I was, I realized that my programming is influenced by education in a way that I never realized before: differentiating instruction.