This week school librarians across the U.S. are collaborating with classroom teachers to promote students’ freedom to read. In many school libraries, librarians have put up displays that spotlight challenged books; many are leading students in discussions about censorship. This Pinterest “Banned Books Week” search yields photographs of many such displays.

While displays are important, they can isolate students’ questions and discussions about their Constitutional freedom to read in the library. Other school librarians are involving their faculty in order to diffuse these conversations throughout the building.

Seanean Shanahan, teacher librarian at Mesa Middle School in Castle Rock, Colorado, spent part of the summer developing a logo that read: “I Read Banned Books And I Cannot Lie.” (See her logo at redbubble.com: https://goo.gl/4s0edX)

She created an iron-on and placed it on shirts, which she presented to the classroom teachers in the English language arts (ELA) department. She also provided them with a list of the frequently challenged and banned books that are on the shelves in their small library. The classroom teachers used fabric markers to add the titles of banned books they had read to their shirts. (All of the titles they added are in the Mesa Middle School Library collection.)

While all of the shirts started the same, they ended up very different. The ELA teachers agreed to wear their shirts on the first school day of Banned Books Week, today, Monday, September 26, 2017. Seanean hopes to snap a photo of the group wearing their personalized “I Read Banned Books And I Cannot Lie” shirts.

Last year, Seanean asked classroom teachers to volunteer to wear cards around their necks that had the picture of the cover of a banned book on one side and the reasons, locations, and years those books were banned or challenged on the reverse side. They wore the cards around school for the week and many of the teachers started trading them around.

You can reach Seanean on Twitter @Librarytalker if you have questions about her efforts to support students’ understanding of their Freedom to Read.

How are you leading and involving your learning community in #bannedbooksweek?

Image courtesy of Banned Books Week.org