Using Digital Latino Children's Books to Promote Multiple Literacies

Bradley, Rebecca

INFO 266

Fall 2016

Naidoo, J. C. (2010). Using print and digital Latino children’s books to promote multiple literacies in classrooms and libraries. In J. C. Naidoo (Ed.), Celebrating cuentos: promoting Latino children’s literature and literacy in classrooms and libraries (pp. 301-317). Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.

As a relatively new Spanish bilingual teacher-librarian in a high-needs public elementary school in San Francisco, I spent my first year completely reorganizing the library space. Before I started this project, all of the Spanish books were stuffed into one shelf area with several small rolling carts used for overflow. After months of hard work and funding for new shelving, the library is now clearly divided so that all of the English books are on one side and all of the Spanish books are on the other and are spread out among seven new ample book shelves. Starting this year, I am focused on improving the online links for teachers and students on our school library webpage as well as providing relevant and engaging lessons teaching our students how to use online resources effectively. Therefore, Jamie Naidoo’s essay has given me wonderful ideas about using digital resources among our Latino students.

Naidoo’s essay recreates a lesson by a sixth grade teacher reading Julia Alvarez’s Return to Sender, which sparks a lively debate about immigration and deportation among his students. To learn more, the teacher directs students to a Webquest site where they find out information on current immigration laws as well as important leaders in the Latino community such as César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. Quite frankly, this lesson overview has opened my eyes to a myriad of ways in which I could enhance the learning experiences of the students at our school. The only obstacle I see at this point is the fact that the fourth and fifth graders are already loaded down with reports on other topics such as the California Native American tribes and US Presidents, which are required by California curriculum standards. Nevertheless, it is worth talking to the upper grade teachers at my school about fitting in a new topic such as immigration that is more personally relevant to our students given that more than 90% are Latino.

Closing the Digital Divide: Latinos and Technology Adoption

Bradley, Rebecca
INFO 266
Fall 2016

López, M., González-Barrera, A. & Patten, E. (2013). Closing the digital divide: Latinos and technology adoption. Retrieved from the Pew Hispanic Center website: http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/03/07/closing-the-digital-divide-latinos-and-technology-adoption/

This report conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center in 2013 presents interesting information about Latino Internet usage, which could be helpful to both school and public libraries attempting to better understand and reach out to Hispanic community. As in most articles and reports, the authors chose to use “Latino” to mean anyone of Hispanic heritage living in the United States. This includes people born in the U.S. as well as immigrants.

This report shows that some 78% of Latinos said they used the Internet or sent or received email at least occasionally, which is up 14% since 2009. However, there was still a lingering digital divide among Latinos. In simple terms, English-dominant, US-born, younger, and richer Latinos were more likely to go online than Spanish-dominant, foreign-born, older, and lower-income families. (See graph below.)

As a Spanish bilingual elementary school librarian, this report confirms what I have already suspected. Many older immigrant parents at my school seem quite uncomfortable using the Internet to find resources for their children while younger, U.S.-educated parents appear to have fewer qualms doing so. However, in my opinion the greatest obstacle for the older immigrant parents is their low-level of formal education and in many cases illiteracy. One of my professional goals as a librarian is to offer reading classes to Latino parents in Spanish in hopes of empowering them to feel more at ease with books, libraries, and online resources.

Approaches to Selection, Access, and Collection Development in the Web World: A Case Study with Fugitive Literature

Schmidt, K., Shelburne, W. A., & Vess, D. S. (2008). Approaches to selection, access, and collection development in the web world: a case study with fugitive literature. Library Resources & Technical Services, 52(3), 184-191.

In this highly fascinating article, the authors discuss the challenges of collection development from the Internet.  They address the application of existing skills and knowledge to collect materials from the Web, and in particular focused on the topic of hate literature.  Such fugitive literature, the authors state, “contains important manifestations of present day social and political history, art, and literature, and primary cultural output” (p. 184).  This topic had relevance to special collections already at the university where the authors work, and thus could be used to enhance these collections.  The central questions they wanted to answer were: how to locate this material; and how it might enrich an existing collection (either print or electronic).  The authors targeted Internet hate literature on websites that came from Illinois or surrounding Midwestern states (Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana).  An overwhelming number of sites were found, but eight websites/groups were eventually chosen for the study.  Some included the usual suspects such as Ku Klux Klan websites, or other white supremacist websites/groups, but some of the others were somewhat surprising, such as the Nation of Islam, Jewish Defense League, and the New Black Panthers.  The authors found that building a sustained collection of primary source materials from the web was very labor-intensive.  Various tools, programs, and webcrawlers were used, such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and Archive-It.  A number of lessons learned from their project were provided to those interested in this work, and the authors write that “a powerful symmetry exists between the process of developing print collections and that of developing digital collections from the Internet” (p. 189).  And that this work is very accessible to subject bibliographers and specialists in research libraries.  Lastly, the authors argue that it’s the duty of librarians to collect and preserve such digital material, as they our part of our cultural heritage, which librarians have done with other types of material.  Print items in current collections may have appeared to be fringe back when they were collected, but are considered to have rich research value today.  This article was very interesting because it explores the issues of collecting from the Web (and thus very relevant to librarians today), but equally interesting was the fact that they chose hate literature as the focus.  I highly recommend this article.