Riverside High School Library

 For my third interview, I spoke with Anna Webb (who is a high school librarian at Riverside High School) about the shared foundation of "Include". A list of interview questions can be found here.

Riverside High School is a 9-12th grade school that serves around 1,800 students. This is a very academic focused school, a very affluent school with lots of clubs, sports, and other after school activities that students participate in. They have many state ranked extra curriculars and all of the students are very involved. There is also a large population of students from multicultural backgrounds.

For Anna, the include shared foundation is not necessarily about activities and programming but about making sure that all students from all backgrounds are included in the school. As a result, she has really pushed for a focus on providing materials in students' native languages. All of the required reading texts for English classes are offered in all of the school's common languages and there are also many other popular titles that are offered in those languages. She also has a plan in place to start purchasing more resources for visually impaired students. 

She also works in collaboration with teachers to encourage students to understand differing view points. For example, one project that she works on is the Pro/Con assignment where students have to study and argue both the pros and cons of a particular issue. This is a great assignment for getting students to understand differing viewpoints but also to get them to discuss those viewpoints respectfully because they do have to look at both sides and they do have to research both sides.

One of the biggest challenges that this library faces is that there is not a regular class time for students. A lot of the students drop by during lunch or between classes. As a result, there are not many whole class lessons and the library has to rely on passive programming and displays to get indirect teaching across. Displays end up being a great way to provide students with indirect instruction on the "include" shared foundation. Anna and her media clerk, Stephanie, spend a lot of time building displays that celebrate different perspectives. For example, they just finished up a display highlighting different recommendations for Kpop fans. They want students to be able to walk in and see something that they immediately relate to, or something that they can immediately recognize and gets them thinking.

In my previous career as a third grade teacher, I worked in a school that had a 70% Hispanic population with a large percentage of those students being new to the country (meaning they spoke little to no English). Anna's focus on providing resources in native languages is something that really resonated with me. When I was building my classroom library, I wanted my students to be able to access the books in my library. I spent a lot of time working to build a library that had high interest, low readability books as well as books in other languages. As a librarian, I want to continue to find resources that include all students. I want them to feel like they are welcome and celebrate and not that the library is a place that is not accessible to them.