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bjbj [MUSIC] John Cole: Well, welcome to the Library of Congress. I m John Cole. I m the
director of The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, and I m also a historian
of the Library of Congress. So I am going to say a word about the historic significance
of the place in which we sit, and are having this wonderful program today. The Library
of Congress itself is an appropriate place for a presentation of multicultural book and
talking in multicultural ways. This is the largest library in the world, and we re fortunate
enough to have some congressional support to make us into a world library. And we re
one of the few libraries that collect in all languages, in all formats, and are very pleased
to be able to have multiformat materials. As a matter of fact, Daniel Boorstein who
was the librarian of congress a number of years ago, who actually created The Center
for the Book, called this place a multimedia encyclopedia. And today we can add multicultural,
multimedia encyclopedia to the description. I hope if you ve never been here before that
when the program is over, you will take a look upstairs at the Great Hall and get to
know this wonderful structure. This building was opened in 1897. We now have two other
large buildings on this campus, on Capital Hill, plus annexes in other places. Above
all, we are a collection of educational materials. There are about a hundred and sixty million
items in our collections of which around thirty million are books. And of the thirty million,
of course, there are many specialized collections. There are also about twenty reading rooms
in the Library of Congress. This is a special place for young readers. It s not an official
reading room; it s better than an official reading room. It s a program space for people
or kids sixteen and under as long as they are accompanied by an adult or have an escort.
This is revolutionary for the Library of Congress. We have only been open for two years. The
decision was made by my boss, Dr. James Billington, the librarian of Congress that the Library
of Congress needed to open itself up in ways we had never done so. In our other twenty
reading rooms, you need to be sixteen or older to get a readers card. In this day and age,
everyone felt that it was ridiculous for the Library of Congress not to pay attention to
young readers, and it was Dr. Billington s initiative that brought us here today. I hope
you had a chance to look at all three of these rooms. I think we will by the time we have
finished the program. The Young Reader s Center is administered by The Center for the Book,
and Jane Gilchrist [PH] who is the head of The Young Reader s Center is over here. Jane
is our welcoming presence and we re very pleased that she is able to help us with The Young
Reader s Center. We also have a variety of volunteers, interns, and students, and we
have reading promotion partners, such as Reading is Fundamental that are part of this network.
The final word about our networks, and then I will be quite, and start the program. We
really exist through two national networks. There are state centers for The Book in all
the states, plus DC, and the *** Islands. And guess who had to go to the *** Islands
to open it up? Unidentified Male: Ah! [LAUGH] poor man. We pay him. All: [LAUGH] John Cole:
They all work at the local levels to promote writers, and writing, and books, and literacy,
and reading. We have eighty organizations, nonprofit or government organizations including
Reading is Fundamental that we work with in both programing and partnership ways to try
to do what we can together to stimulate reading and literacy for people of all ages. So, it
RIF has been a partner since the very beginning of The Center for the Book in 1977. I may
say a word about that later, but now to move into our program and I want to make certain
it _____ [00:04:38] Judy Cheatham who is the vice president of Literacy Services in RIF
who is going to introduce the program and get us started in what is a unique program
that is going to substantially contribute to the mission of both the Center of the Book,
The Young Reader s Center, and the Library of Congress. We love books. We love RIF. Judy,
it s yours. Thank you. All: [APPLAUSE] Judy Cheatham: Thank you John. We are delighted
to be here at Reading is Fundamental with our old friends and our new friends, and this
amazing panel. We found out we had this opportunity about three weeks ago, and we ve got the best
in the fields all across the board, and everybody did this just for us. Dr. Brushak [PH] said
he had two days between now and the end of the year, and he loved RIF so much that he
would come and see us. So, I want to introduce you to Dr. Harris, Dr. Brushak, Liz Lopez,
and Mr. Meyers [PH]. If you want to read about them, unless you re hiding under a rock, you
already know about them, but here is a brief introduction and you ll have the opportunity
after we finish our discussion to have them sign your books. We have a copy of each of
their books for you, and they have graciously agreed during our reception to have a book
signing for us. So that will be wonderful. Now let s get to the program, and what a timely
program it is. We are going to start ve asked Dr. Harris, Violet if she would come set the
stage for us. Anything that happens culturally or educationally, or socially, always has
a philosophical base, a social/emotional affective base, and for those of us who teach then pedagogical
implications. So we ve asked Dr. Harris if she would kind of give us a little framework.
Dr. Harris: Okay that s a big chore, especially for me because I tend to go off on tangents
and will remember books and people and times associated with those books. But we re at
a point in our lives in this society when it is quite important for us to treasure and
value the book, whether that book is in digital format or print format, it is vitally important
that we make that literature available for children. I m of the belief, and I m sure
many of us here are of the belief that having that literature is as vital to us as breathing,
or eating, or drinking water. And that something in our lives is lacking if we don t have literature
in our lives, or art, and music, and many other disciplines as well. But we re especially
lacking in that literature that we label multicultural, and we have to thank, the late, Dr. Nancy
Larik [PH] who nearly sixty seven years ago published an article, and she wasn t the first
to push for this literature by any means. There were people who came prior to her. In
Washington DC, you had Dr. Carter G Woodson [PH] who had the Association for the Study
of *** Life and History, who published books in the 1920s. You had Dr. W.E.B Du Bois [PH]
publishing books in the 1920s, and you had Wigwam [PH] Journal in the 1800 s with Native
Americans, and _____ [00:08:17] New York City pushing for the literature. So lots of people
were engaged in this work, but she captured the imagination of the American public at
a critical time in 1965, in the Saturday [PH] Post when she published the All White World
of Children s Books. Think about that, in 1965 how critical was that time period, and
there was a great deal of soul searching going on. How can we say to the rest of the world
that you need to model yourselves after us, in our educational systems, our political
systems, our economic systems and so forth, when you disenfranchise a significant portion
of your citizenry? So, that article sparked a lot of self reflection among teachers, librarians,
writers, illustrators, publishers. You had groups that were formed, and you also had
some significant changes occurring. More authors were being published. Christopher s Father
won one of the contests sponsored by one of the organizations that was created in the
1960s by The Council of Interracial Books for Youth, and that s an important element
to know. There has always been individuals of varying cultures, languages, ethnicity,
races, etcetera, coming together to ensure the children have access to the literature.
And it has been that important, but I want to emphasize to us, it is a fight that goes
constantly on. Each generation or even every couple of years or so, your father wrote an
article, two steps forward, one step back to indicate what was occurring at the publishing.
Joseph was sharing that his books are going out of print with one of the publishing companies.
Bilingual books are under fire across the country. So, we need to have these books available
for children. Not just the children who are _____ [00:10:25], and whose stories are told
in those books, but for every child. How can you have The American Literature with significant
portions of people who contribute to that literature not included, and that everyone
else does not read it? I could no more not read Cinderella that I could not read Ya Chen,
which is like our oldest variance of Cinderella that we have, and knowing that that is a universal
fairy tale, that will sometimes have males. That will not always have a glass slipper,
but fruit [PH] and occasionally some other elements attached to it. It is very important
for children to know. The literature should be used as we use any literature, primarily
because it entertains; it engages the reader intellectually, emotionally, esthetically.
Think about the language that you find in books. Think about the art that you find in
books. Think about the phrase that you find in a text that stays with you forever and
ever. Imagine children not having that, because the author is African-American or Latina,
or the author is _____ [00:11:36], and so on. So, you can not exclude the literature
from them, because any literature has the possibility of affecting a child in a myriad
of ways. I m being very pragmatic, because we also have to show to demonstrate the value
of literature. It's not enough to say that literature is great for children anymore.
That argument doesn't hold water in an era of palatability and testing. So we have to
point out these quiet pragmatic aspects of it, and one of those pragmatic aspects that
I'd like to point out is that exposing children to a variety of written and artistic modes
increases their vocabulary, increases and improves their reading comprehension skills,
provides them with models of oral and written language. I, for example learned the use of
semicolons, not from a teacher drilling me on it, but looking at how they were used in
language. And what I'll leave you with, because she's giving me the sign. _____ [00:12:40]
All: [LAUGH] Dr. Harris: I mean, I could go on, is that I have seen this literature, year-after-year,
readers, and it does transform them. Can you imagine at one point a couple of months I
had young men come into my office during office hours to talk about their programs and things
of that sort, and these were young African-American males who are in our Bachelorette Programs.
And they would leave out of my office sometimes crying. So I finally had to go out to the
people in the outer room saying, I m not doing anything to make these guys cry. I m just
simply showing them books, and when you have people who can look at a work of literature,
and cry, because they can never seen anything so beautiful before, or because they'd never
seen a book like this before in their entire experience growing up, that's transformative,
but shows how much we have yet to do in terms of making this literature available to all
children. In case you were wondering what book was that they had to read, people read
in my office, crying, but also being proud, and wanting to go out, and purchase it, it
was Kadir Nelson's We are the Ship, and they were just mesmerized my that particular book.
One young man, he literally would pick it up, and hold it like this, and was talking
about his program then he would start looking inside, and just let him go on, and do that,
and he'd just pick write back up about our discussion about his program. And I finally
had to say, you know, you really have to leave my book, because I'm going to be using it
in class this week. So you can't take it with you, but he ordered it, and each of those
young men in my in that classroom, ordered those books. But also I can give you other
examples of the ways in which not having this literature is affecting so many of our students.
We use two books with my undergraduate students, and many of these young women are from middle
to upper middle class families, from the suburbs of Chicago primarily, and they're in training
to become teachers. And they're going to work with a student population that in about ten
years will be majority Latino and African-American, but the teaching population will still be
majority of young white women. And we had _____ [00:15:03], because I wanted to give
them an understanding of literature in its broadest sense. So, we read Day of Tears,
by Julius Lester which was about the largest slave auction in The U.S., and also Hotel
on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, and of those sixty plus young men and women in that
classroom, I would say only about fifteen percent knew about the events depicted in
those two books. In their American History courses throughout their schooling, they were
not told about those events. The two iconic events that they're often told about slavery's
glossed over, completely. The two iconic events that they're often told about are Rosa Parks,
and Martin Luther King. They don't have other historical events. They don't see history
as an ongoing process in which they two are engaged, and which multiple people have participated.
And to me, that signals that in the Twenty-first Century we still have a lot of work to do
to ensure that our children know the history of this country. Not a selective history,
but history of everyone who's contributed to the making of this country, so that we
don't have mistakes [PH] with the state of Virginia publishing a textbook which states
that a significant number of slaves walked with the confederacy; so that we don t have
the textbooks not mentioning Angle Island, so that we don't have textbooks mentioning
Day of Tears. So that we don't have textbooks not mentioning The Trail of Tears, so that
we don't have textbooks from which Law versus Little is not mentioned. So that people do
not only associate immigration issues with Latinos, that they know it started by a Chinese
family who could either be classified as Spanish or White or Black. We need to know that if
we're going to know who we are as a people, and where we're going to go as a people. And
by the way, the woman who wrote that history textbook for Virginia, she got her information
off the internet. [LAUGH] And just as we now have a serious issue of Arizona in which the
books were taken off the shelves in classrooms recently, because Arizona has decreed that
they no longer want mixed studies [PH], but they didn't say all of mixed studies. They
singled out particular groups. So, what is it about these books that some people find
so transformative, and other people find flawed [PH]. And we need to allow children an opportunity
to engage with these texts, so that they can develop the critical thinking skills that
are needed in order to make judgements on their own, without resorting to dogma of any
kind. Even in my home, I m tempted to bring to my classroom soap box, so they'll say,
I'm on my soapbox now. So, you can take it for what it is. But one soap box that I will
always be on is the idea that literature is vital to children, and that they need to have
exposure to all kinds of literature. And I've even gone so far in my own teaching and my
own classroom is to say, they need, and I need to have exposure to literature _____
[00:18:44] languages. So we're fortunate now, that I can now get in middle school, and that's
sold in picture books that are bilingual about the libre, the fighters, and wrestling. So,
that's one _____ [00:19:00] important this year, and you know it right? That's going
to be quite an important book to share in the community with kids who are interested
in that form of entertainment. And it's bilingual, and its middle school and it s a broadly distributed
book available by a major publisher. So, even pushing myself to make that stance that there's
a need for me too to acquire a syllabi in other languages, and to read that literature
as well, that's the next frontier, and so, this is a fight, and it is a fight, because
Walter wrote several decades ago two steps forward, one step back. And so, we need to
continue to make this literature available to all children. End of Audio LOC_MBC_1_of_5
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Word VT$mG Times New Roman LOC_MBC_1_of_5 [MUSIC] John Cole Well, welcome to the Library
of Congress. I m John Cole. I m the director of The Center for the Book in the Library
of Congress, and I m also a historian of the Library of Congress. So I am going to say
a word about the historic sign ificance of the place in which we sit, and are having
this wonderful program today. The Library of Congress itself is an appropriate place
for a presentation of multicultural book and talking in multicultural ways. This is the
largest library in the wo rld, and we fortunate enough to have some congressional support
to make us into a world library. And we re one of the few libraries that collect in all
languages, in all formats, and are very pleased to be able to have multiformat materials.
As a matt of fact, Daniel Boorstein who was the librarian of cong ress a number of years
ago, who actually created The Center for the Book, called this place a multimedia encyclopedia.
And today we can add multicultural, multimedia encyclopedia to the description I hope if
you ve never been here before that when the program is over, you will take a look upstairs
at the Great Hall and get to know this wonderful structure. This building was opened in 1897.
also about twenty reading rooms in the Library of Congress. This is a special place for young
partners, such as Reading is Fundamental that are part of this network. The final word about
our networks, and then I will be quite, and start the progr am. We really exis t through
two national networks. There are state centers for The Book in all the states, plus DC, and
the *** Islands. And guess who had to go to the *** Islands to open it up? Unidentified
Male Ah! [LAUGH] oor man. We pay h im. All: [LAUGH] ohn Cole They all work at the local
levels to promote writers, and writing, and books, and literacy, and reading. We have
eighty organizations, nonprofit or government organizations "System Hewlett-Packard Company
[MUSIC] Title Microsoft Word 97-2003 Document MSWordDoc Word.Document.8