Steve Thomas: Judi, welcome to Circulating Ideas.
Judi Moreillon: Thank you, Steve. It’s real pleasure to be here having this conversation with you today.
Steve Thomas: Before we start talking about your book that you edited, what brought you into librarianship in the first place?
Judi Moreillon: Wow. It was a long time ago, let’s say that. I was a classroom teacher. My husband and I had moved to Tucson, and that year there were no teaching positions available. But he had a friend who was a principal and she took me out to dinner, or I took her out to dinner and she asked me questions about what I enjoyed about teaching.
And I said, I love sharing literature with children and storytelling and doing research. And she said, well, you should be a librarian. And I thought, librarian? I had taught in a school in California where there was a book room, but no organized library and no school librarian, so it just hadn’t occurred to me.
So I really owe my profession to a principal who asked the right questions at the right time. She connected me to a high school librarian, and I volunteered in her library for the fall semester of that year, and starting in January, I began my master’s program in library science.
Steve Thomas: You mentioned in the introduction that you didn’t realize how political and activist librarians are, and you kind of got into that part of the profession.
Judi Moreillon: That’s absolutely true. Basically, it happened on the very first day of my graduate program called Foundations of Librarianship, and we were talking about the First Amendment, and it occurred to me that I had not experienced my own First Amendment rights as a student in K-12 and that the students with whom I had worked and taught also hadn’t had that experience in my classroom even and in the school where I worked.
And so that really made a huge impression on me as far as how political librarianship can, and in my opinion should be, and I think this relates so well to a conversation that’s happening now in librarianship about neutrality. And I have never felt in all of my 30+ years in the field that libraries could / should be neutral. The fact that we’re having this reckoning now I think is really important. I kind of wish it had happened a few years ago.
Steve Thomas: Sometimes we come a little late to things, but you know, we came to it so we’re having a discussion finally, and that kind of ties into the book cuz there’s a lot of discussion about that and how it does and doesn’t work with intellectual freedom and this kind of stuff.
So we’ll get to that in a little bit later, but the book is called Core Values in School Librarianship. How did you get involved in editing it? I guess when you probably got started it was pre-COVID.
Judi Moreillon: Yes, it was pre-COVID and that’s a whole interesting story in and of itself, but I have previously authored four professional books for school librarians, and always worked as a solo author in those books, even though what I was sharing was mostly the collaborative work I had done in my practice of librarianship, but the final book that I wrote solo was Maximizing School Librarian Leadership: Building Connections for Learning and Advocacy, and I swore to my husband that that would be my last book, and I felt like it was my last book.
But coincidentally, at the AASL conference in 2019, I was sitting in a meeting of the School Library Connection Board, and a conversation was happening among different people around the table about how many librarians in practice and pre-service librarians as well, were experiencing a lot of fear, feeling insecure about the future of the profession, about their positions, many of which were being cut.
And I realized that, upon reflection, that I really believe that for my own practice, going back constantly to my core values helped me overcome the times when I had to make big changes in my work life and meet challenges. And it just so happened that Sharon Coatney, the acquisitions editor of ABC-CLIO Libraries Unlimited, was sitting across the table from me and we walked out of that meeting together and I said, “Gee, Sharon, I have an idea for a book” and she took my proposal and the rest is what happened. There was a lot more to it in finding the contributors for each of the chapters, but I basically set up the chapters and a framework for each chapter to make the book more cohesive and comprehensive.
Steve Thomas: One of the things I liked that was in each chapter and obviously was part of the framework probably you set up, is that there’s little vignettes in each one of where you tell a story that somebody else of in practice, and then there’s also reflection questions at the end of each chapter, which is good for just reading on your own or even reading as a group to really make you think about what you just read.
Judi Moreillon: Yeah. Thank you for noticing that. This was really important to me in terms of. Including as many voices as possible in this book. So not only are there co-authors for every chapter, there are two chapters that have three co-authors. Every chapter includes quotes from the field or from scholars or research.
And then each has two vignettes. And some of the vignettes are from the co-authors themselves and some of them are from their colleagues in the field. So one of my goals was, I’m moving on from librarianship and one of the things that helps me finally make good on my commitment to retire is to know that the future of the profession is in really, really expert good hands and from my own personal experience of this book, this was the gift for me is that these contributors and the work that they produced really helped me feel very confident about the future for school librarianship, because they are wise, they are articulate and experienced, and they have the commitment and courage to go forward with our values.
Steve Thomas: In your introduction, you talk about passion, and that’s kind of almost at the core of all of this, that you have to have a passion for your work. How do you stoke that passion in people and keep it sustained over a long career, especially?
Judi Moreillon: I think that’s really hard for a lot of people. I think that we can all get bogged down in the things we don’t have in our libraries.
You know, we don’t have enough technology access for our students and we don’t have enough time and we don’t have enough flexibility. And I think that all of those things tend to wear us down. And I believe personally for myself, that it is in the process of reflection where I go back and re-experience my passion.
It happens when I’m working with students, and I have to say it’s been since 2009 since I’ve actually worked in a school library, but working with my graduate students generated the same kind of feelings for me about how important it is to live your values, to work toward improving the world and to building community through your passion and finding other people that share your passion, and I think that’s a really important piece.
My experience in librarianship is that because of these values and the experiences we share, we have a tribe of people that know us, that know how difficult it is when a classroom teacher turns us down for the fifth time to do a collaborative inquiry project together, we know how hard that is. We also know the joys of when the little light bulb goes off in a student’s head and we can see learning happening.
I think the other piece is that different from classroom teachers, we have this global view and global experience of the school community. Most of us are the only person in our school besides our principals who have that view, and so finding those people who share our passion helps stoke our passion, helps renew our passion, and I always have encouraged my pre-service school librarian candidates to become members of organizations, of affinity groups that they create on their own, of personal learning networks, whether they be virtual or face-to-face, to really make that support system for yourself where that passion can be regenerated when it needs to be.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and ALA and AASL can be good places for that as well, that you can, cuz a lot of times, I know school librarians can be a very isolated profession, that you are the school librarian for the school and maybe you have some clerks or a couple people on staff, but you know, very rare are there more than one librarian in the school so it’s good to have these colleagues around the country, around the world that you can talk to about the same issues and they understand what you’re going through.
So the four core values that you identified: equity, diversity, inclusion, and intellectual freedom. The first half of the book basically is going through those and talking about those. For equity, I know there’s a lot of talk recently about having equitable collections, equitable advocacy, equitable everything, because that’s what we need. You know, the old days it was sort of equality, and now we’ve gone to equity, which is much more of a social justice view of the world. And that’s how this chapter is laid out. This chapter particularly, and then the rest of the book as well, talks about where it’s not just okay to talk about equity, but you really have to put it into action as well. Can you talk about the mindset, I guess, first and how we can put some of that into action?
Judi Moreillon: Sure. One thing I just wanna say before we talk about the individual chapters is I really don’t wanna speak for the contributors in a way. They’ve spoken eloquently about their topic for each chapter.
So these four core values are not commonly linked to one another. Equity, diversity, inclusion is a hot topic and should be, and these are interconnected values and calls to action. It was absolutely important that we include equity, diversity, inclusion in this book, and they are a foundation. But for me, adding intellectual freedom added that extra piece that I believe separates school librarians in many ways from the other colleagues with whom they work as educators, that we have these four core values that are likely not shared by other people in our learning environments. So that gives us an extra motivation and responsibility to make sure these are enacted in our schools.
And so each of the chapters begins with a one sentence statement, and I initially wrote those. Those were in my book proposal. And then each of the chapter contributors had the opportunity after they wrote their chapter to change them, elaborate on them, whatever they chose.
But our chapter one equity team of Erica Long and Suzanne Sherman retained that theme, which is “Equity is a matter of social justice”, and I think that we’re absolutely right, that this is the time in our society where we are really looking at justice more broadly, and equity is one of the mainstays. We can’t go forward with justice unless we have equity, and I think this has been a problem in school libraries. I was an elementary librarian for 10 years and one of the challenges in elementary libraries has been fixed schedules, and so many people have had an idea that in order to have equality in school library schedules that librarians have to see every child in the school the same amount of time, when in fact equity asks us to look at that situation in a different way. Can we actually help the classroom teachers and the students who need the most help from the library program rather than working at a superficial level with all students? Can we go deeper with the ones that really need to go deeper? In a “just in time” kind of framework where we are meeting the needs of the students when they have the need for information and instruction and when the teacher needs support, for instance, in a research or inquiry project where monitoring a classroom of students, if they’re working in groups or even if they’re working individually on a project, two heads are better than one and having four hands to work in the library or in the classroom, or in the lab, or out on the field with those students really makes a difference. And that to me is a big mind shift for elementary librarians.
Equity is something that certainly came to light during the pandemic. We are still struggling in the biggest school district here in my community of Tucson, Arizona because even though school did go virtual, we have students who still don’t have access to broadband, who don’t have the digital devices they need in order to successfully do school, whether they’re at home or in the classroom. These are 21st century tools and this is 2021, and we shouldn’t be talking about this. So I think the equity piece is really big, and I love the way Erica and Suzanne wrote this chapter to really bring in other voices and to really show how librarians have to be courageous to defend every student’s right for equitable access. And I think this also relates to advocacy in terms of stepping out of our own school libraries and realizing, you know, maybe five schools in our district have full-time state certified school librarians and 10 schools don’t and that’s an issue for us. If we truly believe in equity, then it’s not just the students in our own schools, but it’s the students in all of the schools in our district and in our state and in our country. And that brings us to advocacy, which is another chapter in the book.
Steve Thomas: And then the next value is diversity. The statement at the beginning is, “Diversity in resources and programming is not optional.” So it talks about diverse resources, diverse collections, diverse programming. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then I want to talk about diversity audits as well after, when we get to the end of that.
Judi Moreillon: Okay. I wanna congratulate our three chapter authors for chapter two, Julie Stivers and Stephanie Powell and Nancy Joe Lambert.
They really take really deep dive into diversity and librarians, school librarians in particular, as having that full responsibility for developing collections and programming that really meets the needs of all students and not just the students in your school that you may be working in a homogeneous school environment, and that may not be the sum total of what you want your students to be able to engage with.
So as you mentioned, diversity audits is one of the ways that we look at our collections and our selections, and we have to set up some criteria for that. Many people start with the demographics of their own school. And then again, if your school is very homogenous, that means that you’re gonna have to broaden that. So there are so many resources these days. Libraries today are so lucky compared to those of us who started in the nineties where we were talking about multicultural literature as opposed to the global diversity voices that are available today. So it’s still, of course, a work in progress. We like to support more and more publishers reaching those underrepresented voices and getting them in print for our students or on our eBooks, but we are responsible for making sure that we have a wide variety of resources and to see how we’re sharing those. Just having them on the shelf is not enough. Which resources are we spotlighting? Which ones are we including in programming? And actually most importantly, which ones are getting into the classroom curriculum? And I think that is an area where collaboration with our classroom teachers is so important to make sure that diversity exists in the curriculum as well as in the library program.
Steve Thomas: And I think that transitions really well onto the next chapter of inclusion because we can have all these materials, but inclusion means that people feel welcome to actually use them and see themselves in it and all that, and the authors also talk about intersectional inclusion as well, cuz there’s all kinds of different identities that we want to make sure we’re making welcome.
Judi Moreillon: Absolutely. So Meg Boisseau Allison and Peter Patrick Langella wrote this chapter together. They’re both Vermont librarians, which is interesting because they live in a predominantly white state and work in predominantly white schools, and they are really strong advocates and activists in their communities, in their chapter, they give readers a great deal of inspiration for following students’ voices and empowering students in the school community. Their chapter, their vignettes, are of their own work, and I believe that anybody who reads their chapter will be reflective of how they can also support their students and really engaging.
And I think this is more broadly, I think this is really important for us now with the national conversation about participation in electoral politics, about voting. All of the ways that we have traditionally thought we were engaging in our democracy. And I think that their idea, which is not their own, but they promote radical inclusion, and I think that it has to be radical to be real. That it really, today there is really no choice. Inclusion in the old days meant special education students and English language learners, and now we realize that inclusion is so much more diverse than originally thought in education and that pushes against a lot of status quo. And it’s really important that there is a voice in the school that can speak for all of the students.
Steve Thomas: And equity, diversity and inclusion are often grouped together cuz there’s a lot of overlap there. And you also included intellectual freedom as the fourth one. What made you wanna include that? And then how do the authors show how that works in school libraries?
Judi Moreillon: Well, it’s interesting for me because to me that’s the number one value that brought me into librarianship was intellectual freedom. So it, in a book that I edited, it could not be left out. And it was interesting in trying to find someone to write that chapter. And that was the whole process for Suzanne Sannwald and her collaborator, Dan McDowell. Dan is her colleague in her school district. He is a technology person, not a librarian, and I think that there are many in our profession who believe that unless you’ve had a book challenge or you’re rewriting your collection development policy or your materials review policy or you’re working with censorship and selection, that that is the sum total of intellectual freedom. And what I appreciate about this chapter is that it exploded that idea beyond the book challenge and censorship.
And they talk a lot about privacy in their chapter. They talk about confidentiality. They really expanded the concept so that readers of the book will realize that we are all engaged in providing intellectual freedom, ensuring intellectual freedom for our students and our colleagues. Just simply respecting other voices is a piece of intellectual freedom and of course, students having choice is another huge part, and that is a piece of curriculum that has been changing for quite some time, but still has a way to go in terms of meeting the needs and making curriculum and teaching and learning relevant for students. So that is also a big piece of intellectual freedom in this chapter.
We don’t want intellectual freedom or equity, diversity and inclusion to exist only in the library, in the library program. That doesn’t allow us to help these values reach their capacity to influence the learning community and so, especially with intellectual freedom, I think that that’s where co-planning with teachers and co-teaching really helps us work with the teachers who really want to open up their curriculum and encourage those who are a little reluctant to do that. When they do, they find out how much more engaged and motivated and enthusiastic the learners are about their own learning. So, it’s important.
Steve Thomas: And then obviously it’s important to know all these values, but then again, knowing them and speaking about them doesn’t mean anything unless you take some action, so that’s what the next section of the book is about. And the first chapter is about building relationships. Can you talk about the importance of how the authors kind of walked through why a relationship is important for a school librarian?
Judi Moreillon: Well, one of the things I appreciate about this chapter is that the lead contributor is Jen Sturge and she is a district level school librarian supervisor in Maryland, and she co-authored with Stacy Allen and Sandy Walker, and these are two of her district level colleagues who support students. I’m really pleased that we have this example of how these three educators and leaders in their district have come together to build relationships among each other to increase the impact of their work in technology and assistive learning opportunities for students and diversity, but also how they use their power then as collaborators to impact librarians and classroom teachers and students.
One of the metaphors they use is of a tree. One of their contributors drew a tree to show how they are the roots of this “relationships, relationships, relationships” idea, and that how having those strong relationships then branch out into practice into the school where people who are working directly with students every day take those actions.
They also talk a lot about professional development in that chapter, which I think is really important. And this is a responsibility of school librarians and I think it’s a really nice model to. To see that maybe this is not something we have to do on our own all the time, but that we reach out to other leaders in our school and in our district to cocreate and deliver professional development for our colleagues. That increases the power tremendously.
Steve Thomas: Well, as a public librarian, I appreciated that being part of those relationships. The public libraries sort of start kids out with the little story times and programs for pre-K things, and then we kinda work together during the school time and then goes to the academic libraries and then back to public libraries. So we’re all kind of part of a continuum.
Judi Moreillon: Yeah. Thank you for mentioning that. The ecosystem of libraries is something that I think doesn’t get enough attention. Even though ALA has a really nice initiative for the library ecosystem, I really believe that as individual practitioners, we haven’t really deeply embraced that idea that our success is connected to everybody else’s success. As a school librarian, it really matters to me that there were students who come to my school in kindergarten who did the story times at the public library. And it really matters to me that summer reading is there for the students if our library is closed in the summer. And so all of these things, we’re in this together and I think that’s another piece, and I’m glad that you pointed that out of relationships with other libraries and librarians is really important.
Steve Thomas: And then another relationship that’s obviously an important one because it gets its own chapter, is the school librarians and principals partnering together. The tagline for that one is, “Principals are our most important allies.” Can you talk about how the authors convey that?
Judi Moreillon: Kelly Gustafson is a principal in Pennsylvania, and M. E. Shenefiel is a leader librarian in her district, and I’m really excited about having a principal voice in this school and having a principal who has learned everything she knows from librarians, and she will say that at the drop of a hat anywhere she is. And of course her co-author M. E. is really that person who started her on this path of listening to librarians and collaborating.
Principals, superintendents, they make the decisions about whether or not there’s going to be a state certified school librarian in the library in the first place. So if those people aren’t our allies, then we are in deep trouble. And so finding out what our allies need is the way we help ensure our own success and their success. Administration changes in schools a lot. You may have the principle from heaven, and it’s a great relationship and everything is going along wonderfully, and there’s collegiality, and there’s respect, and there’s communication, and there’s shared decision-making and all of those great things can happen, but sometimes administration changes and that isn’t there. And I think it’s really important for us to have examples where that relationship is working well, so that when we need to help educate a new administration that we have some tools and strategies for how to negotiate that. And so they have a brilliant chapter that will help readers do that.
Steve Thomas: The next chapter is about leadership and really you need to have leadership skills to get a lot of this stuff done. And I know you wrote a whole book about leadership, but this chapter talks about various qualities of leadership. Can you go through what the authors there talk about?
Judi Moreillon: So it’s Pam Harland and Anita Cellucci, and Pam and Anita work together at Plymouth State. Pam is on the faculty there and Anita is an adjunct there. She also is a full-time school librarian in Massachusetts, and the two of them really have shared Pam’s dissertation research in a way that is very understandable to the practitioner, and this is one of the challenges in research, is that oftentimes research doesn’t get implemented in practice because translating from the scholarly to the practitioner voice is not always easy, and so I really commend them for working with Pam’s dissertation research and two of the qualities of leaders in school libraries that Pam discovered in her research are vulnerability and confidence.
And so they talk a lot in their chapter about how school librarians can develop these traits and then use them to influence their communities. And I think this capacity to influence others is so essential to everything in this book. None of these chapters really can exist in isolation from the other. They’re interconnected in ways that makes it hard to talk about them in a linear way, but I think that when we look at meeting the needs of a librarian who may be in crisis, or who may be wanting to develop a certain aspect of their practice, they can then drill into each individual chapter and find the takeaways that they need to move forward in their work.
Steve Thomas: And of course part of that blending again is that leadership is needed to properly advocate for school librarians, and as we also said earlier, school librarians need a lot of advocacy in these times to show the value of the position. Can you talk about how the authors of this one talk through that and they kind of come back to that idea of building partners as well?
Judi Moreillon: Yes, absolutely. So Kristin Fraga Sierra and TuesD Chambers co-authored this chapter, and they really talk about the librarian as the lead advocate. And I really appreciate this perspective because many times in librarianship we’ve been schooled in the idea that we need others to speak for us and that only the others are the ones whose voices will be listened to. And I think that we learned during the pandemic and actually they begin their chapter with a little aside about advocacy during the pandemic that if librarians don’t speak up for themselves, there will be no other advocates. That’s pretty much the bottom line.
And so they talk in their chapter a lot about communication and building those relationships and being leaders so that they can then get the attention of people who will be their advocates, students, other educators, administrators, especially principals and district level administrators. So of all the chapters that was maybe the most impacted by the pandemic, I would say this probably was number one because in a time of crisis, and it truly was a crisis when people found out on Friday that their school was gonna be closed on Monday, that was a crisis for every educator, for every administrator, for every student and family in a school. And for librarians to have that mindset that they have to fall back on their own voice to make sure that the library is at the table when decisions are being made, and there were a lot of decisions made around school closures where librarians had the knowledge, the resources, the skills to help move the school forward and to meet the challenges. And if the librarians weren’t at the table, then they weren’t helping solve the problems. And so I appreciate Kristin and TuesD for their perspective in this chapter.
Steve Thomas: And then there’s one final chapter…
Judi Moreillon: I have to say, I can’t have my name on a book that doesn’t have some reference to collaboration in it. So to me, from my view of librarianship, it’s what matters most is that having equity, diversity, inclusion, and intellectual freedom in the library does not help us reach our capacity to influence the community.
And I did listen yesterday to David Lankes’s podcast with you, and he’s one of my all time heroes. I loved his book, the Atlas of New Librarianship, and one of the quotes from that book that I’ve taken with me everywhere I go since 2011 is “The greatest asset any library has is a librarian.” And I truly believe that but it’s not just a librarian who lives in the library, as David points out, it’s about a librarian who creates the community as the collection. And that’s where collaboration is so, so important is that when we work with our colleagues, other classroom teachers, other specialists, administrators, families, students, we can then help influence our community toward a more positive future for everyone. And it’s a tall order. It takes a lot of commitment, it takes a lot of courage because oftentimes we will be leading in a direction that is not always comfortable for everyone, that everyone doesn’t wanna necessarily acknowledge the reality of the situation, and that’s hard. That’s hard, and that’s where falling back on our values really makes a difference.
For instance, as an example, in collaborating with a classroom teacher, and I may notice that this particular educator is not giving students a lot of choice, that the curriculum can be flexible. I mean, there are standards and we can meet them in a lot of different ways. We don’t have to read that same text every time, and so having those interpersonal skills, having the knowledge and the resources to bring to the collaboration table and to approach our colleagues as peers helps us set up a situation for reciprocal mentorship. I don’t wanna set myself up in some hierarchy with a classroom teacher. I want to have a relationship that is a peer relationship. We are equals coming to the task of meeting these learning objectives with our students. And in that environment, I believe that almost every other educator will respond positively to what librarians have to offer. If we can be humble, if we can be flexible, if we can be good negotiators, if we can realize that we’re not always going to have our first choice every time we work with someone, that collaboration, with other adults involves a relationship that builds. It starts with trust, it starts with respect, and builds to that level of professionalism that we ultimately wanna get to in collaboration.
So this chapter, this is the hill on which I will die, and, and this is absolutely the last book I will author or edit, so I had to really get that into the book. But I do believe that collaboration is the key to enacting our core values and building a value-centered community in our schools.
Steve Thomas: We’ve talked about how these different ideas blend into each other, but this is really the thing that you have to do this to get all this other stuff in the first eight chapters done. You can’t do it on your own.
Judi Moreillon: And it’s hard, it’s so much easier to work with our students in the library than it is to work with our colleagues, and that that is just the bottom line. Our colleagues are adult learners. We are adult learners. We’ve had more experience in learning, we’ve had successes, we’ve had disappointments, we have areas of strength and weakness, and it is hard to open yourself up to, another adult evaluating your teaching.
And I think one of the things that would help all school librarians if all school libraries were in the center of the school with glass walls, that we really realized, or no walls in the old days, that we can be the center of the academic program in our schools, but that means everybody has a view of what we do. Everybody can see in and we can look out, and there’s an exchange that happens in that environment that can be terrifying. It’s hard to fail in front of another adult, and if we can really embrace the idea of failing forward, acknowledging with students that we don’t always get it right, and we encourage them to experiment and take risks and learn from those missteps, then we have developed a learning community that really learns, and we learn together. And that’s really the ultimate goal for all of us.
Steve Thomas: Absolutely. So the book is Core Values in School Librarianship. And Judi, if anybody wanted to follow up with you, do you have some contact information where they could get in touch with you?
Judi Moreillon: I do. I’m on Twitter, @cactuswoman, and I am at info@storytrail.com. I also blog at schoollibrarianleadership.com. And I would encourage your listeners to follow these wonderful contributors to this book. We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or seven accepted concurrent sessions at the upcoming AASL National Conference in October in Salt Lake City. So we are out there to share our work. We also believe that having a book is great, but having conversations with people in the field is greater, and we wanna make sure that we’re in conversation with our colleagues locally and nationally to move forward with equity, diversity, inclusion, and intellectual freedom through relationships and allies and principles and leadership and advocacy, and of course, collaboration as well.
Steve Thomas: Well, I appreciate you having this conversation with me and that we can share it with everybody. So have a great day and thank you so much for coming on to tell us about your book.
Judi Moreillon: Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it.
Circulating Ideas 