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As I was preparing a library card for a new student, she handed me a two-page list of books that her mother won’t allow her to read. Then later on, her mother called and told me she expected me to monitor what her daughter was reading. What should I do?
You need to tell the mother that it’s not your role to monitor students’ reading. If she has an issue with the titles that her daughter chooses, then she [...]
The Pew Internet & American Life Project, in collaboration with the Berkman Center at Harvard University, has recently released “Parents, Teens, and Online Privacy”. The report—the first in a Pew/Berkman Pew logoseries with a focus on youth privacy issues—combines a number of quotes taken from focus group interviews conducted by Berkman’s Youth and Media team with Pew data from a nationally representative phone survey of parents and their teens, with a focus on the use of social networking sites. The report is fully downloadable, and may be searched online as well.
Got a great story to tell about a banned book or another disturbing incident involving censorship? Then encourage your teens to enter the 2012 Youth Free Expression Project’s (YFEP) film contest—and give them a chance to win up to $1,000 and a free trip to the Big Apple.
The annual competition, open to kids 19 and under, hopes to educate youth about their First Amendment rights and the importance of free speech. It’s a perfect way to teach a lesson on [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation has filed suit against a Utah school district that removed “In Our Mothers’ House,” a picture book about a family with two mothers from school library shelves.
In addition to reading your column, what’s the best way to keep up with news about censorship?
Start by checking out the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (www.ala.org/offices/oif), which maintains a database of challenges to library materials. These challenges are reported in its Intellectual Freedom Newsletter ($50 a year), unless the person reporting the challenge asks ALA to keep the information confidential. Another helpful resource is Robert P. Doyle’s Banned Books: Challenging Our Freedom to Read [...]
A Christian group’s protests has spurred some schools to pull their involvement from next week’s Mix it Up at Lunch Day—an 11-year-old program meant to reduce prejudice among students that’s sponsored by the Teaching Tolerance project, part of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) will honor award-winning authors Ellen Hopkins and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor next month for their fight to defend free speech.
This week marks the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week, an annual event that celebrates the freedom to read. We caught up by email with bestselling author Lauren Myracle, who ranked number one on the American Library Association’s top 10 most frequently challenged books in 2011 and 2009—and who also made the list in 2008 and 2007.
Award-winning journalist Bill Moyers has joined the American Library Association’s (ALA) Virtual Read Out campaign with a three-minute video on book banning and the dangers of censorship.
Pat Scales, chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and SLJ columnist, regularly fields questions on banned library materials. But “this is the first I’ve encountered in which a book’s format has been censored,” she writes.
The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is expecting an unusual window display starting September 30—writer and editor Corey Michael Dalton plans to mark Banned Books Week by camping out there to demonstrate the value of our freedom to read.
