By Joseph Jeffery
What is Get Ready, Stay Ready?
As part of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations/ Fédération canadienne des associations de bibliothèques (CFLA-FCAB) National Forum, Dr. Lucy Santos Green showed off the Get Ready, Stay Ready Community Action Toolkit. This toolkit is a direct response to the attacks on libraries and attempted book bannings going on in North America. To understand more about moral panic and the hows and whys of what we are seeing right now, please refer to the companion article “Librarianship for Children and Youth – Responding to our present moral panic” also in this edition of CSL Journal. This article will focus on the toolkit, giving an overview of its sections and how to utilize it, with specific attention to the areas most relevant to school libraries and school library learning commons.
Funding for the toolkit came from EBSCO and Penguin Random House. They are also working with ALA in support of Friends of the Libraries and Trustee groups. This allowed for funds to be used to pay people for time including lawyers, public relations people and other experts within their fields to make sure information was accurate.
In the last year or so, there has been a dramatic rise in book bannings and associated moral panic around LGBTQ+ books, Indigenous books, and books involving BIPOC characters. There have also been attempts to silence those who speak out against such attacks, a tactic known as SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation), the most notable of which is the Hansman v. Neufeld case which was dismissed from the Supreme Court of Canada this month (SCC, 2023). With the settlement of this case the Supreme Court of Canada has protected the right of Canadians to public participation with Justice Karakatsanis writing “the closer the expression lies to the core values of [freedom of speech], including truth‑seeking, participation in political decision-making and diversity in the forms of self‑fulfilment and human flourishing, the greater the public interest in protecting it” (SCC, 2023).
Get Ready, Stay Ready is a comprehensive toolkit to help libraries, librarians and non-librarians be proactive in the face of this rising threat. Similar advocacy toolkits have come out from Manitoba Library Association (2023), and Canadian School Libraries (2021) has a collection development based toolkit.
The main areas of Get Ready, Stay Ready are (see Fig 1.):
- Sharing resources for and by libraries and library organizations
- Resources designed around civic engagement
- Resources for LGBTQIA+ support
- Collection development tools
- Recommended booklists
- Advocacy letters, speeches and media
- Recommended Social media accounts
- Webinars
- Training resources
All links and videos posted on Get Ready, Stay Ready have been done so with permission.
Using the Toolkit
One of the critical parts of using this toolkit for school libraries and library learning commons is to understand that the proactive nature of it is not meant to lead to preemptive censorship. That is to say that we should not be separating out LGBTQIA+ materials or stickering them up in their own section; we should not be removing things from the catalog in case there is a ban, nor should we be applying different rules to potentially controversial resources.
To give an example of this, recently within my school district we had a book, All Boys Aren’t Blue, labeled up with very prominent mature stickers in one of the high schools. No other book got mature stickers. The reason for this was that passages from the book were circulating on social media, and the teacher-librarian was trying to get ahead of the controversy. It was not coming from a place of hate or a desire to do something bad. Yet the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Unfortunately this kind of thing singles out the book as different and does not apply the policy in an equal way. For instance, Game of Thrones has far more intensely graphic scenes of both sex and violence, but has happily sat on the shelf for years without the need for a mature warning.
Often as teacher-librarians we do things that, on the surface, may seem good: putting rainbow stickers on all the books with LGBTQIA+ content and moving them to their own section, or putting up pride displays, but when we step back and look at them in a wider context we realize there may be issues. For instance, if the only time of year Black authors are celebrated is Black History Month or LGBTQIA+ authors get a look in is Pride month then we are relegating them to an event, rather than a natural part of the fabric. By pulling out books we are a) making it easier to target these books by those with a nefarious purpose, and b) saying there is something different about these books. This implicit curriculum is, again, not coming from a place of wanting to hurt, but is subtly shaping the conversation in ways we may not suspect.
Instead we should be looking at how we can include these authors in any display we do. Make sure our displays are staying fresh and rotating frequently. Showing off a variety of protagonists and that when we do show LGBTQIA+ characters it’s not just every book being a coming out story; or every Indigenous story is about residential schools or MMIWG. By using a community focused lens, going as far as to include students in the creation of displays, we can change our practice for the better. Resources around this can be found in the Windows and Mirrors section.
Another aspect the toolkit focuses on is our communication strategies as librarians of all kinds. When creating policy we need to move away from “librarian-ese” (and “teacher-ese”) where we jargonize our policy to the point of gatekeeping. Either you know the lingo or you don’t. By doing this we make it harder to connect with those outside of our profession, and make it harder for those who want to help to be able to do so. By taking these approaches, we also help parents and students out and allow them to feel like they can take part in areas of the library they might not have been able to before. Our students should have the right to challenge our collections and have those challenges put through the same rigour as anyone else, but they will only be able to do that if our policies are written so they can understand it.
Speaking of challenges, we often get caught up in feeling that a challenge is aimed at us, at our jobs. Part of that is often, especially in school library learning commons we are solo flyers. Yet responding to book challenges should not be about us, or about our jobs. It should be about what is best for the community. One way to ensure that is to have a library team that extends beyond the teacher-librarian and includes community members including students. This brings us back to policies which are student readable. If we want students to be able to be engaged in intellectual freedom and to be able to express opinions and concerns safely, as well as being part of that challenge process then we need to be cognizant of this. Materials to support this are found in the library organization resources.
The final section of note for school libraries and library learning commons is the webinars and videos. This section contains webinars done by a public relations company, Hennes Communications, as part of this toolkit. Additional video materials from other presentations are also provided. By getting to grips with the topics seen here, we have the opportunity to educate ourselves on how best to respond. We are not PR experts, that is why the toolkit specifically hired outside help and why these videos are critical viewing.
Beyond Librarianship
The other sections move beyond librarianship and provide parents and community members with tools they need to help libraries with this issue. Many parents want to be strong advocates, but often don’t know how best to help out in this field if they are not themselves professionals in it. The resources contained in the other sections help us reach out and invite parents, students and community members in to stand up to moral panic, whether it is this current one focused on LGBTQIA+ stories, or a future one focused on some other area.
Whatever your focus, we urge you to become familiar with these tools in a proactive manner and to use things like the Collection Diversity Toolkit (CSL, 2021) or Get Ready, Stay Ready (Byrd Fort et al., 2023) to help you bring everyone into your library space. “Not every book is for every reader, but every reader should be able to find a book in the collection that meets their needs” (Windows and mirrors, Byrd Fort et al., 2023).
Connect to the Get Ready, Stay Ready Toolkit
References
Canadian School Libraries. (2021). Collection diversity toolkit. Retrieved from https://www.canadianschoollibraries.ca/collection-diversity-toolkit/
Byrd Fort, V., Harper, A., Collins, S., Neal, S., Dawkins, A., Santos Green, L., Richardson Johnson, C. (2023). Get ready, stay ready: A community action toolkit. Retrieved from https://www.getreadystayready.info/
Manitoba Library Association. (2023). Public libraries intellectual freedom and anti-censorship toolkit. Retrieved from https://mla.mb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Toolkit-published-as-of-2023-05-11.pdf
Supreme Court of Canada. (2023). Hansman v. Neufeld. Retrieved from https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/cb/2023/39796-eng.aspx
Joseph Jeffery is the District Learning Commons Teacher-Librarian for SD57 Prince George, BC. He has been a TL since 2013 at both elementary and high school. He is an immigrant to Canada and is Bangladeshi/English on his mother’s side and Ukrainian/English on his fathers’. He supports teachers and teacher-librarian’s throughout the district in resource selection and acquisitions, e-resources, and all types of literacy. Joseph is the BCTLA’s conference organizer, and a lead writer for CSL’s Collection Diversity Toolkit.