The ALSC features resources for parents and caregivers at Look to Libraries

One could say the only constant during this unprecedented time is change. Childcare centers and schools are adjusting from one day to the next in order to keep the children and families in their communities safe. Another constant, however, is the value of connecting with well-trained children’s library professionals. This is why the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) developed Look to Libraries, a collection of materials intended to assist parents and caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic. ALSC is a professional membership organization whose over 4,000 members work in communities across the country to engage children in learning opportunities through stories, programs, and activities in libraries.

Especially now, while families are trying to balance remote learning and digital entertainment with non-screen activities, it is critical to have knowledgeable experts serve as media mentors who can help families and caregivers navigate the digital world. Children’s librarians are professionally trained to evaluate media—they are perfectly suited for this role.

Rather than offering judgement about whether children should be using technology, librarians take cues from individual families about their needs and suggest materials of all types to support the child’s development, interests, and curiosities. Children’s library professionals can assist parents and caregivers in making decisions about what types of programs, apps, and platforms are best suited to each situation. Some librarians also curate digital apps and can help adults discern between those that are truly educational and others that are basically a vehicle for advertisements. Parents and caregivers should know that they can turn to children’s library professionals for media mentorship during the current crisis—and when things settle back down.

ALSC created Look to Libraries with media mentorship in mind. Since March, ALSC librarians had been sharing information within our network as areas began rolling out varying levels of stay-in-place orders. As it became clear that COVID-19 would be with us far longer than initially anticipated, we realized that the trove of resources children’s librarians were sharing needed to reach a broader audience. The Look to Libraries series consists of tip sheets and resource guides compiled by ALSC member librarians that span a range of topics like talking with young children about viruses, easing anxiety around changing routines, and activities family can enjoy together. The resources can be downloaded for free, and include customizable graphics for libraries and library advocates to repurpose.

Below are a few examples of the Look to Libraries resources:

• Media Mentorship Tip Sheet (PDF) – Learn more about media mentorship and how you can look to children’s library professionals to find excellent resources, model safe and effective digital device use, and find objective suggestions on creating a family media plan.
• COVID-19 Resources Tip Sheet (PDF) – Print and online books, articles, apps, podcasts, and websites for youth and parents/caregivers to provide support during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Resources for Parents/Caregivers – Books and articles to help parents and caregivers on a range of topics, from caring for a newborn in the age of COVID-19 to trying to balance parenting and coping with the pandemic.

For more information about ALSC, visit ala.org/alsc.

Angela Hubbard is the Program Officer of Projects and Partnerships for ALSC. She works with multiple ALSC committees to support members’ creation of booklists, toolkits, and advocacy resources. Angela coordinates special projects around early learning, media mentorship, and diversity in children’s literature. She also manages grants and external partnerships for the association.

Download the Playworks School Re-Opening Workbook

This is a moment of unprecedented transition for the United States–and for the world more broadly. Reopening schools requires decisions based on incomplete information that must be made in an environment that, at best, would be described as uncertain. But while it might seem unlikely, our oldest form of connection, play, may be one of our best hopes for helping us to navigate this uncertainty. Play has everything to teach us about managing risks, generating new possibilities, dealing with the unexpected, and wrestling with ambiguity. To this end, Playworks recently released our free School Re-Opening Workbook.

Back in the very early days of Playworks, we had a partnership with a program called Seneca Center. Seneca, now called the Seneca Family of Agencies, runs an amazing program for kids with mental health issues. When we were working with them in the 1990s, we had a staff person named Justin Robinson–he went by JRo–who was placed at one of their schools with the assignment of modifying our recess program to fit within the Seneca model. The most memorable thing about this partnership occurred at one of our staff meetings when JRo explained how the faculty at Seneca handled transitions. According to his Seneca co-workers, things were most likely to break down during transitions and thus deserved special attention. Their team had established a whole protocol around preparing the students before leaving the classroom for recess, reviewing what they were about to do and all the steps involved, mindfully making their way through space to the playground, then circling up to acknowledge that they had arrived, and to preview what was coming next. Then at the end of every recess, the students would circle back up to provide some closure and to review the transition back into the classroom, going through all the steps and calling out ways they would need to adjust their behaviors, modulating their voices and energy levels as they went back inside.

It all seems blindingly obvious from the vantage point of two decades later, but those shared lessons have become integral to our understanding at Playworks of how best to set kids up for success with transitions and change. We believe that these shared lessons have a critical application for this moment as well. As students and school staff are returning to school, it is essential that we intentionally create environments in which people feel a sense of choice, voice, and transparency. Communicating–and even over-communicating–will be essential to ensuring that everyone has an understanding of what is happening and why. Preparing students, staff, and families for transitions—from remote to in-person, within hybrid structures, or from in-person to remote, should that be necessary—will be essential to creating the basic sense of safety and belonging that is a prerequisite to learning. This will be especially true for the youngest learners and their families, for whom the disruption is likely to be most profound.

At Playworks schools, we empower kids to come up with new rules to modify games or new ideas for transitions in inclusive, fun, safe ways; this often leads to them feeling safe and wanting to engage peers. Using this lens, educators can empower kids to translate the constraints of COVID-19 into rules for school. Ultimately, the decisions where students need to have the most input–and where even the youngest students are best prepared to contribute—are around the questions of how we want school to feel. Engaging students in this way will encourage them to explore their own feelings while learning about their classmates’ feelings. This approach promotes the development of empathy, and enables a shift from seeing rules as the domain of “have to” into the more empowering framing of “get to.”

The Workbook features activities to support the co-creation of rules and rituals that support this type of learning environment, from assumption storming to creating a classroom charter. The Feelings Wheel is a great place to start building empathy and understanding. Ask students to choose a color that reminds them of how they are feeling and encourage them to choose any three words on the outside of the wheel, or to make up three words that better describe how they are feeling. It can help if a grown-up goes first. This is also a great activity for students to do at home with their families, asking others about how they are feeling.

The pandemic and the chaos it has created for our kids and communities is more than any of us could have predicted. Yet, we have the power to choose how we respond. We have the power to use what we already know—that kids and the way they connect socially with each other and with the adults in their lives really matters for their learning and well-being—to design a school experience that isn’t just waiting for this all to be over, but rather, makes the most of what we each have to offer right now.

Jill Vialet is the Founder of Playworks, Co-Founder of MOCHA, Substantial, and Workswell, the author of Recess Rules, and co-author of the forthcoming Substantial: Redesigning the Substitute Teaching Experience from Jossey-Bass. Playworks has just released the School Re-Opening Workbook, which is available now.

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting and exploring with young audiences to reflect on their experiences and share their perspectives. We hope these posts will spark conversation, provide direction and resources, and raise up examples of the innovative work that public media stations across the country are creating to engage the next generation. 

Media companies around the world are finding out that when it comes to capturing the attention of youth, authenticity (or at least a sense of it) equals relevancy. Anyone who has worked in a middle or high school setting can also confirm that teenagers are human lie detectors, unafraid to call out a lack of genuineness when they see it.  Armed with this realization, content creators and distributors continue vying for this group’s attention, through ever-changing media platforms in an increasingly interconnected digital space.

For public media—locally based, mission-driven, and community-funded—the pace and cost of pursuing this wary audience from platform to platform is hard to keep up with. We’re convinced we have value, but most of what we offer, however authentic it may be, remains on the fringes of young people’s consciousness. We know, too, that we tend to lose this youth audience when they grow out of PBS Kids, even if they return for PBS NewsHour as they grow older.

How can public media make genuine connections with a youth audience? An approach that has worked well for us at PBS SoCal and KCET is creating with them: meeting youth where they’re interested, consistently supporting their development, and then stepping back and letting the young person’s voice be the loudest.

We employed this method with a project called To Foster Change, a four-year, grant-funded initiative to explore and improve the life outcomes of foster youth. A key element of the initiative (alongside long-form content and convening experts and thought leaders) was a media-creation program for former foster youth called Youth Voices.  We found that the content co-created by youth in the program deeply resonated within and beyond the foster youth community and achieved the most notable multi-platform reach of the initiative.

To Foster Change on Instagram

Youth Voices featured artistic expressions of the participants’ experiences in foster care. With the training and support of a creative media professional, each participant created short video pieces, telling their own story, their way. Our organization then shared their video pieces across our platforms (our website, on social media, and in some cases, on-air). The pieces received enthusiastic and contagious support, with viewers sharing and commenting heartfelt notes to the participants.

Screenings of the video pieces bubbled with excitement, the emoji reactions on social media were an education for our staff, and the participating youth expressed deep gratitude for the opportunity to create something that represented them and that they were proud of.

So, what was the secret? To frame what we saw work with this program, we refer to the model of Connected Learning (CL). The model asserts that “Learning is irresistible and life-changing when it connects personal interests to meaningful relationships and real-world opportunity.”  Using CL’s language to examine the Youth Voices program has helped us both frame the program’s success and find a formula for future projects.

Photo: PBS SoCal
Filmmakers and mentors at Youth Voices film screening.

To gauge interest, we engaged with the community we wanted to reach by directly asking if they wanted to be involved. From posting on social media platforms where youth were present to asking youth whether they had friends with an interest in media making—we left no stone unturned. Next, we heavily emphasized the development of a mentor-mentee relationship between media professionals and youth. We hired experts who were empathetic, came from diverse backgrounds, and had a desire to amplify a young person’s voice, not their own. Once youth were empowered with the tools and support to complete their pieces, our station provided the real-life opportunity to share their work with audiences both online and on-air.

We truly believe the approach of creating with the audience you want to connect to, or whose story you want to tell, is critical to the final product’s ultimate authenticity. For connecting with a youth audience, the CL model has helped us frame this conviction, while also providing insightful research and a robust community of practice from which to glean.  As we continue working to fulfill our mission as a local public media organization, we know we will often return to the Connected Learning model to guide our work, especially with tweens and teens.

Keena Levert is the Director of Engagement at Public Media Group of Southern California, leading engagement strategy, initiatives, and events as well as stewarding key organization and community relationships. With an eye toward innovative engagement tactics, deep community partnerships, and Southern California’s rich arts, cultural and nonprofit resources, she has led over 70 engagement campaigns in her almost 7-year tenure with PMGSC. Keena has also administered the organization’s community councils, a group of 100+ cross-sector leaders that represent diverse communities, since 2015.

Ashley Gain is the Engagement Manager at Public Media Group of Southern California. She led youth engagement and workforce development for To Foster Change, bringing experience working in risk prevention and resilience during adolescence to develop long-term programs to serve foster youth in Southern California. She currently manages a portfolio of engagement work, aiming to connect PMGSC to serve the needs of local audiences.

Every day, information is collected on our daily habits, from the groceries we purchase, the music we stream, the websites we visit, and even our physical locations. What happens to all this data? Some are sold for advertising purposes, some may be used for research, while other data is used by particular interest groups. It might be reported as line graphs, bar graphs, or heat maps. But how do we learn to read and accurately interpret the reality presented by these charts and graphs, and to understand the stories behind the numbers? Now, more than ever, it’s critical that children acquire the skills necessary to understand and read the data that is collected about them and others. For many, understanding and interpreting data will be a necessary skill in their future careers.

Students manage a recording studio in Beats Empire

In most schools, the ideas and practices of data science can be hard to find. Students may collect data and explore data representations in science classes, or they might encounter basic statistics in a math class. Yet data pertains to a multitude of contexts: from how, when, where, and by whom information is being collected, how decisions are made with data, and the ensuing consequences of these decisions for peoples’ lives. The global push to include computer science education in schools offers a new opportunity for expanding the teaching of data science—for exploring how computers collect, sort, and filter data; how data can be transformed and combined; and how data can be represented to tell stories about a whole host of phenomena. New York City’s CS4All initiative, which aims to bring computer science experiences to every public school student in the city by 2025, even lists data and data analysis as a strand of its K-12 CS Education Framework. We think there are also great opportunities for informal learning experiences that support and broaden data science learning outside the classroom.

Students learn how to make predictions by studying trends

Designed for middle school kids, Beats Empire is a game that invites a player to explore data by stepping into the role of a music studio manager. The manager selects artists to sign, develops songs in different genres, and make investments with the goal of topping the music chart. The player must analyze data by making sense of various graphs that show listeners’ interests in different music genres, moods, and topics in boroughs across a fictional city. In this way, core data science practices are situated in a context that is meaningful and close to the children’s interests and simultaneously highlights the prevalence of data science in our lives. Beats Empire is a free game funded by the National Science Foundation and developed by learning scientists from Teachers College, Columbia University, SRI, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Georgia Tech, and Digital Promise in collaboration with Filament Games.

In addition to being a game for playing with data science, Beats Empire is also a formative assessment tool. As such it helps teachers to see what their students are learning about data and data analysis, and offers insight into the topics that are particularly challenging for each student. Using a dashboard that tracks students’ activities in the game, teachers can examine which data representations students use, whether students are making reasonable choices about what kind of songs to record, or whether students’ predictions about the popularity of a particular genre align with the data on listener interests.

While we have found Beats Empire to be a powerful tool for helping students to see the real-world use of data, students should also be encouraged to be critical about the role of data in society. AlgoWorld (coming Fall 2020) invites middle and high school students to think about how data algorithms, and how data is manipulated or cleansed, contributes to social inequity. In AlgoWorld, players are asked to examine the outcomes of algorithms used in domains as diverse as traffic control, bank loan distribution, and policing. By tweaking and adjusting these algorithms, students can learn about how algorithms work, and see the outcome of their changes in a simulated world, discovering some simple guidelines for contributing to more equitable use of personal data. They explore playfully whether data points like gender or race are appropriate factors for algorithms used for making job offers, for example.

While these games may be designed for middle or high school students, that doesn’t mean that parents and caregivers shouldn’t try their best at going platinum in hip-hop or tweaking algorithms to create a more equitable world. After all, understanding data is an important skill for all of us! So be sure to check out Beats Empire, and keep an eye out for AlgoWorld this Fall!

Marleen Villeroy is a doctoral candidate in Instructional Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University. She holds a Master’s degree in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on how children recognize the effects of algorithms in their lives and their communities.

The following post was written by the Cooney Center’s summer intern, Benjamin Prud’homme. We are grateful for his contributions this summer and for making our weekly meetings so much fun. 

I would like to express my sincere gratitude for the opportunity to work with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center this summer on a website design for one of their exciting new initiatives. As an autistic person who adored Sesame Street growing up, it is incredible to think how far I have come since then. It means the world to me that I have been able to use my technical skills to support the continued execution of Cooney’s vision.

As a little boy with great strengths and corresponding challenges, I found in Sesame Street both a powerful educational tool and a way of connecting with others. My childhood was defined by early reading and memorization ability, social anxiety and sensitivity, and a deep curiosity in my specific areas of interest. By the age of two, I was able to read fluently, spell long words, and could recite advertising slogans I had seen on highway billboards. I would read for hours to my baby brother James and was always willing to help him study for spelling tests in elementary school. While James would (and still does) regularly make merry conversation and burst into song around the house, I spent hours in my room playing guitar and piano (but feeling too shy to sing by myself), playing on my computer, and looking for money to store in my toy ATM. I was quite nervous to express myself openly when I wasn’t engaging with my passions. When James asked me to come out and play computer or role-playing games with him, I resisted adamantly. But we always bonded through watching educational television, most notably Sesame Street.

I’m one of the enormous number of kids who learned my letters and numbers through “C Is For Cookie” and the rocking classic, “Count it Higher.” But the show also did something deeper: it provided an entire language of character, event, and emotion that allowed me and my family to think and communicate within its crazy, lovable, irresistible terms. When I would get frustrated by misplaying a musical note, my mother would laughingly call me Don Music, the perfectionistic, piano-playing, Beethoven-loving muppet who bangs his head on the keyboard and wails, “I’ll never get it, never!” Don was an early lesson in the perils of catastrophic thinking, and my mother’s connection gave me a perspective on my own rigidity.

Meanwhile, it was lessons from characters like Kermit that helped me visualize what learning to cope with disaster might look like. In our family, it’s the antics of Grover, and the friendly, frazzled comradeship of Kermit, that stand in the highest place. Grover may come in like a whirlwind—”Ahhhhhhhhhh!” —but the steadfastness of their friendship always survives the chaos. When things are going wrong, all one of us has to do is look at the other person, cry out, “stop wreckin’ my place!” (see “The Weather Machine Salesman” episode) and it’s a commitment that, after the storm, we will work things out. As they squabble over pizza slices, what games to play, and whether to watch TV or listen to a record, Bert and Ernie have made me laugh uproariously while teaching me how to collaborate, cooperate, and build a bond with someone very different from me. My mom even wrote a HuffPost Parents piece called “Ernie and Bert’s Mother” about her experience parenting me and James!

I have come a long way since I was a little boy entranced by Sesame Street, but the lessons it taught me continue to resonate. My early fascination with music was stoked by the show’s songs, appearances by celebrated musicians, and sketches about how music is made. With a lot of hard work and a refusal to succumb to “I’ll never get it!” thinking, I developed into a singer and a skilled classical guitarist who studied throughout high school with a Juilliard teacher. Now, I play in ensembles and sings in two auditioned choirs at Vassar College, where I’m a rising junior. A math and computer science double major (and music minor) at Vassar, I have a Count Von Count doll on the bookshelf above my desk. My obsession with numbers as a young boy, nurtured by Sesame Street, has flowered into a passion for math and a love of “counting” akin to the Count’s himself.

Another big force in my growth was Tech Kids Unlimited. Since beginning summer classes there almost 10 years ago, I have worked on various creative and client projects, including a prototype for an app meant to teach students on the autism spectrum about the job searching process. It is through TKU that I’ve been given this opportunity to bring my love of Sesame Street and my passion for technology together.

For the last six months, the COVID pandemic has thrown nearly every aspect of our lives into disarray. Unable to meet face-to-face, we’ve been forced to rely on our devices for work, school, conversation, and entertainment. Yet the experts are always warning us of the dangerous consequences that over-investing in these omnipresent digital trends—smartphones, apps, social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc.—can have. I believe the present situation demands that we seriously consider how technology can not only support but enhance our lives. We can set up Zoom calls for anything from work meetings and school classes to virtual playdates and conversations with missed friends and family. Digital apps and games have the capacity to teach kids important life skills such as teamwork, self-advocacy, and independence in fun and engaging ways.

Sesame Street was created at a time when television was the only readily available platform for digital media. Now more than 50 years since its debut, it is still going strong, having adapted remarkably and resiliently to the rapidly changing landscape of digital media to bring Cooney’s vision to children and families all over the world. The Cooney Center continues to diligently scope out the ways technology can play a positive role in children’s learning and to confront the urgent issues they and their families are struggling with. It has been one of the greatest pleasures and honors of my life to work on behalf of a company that has taught me so much and given me so much joy.

Benjamin Prud’homme was born in New Haven, CT, grew up in New York City, and is a rising junior at Vassar College, where he is a double major in Math and Computer Science with a minor in Music. He was an intern with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center during the summer of 2020.