Well, we are deep in History Final Projects season once again! I have an in-box full of research assistance requests, so I am going to share the joyous discovery I made through a new collaboration this year.

One of our History teachers moved to 9th grade, taking lead on curriculum — basically a completely new one — for that class. About half of this term has focused on ethnic studies, mostly using historical thinking skills to weigh multiple perspectives, and doing close reading of primary source material. The teacher came to me with the idea of having students make a museum exhibits, feeling there was something about the storytelling — the human experience — that she wanted students to strive to capture with their final project. Their topic is a social movement from an ethnic group living in California in the 20th Century or earlier.

Of course, that gave me a perfect rabbit-hole to go down! The available materials on exhibition design are wonderful, and I quickly discovered that it offered a fantastic framework that allows the development and demonstration of many historical thinking skills. Not only does it allow students to chose a voice for their writing, but the strictures and low word counts push back against writing in curlycues to try to “sound smart” that so often plague our 9th graders.

Some of the excellent sources I drew upon for lesson planning purposes included guides from the Smithsonian and the BC Museums Association. (NOTE: Debbie Abilock just pointed me to the classic work that almost every guide I read talked about, but the Internet Archive was down when I was designing the project.) Students will be making a digital exhibit with Thinglink. (Here is my very in-process example.) I’ll be vulnerable and tell you that I am due in class now, even though I have citations missing from pretty much everything at this point. The links here should point you to most of what I used to build the curriculum, if not the exhibit.

In any event, here is our first draft of class materials. I’m very, very open, as always, to ideas and feedback. (Please NOTE: We decided we absolutely want to keep this project in the curriculum, and we would definitely take more days to do it next year.)

I’m off to support storytelling about the Chicano Tattoo Movement, gospel music in Los Angeles, and more!

Last summer I learned that the act of mindfully seeking and embracing joy had a transformative effect on my state of mind. Now, I am passionate about sharing the approach that helped me with you, my professional colleagues, and also with my students.

I am part of a personal, aspirational data visualization quilting group (@nightquilter’s #QuiltYourLifeCrew on Instagram). In a later post I am going to share the strategic quilts I am making for work under its auspices. Last summer, however, the group experienced its first #SummerLovingSeaglassSAL (Sew-a-long), based on @Nightquilter’s tracking system and @ExhaustedOctopus’ method of sea glass quilting. One participant renamed the summer exercise “JoyFest2023” and the authenticity of the moniker caught on for all of us.

And a #JoyFest it was! The goal was to decide on categories of activities that provided personal joy, assign a color to each category, and “earn” a color-coordinated scrap of fabric — a “piece of sea glass” — for each time you engaged with that activity. (This summer, the sew-a-long has expended into paper craft, painting, and other methods that move each particular participant.)

At first, I laid out activities that make me happy, such as pleasure reading and playing boardgames, but when I attended the launch party and heard that someone was tracking sounds they hear because their windows were open in summer (sprinklers, birds, dogs barking….) and another person mentioned a category for drinking coffee outside, I realized that my great joy comes from something else entirely: napping. So, I started tracking where I napped (couch, hammock, bed, during a car ride, outdoors/not hammock). I also decided that, since my spouse and I planned to spend our first empty-nester summer traveling to see friends and family we had not seen in a long time, I would do a “Re/Connecting” quilt that tracked from what parts of my life the people I was spending time with came.

Another participant came up with the idea of having a “joy jar,” as a place to add sea glass pieces as they were earned. As a result, we could actually see our jars filling with joy.

It turns out that the process of considering the acts that bring me joy, and the subcategories contained, brought about a huge change in my state of wellness. It made joy accessible, and helped me realize all the small areas in my day that brought happiness. But then, the tracking: Noticing I was earning substantially less of one color than others and asking myself if that activity really brought me joy, if I wanted to make a concerted effort to partake, or if I wanted to drop it? So very healthy! Paying attention to how much happiness I was earning each day and getting the visceral feedback of dropping bits of fabric into my joy jars? Priceless!

I wanted to share this method with you now. It is the perfect time to give it a try for a month. What joy do you aspire to have and record in July? Below, I am including a public post by another participant, @quilting_julia, to give you a concrete example and get you started. (Please note: I am only redacting one username, as I do not know the individual and have not gotten permission to share.)

Again, I really am advocating for introducing this method through advisory to each grade level at school. The administration is also excited by what this method has to offer. I think that individual definitions of, and attention to, daily joys could be a wonderful thing for the whole community.

Wishing you awareness of your small experiences of joy, and a rejuvenating summer.

This week I am fortunate to join our academic library colleagues at their statewide conference. I am encountering a variety of products and ideas that might be of use to US/HS-serving colleagues (and a few that might be helpful to all), so I am going to record them here.

The theme was The Insufficient Librarian. It was about both justice work and also the need to fight the feelings of insufficiency at work and learn to embrace boundaries and joy. So, below you will find notes about both IL skills and joy skills! (Let’s work on those JOY skills!)

For everyone, from our keynote speaker, Mychal Threets:

*I have long been wishing for a replacement for “How are you?” and am now considering “Are you ready for joy?” Might need to develop a follow-up questions along the lines of “How can I help you get there?”

*Do you use social media to promote your library? Mr. Threets reminded us that screen readers need help with hashtags. While they can see the separate words in #LibraryJoy (capitalizing the first letter of each word), they cannot parse #libraryjoy into readable parts.

Important new framing from Librarian Amy Gilgan from University of San Francisco:

“Multipartiality,” not neutrality—

“Neutrality” tends to favor people in power, multi partial acknowledges all but also power operating in the room.

Lit review of literature about joy at work, Kitty Luce and Margot Hanson

Here are the slides of their review. I mean, who doesn’t love a lit review!?!

True Fun from Stef Baldivia and Elizabeth Tibbitts

*We did a very cool “joy audit” to consider elements of our personal life and then our work life. It was awesome, actually. We looked for “fun magnets”: “Fun magnets are what bring the true fun alive for you.”

*The main focus was on library events, and making traditionally bureaucratic, dreadful draggy events into fun, joyful spaces in which your collaborators want to come. They based their thinking on the framework of SPARK:

S (making space – decluttering, taking space when needed, featuring your space, everyone is welcome)

P (pursuing passions – find something people can really get into)

A (Attracting fun – just really thinking about and opening oneself up to places where fun can enter into generally laborious moments)

R (rebelling – fun at work is rebellious)

K (keeping it going – make it a habit)

Example: These particular librarians took the meeting in which the disciplinary department representatives got trained in how to request books from the library collection (which never included the subject librarians!) and turned it into a passport-based fair. They invited all departments of the library to table at the fair, and were able to stimulate a bunch of conversations between faculty members and library folks offering services of which the faculty were not aware.

Virtue Information Literacy: Flourishing in an Age of Anarchy, by Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Virtues: open-mindedness, humility, modesty, courage, caution, thoroughness, justice, and information vigilance. This book draws heavily on “virtue ethics” from the discipline of philosophy, is highly interdisciplinary in its roots, and sounds quite intellectual — an interesting concept overall.

TikTok analogies for information lit instruction, from Laura Wimberley of California State University, Northridge (you are going to have to do your own self-education on TikTok, as I am so not there):

*Finding a strong initial article for citation tracing is like your first follow that indicates to the algorithm what you like and want to see more of in your feed

*Literature reviews are like explainers (I will try to get my hands on her example and share it, if I can)

*A citation is a stich (you are on your own here, I am working on growth mindset re: understanding stiches)

The National Library of Medicine has an online Medical History hub and a very interesting Know the Science tool

Pheonix Bioinformatics has some very interesting tools for K-12, including:

*Tair, a reference for gene function data that can be free for K-12

*MorphoBank, a paleontology database

I don’t know about you, but I am noticing quite a drop in students’ ability to read for information. We are experiencing a lot less resilience and a lot more rebellion against reading activities. Students complain “this isn’t English class,” when asked to engage with text in their other subjects. Thus, some teachers and I are reviving an old lesson in strategic reading as students prepare to undertake background research for their science fair projects.

I would love to hear how you are handling these challenges, as I think about how to repurpose the following lesson.

An age-old problem, of course, is a lack of reading-level appropriate materials on certain topics, especially for our middle school students. Two years ago, our seventh grade science teacher asked me to help students tackle navigating a slightly too hard article to learn some necessary information. My then-TA Anna came up with a lesson that met with great success.

Each group of students were assigned one article from a series taken from a single source. For homework, the skimmed the article. In class, we gave them a second copy of their articles and a specific prompt:

What are the abiotic factors (of your topic) and how do they interact with the biotic factors in the ecosystem?

We asked them to go back to their article and identify which parts of the article would help them answer their prompt. They were to note the text that looked useful and cross out any text that did not appear to help them answer their question.

Students stared at us, open-mouthed. We explained that they would only be working to read closely the parts of the article that had the information they needed (remember, they had looked at the entire article already…though they probably had not understood large parts of it), so we needed them to cross out anything that would not be helpful so they would feel freed from the need to read and understand it.

They continued staring at us. We next reminded them that each student had a second, clean copy of their article. If they crossed something out by mistake, it would not be lost — they had a back-up copy. (My TA had been very clear that fear of missing something would keep students from eliminating unhelpful text, and they needed the safety blanket of the ability to retrieve text, if necessary.)

Finally, they stopped starting, and started crossing out. With vigor and glee.

We then moved on to comprehending significantly smaller chunks of text, and the students felt gratified by the practice. They were able to speak to their prompts by the end of class. Our learning specialist even adopted the strategy to teach to specific students across the grades.

It is a tricky thing, balancing the need to know the context in which your needed information appears with the ability to target your reading successfully. It is my hope that employing this technique again this year will help students view reading for information not just as something being done to them, but as an incisive tool they can wield as needed.

But I would be really grateful to hear, if you have encountered similar challenges, how you responded!