Doug Johnson

Once Upon a Time
Head for the Edge, March 2002

As an elementary library media specialist for the Aramco schools in Saudi Arabia, one of my favorite students was a Nigerian boy named Chinedu. Big for his age, talkative, focused on his own agenda and relentlessly cheerful, he drove his regular classroom teachers crazy. As a result, Chinedu was often sent to the library for a little timeout for the three years I knew him.

Chinedu really was a pest. He always wanted to visit at the times I was the busiest. He needed watching – his silliness could be a real bother to everyone in the library. But he also liked work. As a result, I kept on hand a Chinedu –do list of small jobs he could work at during his frequent visits that kept him productively occupied. Things would go smoothly for weeks and then Chinedu would do something outrageous like purposely dumping the cart of books he was shelving on the floor just to see reactions. And I would go home wondering why I even bothered with him.

But late one afternoon, Chinedu reminded me of why I bothered. Out of the blue, he approached my desk, grinned, and in his melodious accent declared, “Ahh, Meester Johnson. Dees library. Eet is my hoom away from hoom.” And I was reminded again that  library is often the only place in school that is comfortable for many, many students.

Personally, I like stories. I like hearing them and I like telling them. It’s one of the reasons I became a library media specialist. And judging from the attention paid to stories and storytelling at school library conferences, lots of media specialists feel the same way. And that’s a good thing. As a profession, we should be paying attention to storytelling for two reasons.

The first is quite traditional. We can use our storytelling arts to turn kids on to reading and literature and learning. We like to do this and do it well. But I would add a caution.

School library media programs must participate in the accountability movement. When our communities tell schools that basic skills come first, they are asking us to grow vegetables. And I worry that things like story telling will be seen as flowers unless we can find ways to correlate our literature and language activities to improved reading scores and the like. Library media specialists know that kids who can read, but don’t, are no better off than those who can’t. We know that the more kids read and hear literature read, the better they read. We know that it takes special efforts to get some kids turned on to reading. We know that an appreciation of art and literature and divergent cultures is as important to kids as phonics and number facts. But for too many folks that is sort of mushy claptrap. In the current political climate, there needs to be a strong tie made between our wonderful work with stories and the purpose and effectiveness of “school.”

There is a second reason we can and should hone our ability to tell stories. One skill all great salespeople have is the ability to tell compelling personal tales that illustrate the points they wish to make. It’s one thing for the guy down at the Ford dealership to show a potential buyer a Consumer Reports study. But the real closer tells the story of how Ms. Jones buys this exact model every other year and swears each one is the best car she has ever owned. When selling (advocating for) our programs, our visions, and ourselves to those we wish to influence, we need to tell our stories. And we should be good at it!

Statistics are a wonderful thing (despite 86.4% of them being made up). Numbers that tell of correlations between good media programs and good test scores, of circulation increases, of average ages of collections, of percentages of students mastering benchmark skills, of computer to student ratios, and of other “hard” indicators can be very influential with some decision-makers. But often numbers are viewed skeptically as well. Shakespeare once wrote that the devil could cite scripture to his purpose. Today he might well observe that the devil can cite statistics as well.

Stories put a human face on the numbers and the concepts. Anne Frank is the face of the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust; Rosa Parks’ story becomes the tale of every person affected by segregation; and Helen Keller’s and Anne Sullivan’s lives demonstrate the power of teaching. As library media specialists, we can use stories to personalize the effects of our programs. We need to share with administrators, teachers, parents and legislators:

• How Susie after years of being turned off reading can’t stop now that she found Avi’s books.
• How as a media specialist, you were able to help Jason to find good information about a career in genetic engineering on the Internet.
• How frustrated Mr. Lender’s class was when looking for information on countries when most of the books in the library media center were over fifteen years old.
• How excited Jamal got about his writing when he knew it would be part of a school website that all his relatives could read.
• How much easier it was for Mrs. Hanson’s class to focus their research when she and the library media specialist worked together to figure out how the assignment could tap into personal interests.
• How Chinedu found the library media center to be the one place he could feel welcome and successful in school.

We need to all tell our stories often and with passion. People will listen. Remember the works of the poet Muriel Rukeyser: “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”