The 2012 YALSA/VOYA Frances Henne Research Grant Committee congratulates this year’s grant recipient, Sylvia Vardell. Her research proposal is entitled, Poetry Books and Apps: Complement or Competition? Dr. Vardell’s research seeks to investigate student attitudes toward poetry apps and the impact of use of apps on poetry book reading and circulation.
In the research proposal, Dr. Vardell poses these questions and ideas:
“Where do we begin in selecting poetry that children will like? No one has yet considered the impact of the new format of the poetry application or ‘app.’ It seems logical to hypothesize that access to this new innovation might have a positive impact on young people’s attitudes toward the poetry content, but it has not been investigated. In addition, this raises the question about whether poetry in print format will suffer as a result. Does new technology trump old books? The proposed project will attempt to address these questions.”
Dr. Vardell notes that although this small study focuses exclusively on poetry, this look at the impact of apps on student attitudes and the relationship to book reading offers wider applications that interest professionals and researchers in libraries and literacy.
Sylvia Vardell is Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman’s University, where she teaches graduate courses in children’s and young adult literature.
The YALSA/VOYA Frances Henne Research Grant offers seed money to research that supports the YALSA Research Agenda. Applications for the 2013 grant are due on December 1, 2012. For more information, please see http://www.ala.org/yalsa/awardsandgrants/franceshenne .
Happy New Year! Here’s the latest in research and innovation from all areas that might interest you and your teens.
- High school students in Tucson, Arizona, are outraged that the school board has chosen to eliminate its Mexican American Studies courses in the wake of extremist politics and laws that will deny funding to the Tucson Unified School District if it continues to offer the curriculum. In protest, many students walked out on Thursday and marched to TUSD headquarters, where their pleas were largely ignored. Even if you’re not a librarian in Arizona, you can use this timely piece of news to plan programming or encourage discussion and study of students’ rights, the history of educational policy, or the study of history itself, as well as to highlight relevant books in your YA and greater library collections, like Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s The Latte Rebellion or Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
- It’s probably not much of a stretch to get your male patrons interested in books on sports, nor to encourage them to get out and play sports themselves. If you’re looking for an angle to get in with your more physical activity-reluctant patrons, male or female, turn them on to new interviews and research published in the latest issues of Latina and Shape, which cite a multitude of benefits (aside from the normal ones, like long, healthy life) for people who engage in competitive sports. Girls who play sports are more likely to have better body images and to avoid teen pregnancy, and researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that athletes are more skilled at balancing mental activities and multitasking than those who don’t play sports. Between looking pretty and doing well at school, there’s a benefit for everyone. Letting your teens know about this should make your sports and fitness books get off the shelves a little easier.
Colón, Suzan. “Love It, Dream It, Live It.” Latina, 16:4, 2012. 20-22.
“On the Ball.” Shape, 31:5, 2012. 19.
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The applications are in! The YALSA/VOYA Frances Henne Research Grant applications have been submitted, and the review committee is currently reading the innovative research ideas of this year’s pool of grant proposals.
We are looking forward to announcing the 2012 recipient at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. You are invited to join us for the official announcement during the “YALSA Research Forum: What’s Next for YA?” event on Friday, January 20, to be held from 1:30 PM-3:30 PM, Dallas Convention Center, Room D225. As part of the Research Forum, we will announce the winning grant proposal and tell you how to apply for the 2013 Henne Research Grant.
We will also share the news of the 2012 recipient during the “YALSA Trends in YA Presentation” on Saturday, January 21, to be held from 4:00-5:30PM, in the Dallas Convention Center, Room C141. This event will feature a paper presentation from Jeanie Austin called “Critical Issues in Juvenile Detention Center Libraries.” The paper will explore the tensions present in juvenile detention center library services (such as institutional limitations and access to technologies) and how youth and librarians can and do navigate these tensions within the library setting.
For more information on these programs, please go to http://wikis.ala.org/yalsa/index.php/YALSA_at_ALA%27s_2012_Midwinter_Meeting. We hope that you can join us for one of these YALSA events at Midwinter, and we look forward to celebrating this year’s Frances Henne Research Grant recipient with you in Dallas!
I’m back with another month’s worth of interesting research and writing on scholarly and popular topics related to teen culture, literacy, and library services. I’ve decided to expand from just summarizing research to also linking you to fascinating articles, blog posts, or other more easily-accessed tidbits that might spark meaningful conversation, programming, or reference/advisory transactions. As always, if you have a topic you’d like to know about, or if there’s a journal you miss having access to, comment here and I’ll do some digging for you.
The Lilith blog, an online supplement to the Jewish feminist magazine, reports on a “freedom ride” in Jerusalem protesting the ultra-Orthodox custom of requiring women to board and sit in the rear of the public bus only. Sound familiar? If you’re looking for a way to allow your diverse patrons to connect with each other, try bringing this up as a topic and talking about the similarities with the freedom rides in the American South.
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A couple of weeks ago YALSABlog readers may have noticed that the weekly Tweets of the Week had a new format. A few days after that revision there was a Blog post that used Storify (The tool also used for the Tweets of the Week) to highlight findings in a new Pew Internet and American Life report on teens and social networking. Some may wonder, “what’s going on here?” Well, what’s going on is that curation has come to the YALSABlog and curation is probably something that you are or will be thinking about for the work you do with teens.
There has been a lot of buzz about curation over the past several months. What people are talking about when they buzz about content curation is the organization of information, usually using web-based tools, on a particular topic. For example, Storify enables users to search a variety of sources, including Twitter, YouTube, Google, and Facebook, to uncover and organize topic content. With Storify it’s possible to integrate text in-between curated resources to provide context and flow to the curated content. For example, the Storify below is all about the Austin Teen Book Festival.
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Miss hiding out in your university library? Tired of only reading library publications? Want to know what other scholars are doing? Once a month I’ll do the browsing for you and let you know what’s going on in the world of pop culture, sociology, literature, pedagogy, and more. If it seems relevant to libraries or young adult services, you’ll find it here. When possible, I’ll also offer some insights or suggestions on application for libraries or librarians. Revel in being a student again!
- Contexts Discoveries, a sociology blog, says that Facebook isn’t just a tool for social interaction, but it’s a tool for sociologists to study how students create their physical social networks. With our world getting more technological every moment, it’s good to know how your patrons view their social roles and responsibilities.
- David Darts describes how artists and art teachers have combined social justice education with art education and created street art projects that didn’t just bring art to the public but also brought the streets to the public’s eye. Posing as panhandlers, street artists, and shoppers, students “performed” the streets after a series of activities in the classroom and out including field research, interviews, and journal reflections. This “performance art pedagogy” incorporated visual art, acting, and social research and made the students more aware of street life and culture, in both its positive and negative aspects. Take a look at the community surrounding your library, and think about your teen patron base–would this be an activity for them? And would it be an eye opening one, or a validating one? How can you approach the sensitive subject of homelessness, the sex trade, poverty, and social exclusion in a way that’s meaningful for your community?
Darts, David. “Invisible Culture: Taking Art Education to the Streets.” Art Education, 64:5, 2011. 49-53.
- There is a lot of talk in libraries about how best to serve the “underserved,” the “low-achieving,” the “at-risk,” and rightfully so. But what about serving and supporting the needs of gifted and creative young people? Two articles in the spring issue of Gifted Child Today address these issues. (more…)
