Over the past several weeks I’ve been working on a few projects that have given me a chance to consider once again what we mean in libraries when we talk about youth participation. To be honest, over the past several years I’ve been pretty frustrated with teen youth participation in libraries. What I usually find is that most librarians focus on activities that are at the lowest levels of the ladder of particiption. In other words real teen participation is really pretty minimal.
Yesterday, I was able to hear part of a presentation from community agencies in New York City that manage to “do” real participation. (YMCA, Studio Museum Harlem, The Door) Unfortunately, I missed everything but the question and answer portion of the presentation, but what I did hear was truly inspiring, particularly from a youth participation perspective. Panelists mentioned the importance of:
- Listening to what teens have to say
- Not making assumptions
- Not judging
- Being who you really are – not trying to be cool when you are not
- Talking with teens about sometimes difficult topics
- Building relationships
This tied in with other thinking and work I’ve been doing. Recently, I’ve been reminded how important it is for librarians and teens to focus on project-based youth participation. Many teen librarians talk to me about how hard it is to keep teens coming to TAB/TAG meetings and how much work it takes on the librarians part to keep a TAB/TAG going. But, think about this. If the participation is project-based:
- Each project has a beginning, middle, and end.
- Different teens in the community work on different projects.
- More teens will want to participate and be motivated because they are involved in a specific project that is of interest to them.
- You have the chance of meeting the needs and bringing in more teens because of the short-term nature of the participation. (It’s not a life-time committment.
It’s likely that a higher level of participation is also possible when it comes to project-based youth participation. Teens have more opportunity to come up with projects that are meaningful to them, the library, and community. Some examples of project-based participation include:
- Space planning – a group of teens who are interested in figuring how to work with the library’s space get together and plan and implement a rearrangement or renovation of the space.
- Gaming – teens who are interested in gaming get together to talk about how to bring gaming into the library. They talk about policies, hardware and software, and plan programs.
- Collection building – teens who are interested in different parts of the library collection get together to help determine what to add, and weed. A group of music loving teens might work on the music collection. A group of manga loving teens might work on the manga collection. Etc.
None of these projects has to be long-term. The group might get together for several weeks, disband, and then reconstitute themselves in some way at a later date. The group only lasts as long as the project on which they are working.
And, of course, don’t forget that teens involved in a particular project could meet virtually just as well as f2f.
It would be great to learn about librarians who are using a project-based approach to youth participation already. Anyone?
I know that there are many articles, workshops, and blog entries circulating on teen spaces.Most of these revolve around the physical trappings of the area:what furniture did we buy, how did we find the space, what paint colors did we use, etc. Most prominently, they state how they got the money for this project. Who gave it, and how did we talk them into it? Having a teen space is seen as a vital part of serving teens. But where does that leave libraries that, for whatever reason, can’t get the funding?Or what if, no matter how supportive your administration is, they can’t enlarge your teen space any more than it is?
