Strong Girls School at ALA
Leah Langby
July 5, 2017
Keeping Up With Kids
group of girls facing away from the camera, holding hands and jumping

One of the programs I attended at ALA this year was called Strong Girls School.  Nancy Evans, from the public library in Levittown, New York discussed a program that she developed after teen girls in a library writing group clamored for it.  As a writing sample for the kids, she brought in a blog post by Maureen Johnson about photo-shopping.  Turns out the girls were more interested in talking about the content of the blog post than in the writing style.  Turns out the girls had a LOT to talk about related to body image, gender expectations, sexism, rape culture, and more.

Combining this interest and desire for information and conversation about important topics with sobering statistics about gender inequality, prevalence of sexual assault, and other depressing topics, Nancy decided that there was a need for a program.  She describes it, and some of the resources, in this Programming Librarian blog post.  She talked, both in the program and in the blog post, about her nervousness about having a gender-specific program, but also discussed her reasons for finding it to be worthwhile, despite being exclusive.  It would be ideal, she agreed, to also have a series of sessions about what it is like to grow up male, with all the challenges and societal expectations that this includes.

The girls who attend the 6-8 week sessions are very engaged and want to continue the series as a discussion group indefinitely.  She offers it once a year, but has enough interest that she could run it more often.  Wonderful collaborations for additional free programming have grown from this program.  Hmmm…it seems pretty interesting–I’m wondering if anyone around here is interested in doing it.

search all blog posts using keywords or title, date, categories

Archives

Categories

Related Articles

Thanksgiving Books

I recently got a question from a librarian who had weeded a lot of Thanksgiving books that perpetuate myths about Thanksgiving that are both historically inaccurate and promote harmful ideas about the Indigenous people already here when the colonists celebrated their...

Marketing to Teens

Thanks to Reb for passing along this sound advice from Angela Hursch about marketing to what can be a very tricky audience:  teens.  Take a look at this short video, Boost Teen Library Attendance,  and see how many of these things you are already doing, and if there...

Art to Calm Squirming Bodies and Minds

I attended an excellent webinar yesterday through Early Childhood Education Webinars with Anna Reyner, an art therapist who is also an early childhood expert.  Wow!  So many wonderful ideas.  The Early Childhood Education Webinars are almost always thought-provoking,...