Librarians Make the Most of a School Visit

As we leave Children's Book Week, here's an appreciation of children's librarians, the world over.

One of my March school visits was particularly memorable because of extraordinary efforts of librarians to engage their students in my work before I arrived.

Brent Subic Library staff (left to right): Riza Bamba (elementary library assistant), Angelo Fernandez (middle school librarian), me, Debbie Kienzle (Brent International School head librarian), Rose Austria (lower school librarian).

At Brent International School Subic in the Philippines, Rose and Angelo put my books on display, put up welcoming banners, and read my work to their students.

 

Riza, who'd never been part of an author visit before, worked with the 4th and 5th graders to create the most amazing display of creative projects in response to my work that I've ever seen. She first went online to research what kinds of projects other schools had produced. She googled "author visits," looked at Pinterest, and gathered examples to give students ideas of what was possible.

The students, in small teams of 3-5 students, used 2 library periods per week for more than a month, plus free time - a total of 10-15 hours on each project. They did online research about me and my books, then used their imaginations to craft incredibly original and delightful projects demonstrating their knowledge, including...

a Lift-the-Flap poster ;

a Facebook page;

   

a gameboard;

 

a hanging poster;

  a house;

and a pizza box!

The result of this extraordinary investment of time, energy and creativity was palpable in the students' response to meeting me. When the 4th-5th graders came into the auditorium for their workshop, they were bursting with excitement. It felt as if there was already a deep bond between us, as if I was theirs. What an honor and a delight to spend time with them!

The Philippines!

Catching up on my spring: back in March, my second Southeast Asia stop was the Philippines, where I visited the three campuses of Brent International School. It was fascinating to experience the differences between the schools, from Subic's 200 students (80% Korean) in a building on a former U.S. military base, to Baguio's hillside cluster of buildings with 300 students (60% Korean), to Manila's student body of more-than-1000 diverse students from all over the world.

And I got to travel and experience wonders of the Philippines, from Subic Bay on the western coast...

with breakfast by the bay,
















and fruit bats in one protected area;

then across the central plain and up twisting roads to mountain-top Baguio,

where I was the first-ever international author to visit,

and students were very excited by autographing.

Baguio had some of the most amazing jeepneys I saw.

Then back down the mountain and across the plain, driving through Manila and to the southern suburbs...

Another  hotel breakfast with a very different view!

  to the main campus of Brent Manila.

Throughout, I was accompanied by librarian extraordinaire Debbie Kienzle, and welcomed so warmly and graciously by her library staff, the schools' personnel and students, and the Filipinos I met everywhere we traveled.

Inspiration in Rome

I spent last week in Italy, with two days as a visiting author-illustrator at the American Overseas School of Rome, focusing on Africa is Not a Country (K-2), The Legend of Hong Kil Dong (8th grade art classes), and After Gandhi (7th grade English). I felt a real connection with this K-12 school community, its wonderfully welcoming staff and multinational, multilingual student body.

The school borders the busy Via Cassia on one side and a green zone of rolling hills on the other - amazing to find in the midst of a huge city. The cafeteria serves Italian food - risotto cooked with radicchio one day, pasta with pesto the next. Best of all, there is a coffee bar in the school, and kind staff members kept bringing me freshly brewed cappuccino between sessions! (Sets a new standard for author visits.)

On either side of the days of presenting, I got to explore Rome, with sights like the Pantheon, the majesty of which no photograph can convey.

And I got to experience - and get stuck in while traveling back from Florence - the biggest snowfall Rome has seen in decades, some say in 55 years!



My host, upper school principal Ken Kunin, shared some of the books he's used as references for faculty training on cultural competency, including Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, in which I found this gem of a passage in a Patricia J. Williams essay on intentional color blindness, "The Emperor's New Clothes" (here's an excerpt):

"... I do think that to a very great extent we dream our worlds into being. For better or worse, our customs and laws, our culture and society are sustained by the myths we embrace, the stories we recirculate to explain what we behold. I believe that racism's hardy persistence and immense adaptability are sustained by a habit of human imagination, deflective rhetoric, and hidden license. I believe no less that an optimistic course might be charted if only we could imagine it.

What a world it would be if we could all wake up and see all of ourselves reflected in the world, not merely in a territorial sense but with a kind of nonexclusive entitlement that grants not so much possession as investment. A peculiarly anachronistic notion of investment, I suppose, at once both ancient and futuristic. An investment that envisions each of us in each other."