In November of 2015, I attended the AASL conference in Columbus, Ohio and came away from it more firmly convinced that we had to change the way we conducted our project based learning and taught research skills to our lower secondary students. For various reasons, research skills and the inquiry cycle were being neglected by our teachers.
At the same time, I was concerned about the fact that we had introduced a course for grades 9 and 10, called Study Skills and were teaching stand alone lessons relating to research, communication, self-management and thinking, in other words, the ATLs, which should be embedded in our curriculum. Putting the two concerns together I suggested that I become one of the grade 9 study skills teachers, that we get rid of the stand alone classes, and that we teach skills through a project. It was my hope that we could then present this project to the other teachers as an example of a way to embed ATLs in their project based work.
I was unsure about the subject of the project or even what format it should take and grappled with this for several months. Sure that I had come up with a solution, I offered to run a session at Dianne McKenzie and Katie Day's Inspiring Conversations in Prague. In the session before mine, I attended a conversation about Human Libraries and at that moment everything changed! Though my apple cart had been overturned completely, it allowed my presentation to become a true conversation in which I set out what I had planned and talked about how I would like to now change it. Dianne gave me the idea for the topic when she discussed a similar project she had done, entitled 'My Passion'. I had been stumbling around looking for a topic that students could take ownership of and this was it.
So what is a Human Library? The Human Library, developed first for the 2000 Roskilde Music Festival in Denmark in response to a hate crime, is about offering people as ‘human’ books which are lent out to 'readers' for a conversation. Books typically had titles that represented a stigmatised or stereotyped group of people in the community. (World Peace) However, in our case, our titles were to reflect the vast array of interests of our grade 9 students. Through their preparation for a Human Library presentation, students would research and present (as a human book) a subject about which they were particularly passionate.
Our student ‘books’ would then be borrowed by 3 people per session for 15 to 20 minutes, during which time, the books would tell their ‘readers’ about their topic and share pictures or activities with them and then answer questions. ‘Readers’, who would come from various parts of the ACS Egham community, were to be given a ‘catalogue’ in advance from which to choose the book they were most interested in. Having done so, they would then sign it out. The reader was also to be provided with the protocols for their role in the Human library at the time of reserving their book. To assist our ‘books’ in improving for their next ‘edition’, readers were to be asked to write a short ‘book review’, which would be shared with the ‘books’.
And our library basically followed the format that I first envisioned. There was some tweaking to be done but not as much as I had anticipated might be needed. The day itself was stress free for the organisers, though I imagine our grade 9s may have been a bit stressed more stressed than we!
And our future plans? We definitely want to repeat this concept next year with the grade 9s. Moreover, other sections of our school community have asked about holding a human library and so 2017-18 may see an explosion of these libraries across our campus.
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