Ingrid Hopson, SLA School Librarian of the Year 2007, gave this speech at the SLA Weekend Course Gala Dinner on 23 June 2007.
Firstly, I need to thank Kathy and her team at the SLA for their unstinting work to raise our collective profile and of course to Aidan Chambers for creating the School Librarian of the Year Award in the first place.
For me this is a moment of mixed emotions. I am excited and delighted to have been chosen as School librarian of the Year and yet as I stand here before you this evening I feel scared and apprehensive about giving this speech.
Today is for me the tomorrow that yesterday I dreamed of. My dream began last summer when, Lucy, our Head of English, said that she was would like to nominate me for this award. Now five weeks after being selected as the School Librarian of the Year 2007 I am still living the dream.
Tonight I really want to say something that matters, at least to me, and something which will, I hope, start to help us work together to make every child a reader. This is not an easy task, in a world where so many people have something to say about reading and where so little of it seems to make a significant difference.
No part of society - parents, teachers, librarians, community members - wants to see boys, or girls for that matter, unable to enjoy and learn from reading, especially as more and more jobs require higher levels of literacy. But it would be pointless to stand before you and talk about research and statistics. We all know the problem, many children do not read as much as they used to, others do not enjoy it and some struggle to decode texts.
Reading has become our problem, our aim and our solution.
Why don't all our students engage with reading? Is there anything we can to do to get students reading with motivation? Are there any techniques that all good readers use to help them enjoy and learn from their reading? And, if so, can anyone learn to use them to become a more effective learner? The good news is that the answer to all these questions is an emphatic yes.
Reading is probably the most researched aspect of education. If the fix were easy surely someone would have discovered it by now. It appears that for many of our students, reading a book is like getting a young child to have a bath: It's hard to get them in, but once there, it's nearly impossible to get them out.
So how do we entice them into the bath water? How do we show our students that those squiggles on a page can be transformed into an enjoyable experience? I believe that we must allow and nurture a personal response to the books our students read. Our reluctant readers need to be shown how reading can be an active and social pursuit. Readers do not merely lie back and soak up the words like the sponge in the bath water. Reading is about what happens to the readers, what clues they spot, what strikes them as they read and how reading can help them experiment with life. As Rosenblatt said "literature provides a living through, not simply knowledge about" Without words we cannot connect, without thoughts we cannot understand and without readers words cannot live.
I have just read "A thousand splendid suns" and I experienced a range of emotions as I followed the lives of Mariam and Laila. I was enraged and very emotional as I read about their lives. For most of the book I adopted a predominately aesthetic stance. However at the same time I learned much about the troubled history and social life of Afghanistan over the past thirty years.
How was I able to do this? I could do it because I know like you how to behave and act as a reader, I have a whole range of strategies to call upon to support my reading. This I feel is our key. If we can show our students what good readers do we may be able to make a difference and get students reading.
How do we show others to behave like a good reader? If we were football coaches we would show the students how to bend it like Beckham. Instead we need to make explicit how meaning is created in the mind of the reader. So in the library we model how to read it like Paxman, respond to it like Pullman and present it like Dimbleby.
Just as writers write best about things they know and care about. So readers read best when they carry on an inner conversation with the text. When they respond with delight or wonder; horror or outrage. When they question what they read, argue or agree with the author. We need to model how important their thinking is when they read.
I challenge you all, if you have not already done so to read Rosenblatt and Zimmermann, Goudvaris or Tovani, Pressley or Guthrie and like me I hope you will learn and borrow and steal from all of them. Let our main concern to be to create a spark between the students and the books. Let's not concentrate on easily checked facts of the story but show students the value of their own responses to literature.
When you try something and it works I beg you to share it with us on the SLA members' section, where I hope we will have a special database to record all our successes. Individually we will have a uphill battle but collectively we have could be on to a winner.
For us change is not an option but essential for our survival. Reading has a future but that reading may be far more social than in the past. We need to embrace new information and communication sources. Never before have so many primary source materials been available to us. Never before would we have been privy to the day to day lives and conversations of so many people. Never before could we build communities with people throughout the world. Our landscape is changing and as librarians we need to grab these tools and make them work for us.
Boys into Books, Booked Up and a National Year of Reading, the time is surely right for reading to make sense. These are the initiatives we need to devote our energies to. When asked at the age of 80 what he thought the secret of life is, Henry Moore answered
"The secret of life is to have a task. Something that you devote your entire life to, something to bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the important thing is, it must be something you can't possibly do."
For us it is to guide and nurture our students as they develop their love of reading so what are we waiting for let's go for it.
