2020-11-13 SPLAT Curiosity Report: Special Issue ILA 2020

Featured Story

SPLAT members who attended the first ever virtual Idaho Library Association Conference share what they learned, their reflections, and what you might have missed!

From Eric, via Ryan Dowd

Ryan Dowd was the keynote speaker at this ILA conference. I enjoyed his talk to the librarians at the conference but I wanted to say that I have been enjoying his emails that he puts out with good information. I am copying it with permission to share from Ryan.

In their quest to make a better world, many people adopt a “purity mindset.” A purity mindset says that things will be better when everything and everyone who is not perfect have been expelled. At its most extreme, a purity mindset leads to a Nazi holocaust or Rwandan genocide.

Lesser forms of “purity mindset” can also be dangerous:

  • Church leadership seeks to expel people who don’t believe 100% of stated doctrine.
  • Political parties seek to chase out people who are not conservative or liberal enough.
  • Social movements seek to cast out people who say something wrong.

The consequence in all three of these situations is that the membership of your group shrinks. Fewer people are working with you to make the world a better place.

That’s not how you change the world.

You change the world by drawing more and more people to your cause.

There is one type of purity that I find particularly frustrating because it is very popular right now: “Language purity.” I consider myself to be progressive (dare I even say “liberal”). Some members of progressive movements have adopted a language purity test. They closely monitor what other progressives say or write, looking for language transgressions:

  • “In talking about gay rights, you missed one of the initials (LBGT, etc.), so you are homophobic.”
  • “You used the phrase ‘homeless individuals’ instead of ‘individuals experiencing homelessness,’ so you must hate poor people.”
  • “You didn’t post #BLM on your Facebook page fast enough, so you are racist.”

Two things happen when you talk to people this way:

  • You feel better about yourself because you “get it” more than this person.
  • The other person is driven away from progressive causes.

It is a selfish approach. It puts your ego ahead of the needs of the world. Having empathy, recruiting others to the cause, and helping people to grow is far more effective! Have a great week!
– Ryan

This drawing more people to your cause is what ILA’s theme was this year “United Separately” we are all in this together even when we are not in the same room and coming together through togetherness.

From Jessica

This year, I really enjoyed listening to all my fellow SPLAT members present at ILA. Since I wasn’t part of the presentation, I feel very comfortable bragging about how amazing all of them were! If you registered for ILA, I encourage you to go watch their recorded presentation or go peruse through the slides; there are a lot of great ideas, book recommendations, and new tools that will help you make the most of your time! I haven’t had a chance to test out all the resources from the presentation, but here are a few I heartily recommend you check out:

It is often worth the time it takes to improve our workflows and all of these resources help with that!

From Gretchen

This year’s ILA conference was not my first online conference, and part of me hopes it is not the last. While I do enjoy “in-person” conferences, I have found that I enjoy the accessibility of online conferences even more. I was able to attend the conference and not have to ask for time off work, do a lot of driving, or disrupt my sleep by staying in an unfamiliar hotel room. Online conferences have been a thing for awhile, but I never took advantage of them until it was a necessary way of doing things. Now I will be looking for both online and, eventually, in-person conference experiences as professional development opportunities.

I really appreciated the diversity of our keynote speakers. Ryan Dowd was amazing, and it was interesting how many parallels there are between people dealing with homelessness and my patrons, pre-teens/teens dealing with middle school. We have students at my school who are also dealing with trauma and its effects on their brain development, and what Dowd shared is good practice for those of us who provide services to traumatized people in general. The next day’s keynote speaker was certainly a change of pace, but I enjoyed hearing from Ben Guterson. It is always fun to hear an author talk about their process, and his suggestions for middle grade fiction were great.

The sessions that I attended were fantastic. I really enjoyed hearing about computational thinking from Jennifer Redford and Maria Ricks, and I hope I can learn more about it at some point. Overall I thought this year’s conference was outstanding, and I look forward to attending next year whether it’s in person or online.

From Mike

The ILA experience this year was very different from years past. Of course, you can say that about almost anything since March this year!

One of the things that I loved about this year’s conference is the ability to watch and rewatch sessions for the next several months. ILA always has such great presentations and panels that I must pick and choose which topics I can attend. The Virtual Format of this year’s presentations means that I can see and attend every panel I was interested in as well as discover new panels and topics. Having the panels available online is also a great tool to help spread the ILA energy over a longer period as well. Every time I attend a conference, I come back full of ideas and energy to implement changes, improve programs and services, and make everything better! Being able to spread out the ILA experience over time keeps the energy and enthusiasm going, even after the conference.

From Rasheil

Shaking Up Your Storytime! – Allysa Jewel
The Virtual ILA conference 2020 was a superb opportunity to see how well Idaho librarians are innovative and creative when it comes to pivoting in a pandemic. The conference offered many worthwhile virtual sessions to attend. The session I attended that was an amazing hour of my time was the Shaking Up Your Storytime with Allyssa Jewel. Alyssa is from the Atlanta Area, has a background in theater education, (don’t be intimidated) and has a book that you can reference back to if needed. Highlights to this reimagining story times are as follows.

  • Look at your current storytime structure: How can you improve this?
  • Design a new storytime structure to add music and movement. SING! TALK! READ! MUSIC! MOVE!
  • Be engaging! This will bring life to your storytime.
  • Interaction and Infuse Interactive Material: sing here, or use call and response, dance, story drama, signable poems: This is how kids Learn!
  • Material selection is important
  • New Structure:
    1. Welcome Song
    2. Warm up
    3. Interactive read aloud
    4. Thematic Song with movement
    5. Story drama
    6. Thematic movement Action
    7. Cool down Action

Best idea? The Car Hop Storytime. The kids bring boxes to sit in and we do a storytime with lots of engaging activities. (Honk your horn, adjust your mirrors, make noises ect.) AWESOME!
 

From Jackie

Our SPLAT team had the opportunity to give a lovely presentation about dealing with change during the pandemic. Because we had not had a chance to practice together and we were working with an unfamiliar format we ran short on time and I was unable to present my portion. I thought I would take this opportunity to still share the list of resources I had planned to share as well as a link to my portion of the presentation that I recorded. I hope that it can be of use to someone.

Resource(s):

From Vanessa

I’ve only ever been to one other conference – it was in person. I enjoyed it – all the interesting information and meeting people from other libraries. However, being completely honest here, I felt overwhelmed because there was SO much! So many sessions to attend, so many things to see from vendors, so many people. Don’t get me wrong, I would attend conferences again in the future like that, assuming we have a normal to go back to eventually. This year I really enjoyed the online component to it. For a super introvert like myself, it seemed less overwhelming for me because my senses weren’t bombarded by all the wonderful things to see. Instead, I was in a familiar place, a quiet place, and everything seemed to be more “at my own pace” and I was still able to share and get all the great information from other library folk. PLUS, you can re-watch sessions or watch sessions you didn’t get to attend. I felt like that was a great option to really experience what everyone had to share. I really liked that ILA used Niche Academy – it’s familiar and I’m comfortable with it, it’s easy to use. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I didn’t have to travel!

From Alex

I was absolutely amazed at how well the virtual platform worked, and how easy it was to find and attend sessions. However, I realized this year that my favorite part of ILA has always been connecting with people from around the state, and catching up with people who I might not get to interact with as often. While ILA was still lovely, I’m definitely planning on attending as many future LITT events as possible to get my fill of networking and discussing ideas.

SPLAT explores the ever-evolving library world and supports library folks as they adapt to meet the needs of their communities. Library folk throughout the state of Idaho volunteer to serve on the Special Projects Library Action Team (SPLAT). Learn more about SPLAT at splat.lili.org

SPLAT is brought to you by the Idaho Commission for Libraries and was made possible, in part, by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LS-246156-OLS-20). The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.