Reflections
There are many things we have learned from this experience that will inform our practice in the future. The most beneficial part of this project was getting to meet these students in a relaxed setting, and learn about them and their families first-hand. One of the key elements in successful multicultural education is to get to know the students as well as you can. Certainly this informal setting was ideal for making progress toward that goal. We hope to continue to learn more about our students and how we can better serve them in the future. By doing this, we hope to avoid the possibility that Noel (2000) pointed out, where the "culture and language of children are disregarded and devalued," with perilous results for the students (p. 21).
Our additions to the collection are a great start, but we need to keep progressing toward a collection that successfully reflects the population of our school as well as society at large. Many of the materials in the collection are older, and should be reviewed for stereotypes and cultural appropriateness. Students of different cultures should not only see people who reflect their culture in books specifically about their culture, but they should also appear in non-fiction books and other materials as well.
We plan to continue actively recruiting diverse people to play a visible role in our Media Program as volunteers and guest readers. This project has helped us to step outside the Media Center and see it from the point of view of someone who is unfamiliar with it. While to us, the Media Center seems like a happy welcoming place, to someone who does not speak our language or understand the purpose the Media Center plays in American public education, the Media Center can probably seem very intimidating. We hope that this opportunity has presented the Media Center to these parents as an ideal way for parents of other cultures to become actively involved in the school. We also hope to stand back and try to understand the unique role that the Media Center can play in the lives of these ESOL students, as members of a non-dominant culture. Again, Delpit's (1998) advocacy of the "ethnographer" role comes in handy here (p. 297) as a reminder to step outside of our position of power to try to see the structures we perpetuate and participate in as an outsider might.
We hope to host this event, or others like it, at least twice a year in the future. We will work to improve relations with the ESOL teacher, and encourage her to bring her class to the Media Center as often as possible. If overall use is to be improved, we need to have the ESOL teacher as a member of our team and as an advocate for our services. We will offer ourselves as a partner to her in creating literate and information literate students, keeping the ideals of "technology as social inclusion" as the impetus for these different types of literacy (Warschauer, 2002, p. 5). We found this list of library terms translated into Spanish that may be helpful as a way to improve understanding and access for those Spanish speaking children and families with limited English proficiency. (created by Melissa Howell, a colleague in the School Library Media Program at the University of Georgia.) We will integrate these words into our orientations in the future.
In the future, we would like to offer this Open House as part of a regular series of orientations to smaller groups within the larger school population. It is likely that there are more groups in this school population who would benefit from this targeted outreach. We have learned that it can, in turn, only benefit us to take the time to get to know our patrons (and all their complex attributes and needs) better.
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