Professional development activity: Attend and document a workshop

Event: Reading Oceania: A Celebration of Youth Literature from Pasifika, New Zealand, and Australia
Time: 3 Mar 2022, 4:00 pm AEDT
Place: online link of the session: https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/?L25HXQ

This workshop was organized by The International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) Oceania Region and Children’s and Young People’s Literature Special Interest Group in collaboration with the School Library Association of Victoria (SLAV), the School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (SLANZA) and Charles Sturt University’s Children’s Librarianship Specialisation to shares and celebrates youth literature in the region. Three experts from Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific Islanders will share their views and perspectives and will introduce some platforms looking for more resources and ideas to develop a larger collection.

What did you learn?

The National Centre for Children’s Literature developed a database for native speakers except English to preserve and share their language literature and culture. It gave me an insight into the database of diverse cultures and the reasons behind their software development.

In a lecture given by Dr. Nicola Daly in New Zealand, I learned about the role of picture books in children’s development, through the sign language of deaf children. In addition, she also introduced many books with special layouts, including bilingual.

Digital copies of literature are not only convenient to preserve but they can also be made bilingual or multilingual and shared with people of different cultures around the world, promoting culturally diverse literature and reducing the major barriers to social media.

In addition, David Riley way of getting along with young people is also worth learning. He is very successful in encouraging young people to write their stories creatively and has successfully made young people read again. These are all worth learning.

How is it relevant to your professional practice working with children and young adults?

As a library, he serves not only one type of person but also people with special learning needs who have difficulty obtaining or reading appropriate information in their daily lives, especially children’s and young adults libraries. Because children at different stages of development have different needs. Therefore, to meet people with different needs, libraries should be diverse and need multicultural collections. I think this special database is exactly what libraries need, such as multilingual versions for different nationalities and picture books for deaf children. In addition, they also build a free database platform online that is used by people all over the world.

What were the gaps in your knowledge revealed? How will you fill those?

After this workshop, I realized how inexperienced and lacked knowledge I was. I now work in a middle school library of multiple nationalities. I often avoid being too biased in purchasing, so I use the student ratio as the purchase ratio of Chinese and English, but I ignore students with special learning needs, such as some self-employed students. Students with autism or dyslexia, and international and South Asian students. I feel like this is something I need to explain for now and find out more about these students with special learning needs.

References:

Reading Oceania: A celebration of youth literature from Pasifika, New Zealand, and Australia. FUSE. (2022, March 3). Retrieved from https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/ResourcePackage/ByPin?pin=L25HXQ