After submitting my first assessment for Literature in Digital Environments, I felt it was a good moment to take a breather and reflect, before returning to module readings and gearing up for Assessment 2. As with the previous ETL subject I took (despite working as a Teacher Librarian, I’m on the Master of Information Studies course, rather than the Teacher Librarianship course, it’s something of a long story!), I really enjoyed working on the assessment as it felt a throwback to my days of studying literature and then teaching senior students in the UK. I found a lot that was familiar but I suspect that’s because I deliberately chose areas I was keen on. The points I was finding about literary techniques and theory all gave me a mild rush of excitement, to the point where I realised I would have to really focus and ring-fence what I could achieve in the time, given my work and family commitments.

However, things were different for me as well. In my current work context, it’s not my place or even advisable to get too much into technique and theory, no matter how much I would like to. As a teacher librarian, my primary focus on the reading (rather than research) side is finding texts that young people can enjoy. I have to understand their interests and nurture and model a positive, format and genre-agnostic, exploratory attitude. This is what led me to look at webtoons and interactive fiction. Webtoons are a format I know students enjoy but either think or have been told is not ‘real reading’, and one that I’ve been skeptical of too (no longer!). Interactive Fiction came to my mind after seeing students become interested in choose your own adventure style books. I recently gave some books I found to some learners and they loved them. I would like to have reading classes about both these forms in the future, although I’m mindful that I would need to prepare English teachers for this as some have concerns about anything other than fiction on paper.