YALSA Education Programs at ALA Annual

Below are the Education Programs that will be presented at 2022 ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition as part of YALSA programming; you can find these programs on the ALA Annual Conference Preliminary Scheduler. Programs are listed below in chronological order.

Facing Fear Through Fiction: How young adult and middle-grade authors are exploring anxiety and building empathy in books for teen and tween readers

Saturday, June 25, 2022 9:00am – 10:00am

Anxiety among teens and tweens has more than doubled since 2020, according to the American Medical Association. But these young people don’t have to go through it alone. Books that offer accurate and empathetic anxiety rep can teach your readers not only how to confront their own struggles, but also help them empathize with peers battling mental health issues.

Hear YA and MG authors of 2021/2022 releases discuss how teens and tweens benefit from seeing anxiety explored on the page, how librarians can use these books to help teens live with their anxiety, and why the authors chose to tell these stories. Authors on the panel include Nicole D. Collier (Just Right Jillian, Versify Books), Amalie Jahn (Phoebe Unfired, Bermlord), Kara McDowell (This Might Get Awkward, Scholastic), Jordan Sonnenblick (The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell, Scholastic), Phil Stamper (As Far As You’ll Take Me, Bloomsbury), Erin Stewart (The Words We Keep, Random House) and Jazz Taylor (Meow or Never, Scholastic). From social anxiety to anxiety over sexual identity to clinical disorders like OCD and germaphobia, this panel offers a well-rounded view of the books available for your teen and tween readers, as well as tools on how to use fiction to address these real-world issues.

Let Teens Lead: Strategies to Build Programs Developed By Teens, For Teens

Saturday, June 25, 2022 11:00am – 12:00pm

Are you curious about learning how to implement youth voice in your teen program planning? In this session, you will receive insight from teen leaders that will help you confidently put teens in leadership positions to develop more engaging programming. Some key tools will include: different models for teen leadership depending on the organizational structure of your institution, strategies for building and maintaining healthy teams that include both adult and teen leaders, marketing approaches to engage more teen leaders, and more.

The case study for the session will be the first three seasons of Bridges & Books, a literature podcast developed by teens and for teens featuring teen-hosted interviews with award-winning and NYT Bestselling authors of teen literature. The panel will feature the teen creators behind the Bridges & Books Podcast and will be moderated by Kelsey Ford, their adult advisor.

No Rules, Just Rights: Revolutionize Reading for Young Adults

Saturday, June 25, 2022 2:30pm – 3:30pm

This session will demonstrate how Library staff serving young adults can transform their customers’ expectations by teaching and demonstrating “Readers’ Rights” that empower young people to make choices that foster the joy of reading for pleasure, and turn non-readers into avid readers.

Many young adults identify as non-readers, believing they dislike or even loathe reading because they have internalized a rigid set of rules about what, why and how to read. Middle and High School curriculums reinforce those rules by emphasizing Lexile level and the canonical classics of Western Literature; teen patrons expect us to share these values and enforce these rules.

A panel of expert librarians, authors, and publishing professionals will discuss how to subvert the old “rules'' into radical “rights,” thus transforming teens’ expectations of library services and attitudes towards reading while also broadening their world through diverse literature that serves as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. Actual teens’ honest opinions and attitudes about the rules and rights of reading will be shown through video interviews presented during the discussion.

Participants will leave with a new perspective on how to talk with teens about their rights as readers, and practical tips for communicating these revolutionary rights during readers advisory interactions and through passive programs, collection development, and displays.

The Game of Life: Using Gamification to Teach Information and Media Literacy

Saturday, June 25, 2022 2:30pm – 3:30pm

Learn how to create, adapt and use games to teach information and media literacy knowledge and skills in your school library or youth services program. Engage students and participants in the quest for facts hidden in the information landscape while building the patience and discipline inherent in gaming. Battle bias, stereotypes, and cultural misrepresentations with adaptations of your favorite card, board and choose-your-own-adventure games. Design learning experiences that build vocabulary and understanding foundational to information and media competency while having fun.

Teen Library Internships: Preparing Youth for the Future

Saturday, June 25, 2022 4:00pm – 5:00pm

The innovative concept of offering teen library internships in school, public, special, and university libraries is taking wing in a number of libraries and associated settings today. Speakers will share advice and details based on their experiences with teen internships that libraries can use to build meaningful internship opportunities at their own libraries. Teen library internships provide a new way of encouraging youth participation, help teens to develop valuable knowledge and skills for their futures, encourage teens to become dedicated library users and supporters into adulthood, and sometimes lead to beneficial partnerships. Libraries that want to be on the cutting edge of trends in library teen services and teen career development will want to consider adding teen internships to their repertoire of opportunities for active teen involvement. This program can help to get started!

Technology Speed Dating: 20 apps in 60 minutes

Sunday, June 26, 2022 1:00pm – 2:00pm

Are you looking for technology tools and resources for your library program? Look no further. Our team will feature our favorite 20 apps and online tools we use for our library programs during the sessions. The presenters will review each tool and model how they use it to enhance their program and make it future-ready. These technology tools will focus on curation, student creation tools, research resources, and other additional applications which allow you to manage your library effectively. Learn how librarians can use these tools to reach a larger learning community. Attendees will leave with a multitude of ways to personalize their library programs.

Youth Justice Court: Getting Teens involved with Justice

Sunday, June 26, 2022 2:30pm – 3:30pm

Queens Public Library has partnered with Queens Defenders to create Youth Justice Courts (YJC) in the community. The goal of the YJC program is to provide an alternative response to youth crime in the community. Youth who commit low-level crimes are referred to YJC by local precincts, where they are represented by young people from the community. Teens who join learn about the foundations of the criminal justice system and become trained to serve as peer defense attorneys, prosecutors, and jurors. They will have a say in how their peers can be held accountable in a fair and dignified way.

Outside and Around Town: The Magic of Harry Potter and the Stratford Adventure

Sunday, June 26, 2022 4:00pm – 5:00pm

What happens when you pull together an interactive game, collaboration with local businesses, and community-wide feats? Harry Potter and the Stratford Adventure! Over the course of three weeks, fifteen different challenges were placed in the exterior windows of allied local businesses. The location of the challenges remained a secret to build suspense until the day the specific challenges could be completed. On the weekly premiere day, a video of clues revealed where participants needed to go in order to find the challenges. Players then utilized either Instagram or email to submit the completed challenges -- whether an answer to a riddle, a photo of nearby items, or a video performing a physical endeavor.

Attendees to this session will learn how this magical quest was set up with Covid-friendly arrangements to bring the community back together in a safe yet energizing way. They will walk away with tips and tricks for creating this type of interactive adventure in your own community as well as several challenges that can be immediately used in your version of the game.

Engaging Historically Underrepresented Young Adult Readers

Monday, June 27, 2022 9:00am – 10:00am

Underrepresented young adult readers (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, Disabled, Neuro-Divergent, etc.) who do not see themselves depicted in in an accurate, respectful manner may lose interest in reading for a lifetime. Worse, they may internalize this lack of respectful representation as not being worthy of it. Five historically underrepresented, debut authors will share how it felt not to see themselves in fiction and share strategies that would have engaged them. Participants will leave the session with actionable tactics such as: Leaning Into the News Cycle, Identifying and Serving Local Demographics, and Creating a Representational Calendar.

Reading in the Negative Space; using poetry and art to create community when technology is not an option

Monday, June 27, 2022 9:00am – 10:00am

This project uses Yusef Salaam's Punching the Air as a way to help incarcerated youth engage with literacy in a way that is free from the judgment so often associated with the reading and writing that occurs in the classroom. This book, based on the wrongful incarceration of Yuseef Salam, was chosen in the hope that students would find solace in Yuseef’s ability to survive and cope with his incarceration through art and that they might use art and writing as a way to reflect on their own, often painful, experiences. Additionally, our project purposely takes place outside of the classroom to help nurture a love of literature based on play and relationship building. For many of our students, many of whom are two or more grade levels behind in reading proficiency, this sense of freedom to explore words and stories in a safe space affords them the confidence to rethink their assumptions about what reading is and who qualifies as a “reader.”

To complete the project, the team works with students for three sessions. Each session lasts about 45 minutes. Students are given individual copies of the books to read. Working on a timeline that suits the residential communities, the team, composed of educators, counselors, and security staff visits the unit after students have read the book. The team visits each housing unit for approximately three sessions. During each session, a variety of literacy activities that are based on the book are presented to students. Most sessions begin with a brief discussion of the book and include questions about what in the book resonated with the students and comments on the form of the book.

After this brief discussion, the focus of the session turns to a combined writing-art project. The art teacher provides an explanation of the project along with several examples of black-out poetry that students have completed. Our art teacher also takes great care to underscore the art references in the book, including Picasso and DaVinci. Armed with this background knowledge, the students and teachers each work to create their own art project. The students can select a project based on their personal level of comfort with expression, from creating a black-out poem taken from a page from a discarded library book and editing it, to creating an image using a calligram, to actually writing a poem of their own. While the project encourages students to explore their own emotions, thoughts, and experiences through the creation of individual artwork, many actively seek out the adults in the room to partner with them in this project. In these organically formed pairings and groups, adults and students discuss art; the meaning of words; connections to other books, life experiences and the lessons that have been learned. The book and the project provide a springboard for the students and staff to learn more about each other in a way that pushes past the roles the facility, by its very nature, assigns to these individuals. We learn to connect with each other as humans beyond the labels of resident and teacher.

Due to the wide variety of student comfort, experience, and ability with reading and writing in the facility, the team has incorporated several support structures to ensure that all students who participate in the sessions feel accomplishment at having completed a literacy-based project and embraced as an important part of this literacy-based community. To that end, teachers offer read-aloud sessions to the students prior to beginning the art component of the project. This enables students, who may feel uncomfortable or lack the confidence to read on their own, a path to come to the project feeling equipped with the same level of knowledge and skill that their peers do. In addition, for those students and units whose interest in writing has been sparked by the sessions, the team provides a follow-up writing period. During this time, students and teachers work together on simple, fun writing exercises designed to help students further explore the multiple dimensions of words.

As a culminating activity to the project, an exhibition of the student artwork is planned. The artwork created during the sessions has been collected and will be displayed in a gallery-like outlay during a specific time period. Students, adults, and staff will be invited to walk through the exhibit to view the students’ creations.