Involving Students in the Library Redesign Process

In the Greek language, the words for “space” (or place) and “word” (or message or text) have a close connection, thanks to the teaching of rhetoric in ancient Greece. Topos (place) and logos (word) connect because of another Greek word kairos, which focused on opportunity or the ideal time and place to engage in discourse. Kairos is a critical juncture, the point at which a whole series of things converge and prompt the rhetor to action (and maybe he or she has had something to do with this happy convergence!).

OPPORTUNITY

This is the “kairotic” moment in which I found myself, as a first-year librarian at a private school, serving grades one through eight. I had been engaged in conversation with the director of instruction about ways of redesigning the library. Situated in the lower level of the school, the library has a small courtyard and garden area that I had been charmed by during my interview visit. I had all sorts of ideas for enhancing the area and bringing some booktalks and other activities outside during nice weather. One space in the area begs for posting that quotation from Marcus Tullius Cicero: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

Likewise, the space inside the library invites a makeover and the director of instruction and I have had a grand time sharing design floor plans back and forth during part of our weekly meetings. We have gone through the process of selecting an OPAC vendor and providing a virtual space for our library at a newly designed school website. New ideas keep bubbling up, but we have not begun a formal process for the library redesign project.

This is where the kairos comes in. One of my new colleagues, a sixth grade teacher, invited me to work with her students during their upcoming social studies unit on ancient Greece. Having grown up in Athens, I was pleased to create lessons and draw upon my slides of ancient sites in Greece. Before I knew it, the unit was over and the students had finished up the last of the pastitsio, spinach tartlets, and baklava at our Greek “feast.” But the most important part, the “kairotic moment,” was to come during the follow-up unit on Rome. Early on I had designed a lesson on a small archaeological site in the Athens’ agora.

It is a library from the Roman period (100 A.D.) in Athens, or, rather, the foundation stones of a library. Unlike the grand library of Hadrian, a few city blocks away, this one is comparatively modest. Nonetheless, the Library of Pantainos was a part of, not separate from, the community. It was located right “downtown” in the main shopping and commerce district. Some of its unique features include a paved, interior courtyard and close access to a series of shops in the stoas that formed its outer, protective (for thermal and noise insulation) walls.

My colleague agreed that I should come back to teach the lesson about this library. What the students did not know was that I would use the opportunity to gather their input on the library redesign discussions I had been having with the director of instruction.

INVOLVING STUDENTS

In the lesson, the students learned some basics about libraries in antiquity. After all, I situated the little library in a larger discussion about libraries in antiquity—Hadrian’s Library in Athens, the great library of Alexandria, and so on. The applied part of the lesson, however, asked the students to take the outline floor plan of our school library and re-imagine the space. What would they decide? Would they want to close in the garden area with skylight windows? Create special spaces—a young adult literature reading area, a children’s storytime amphitheater? Rearrange the library to invite flexibility, interaction, and quiet places too? I used a handout to connect students with the activity (see figure 1, below).

STUDENT INPUT

My colleague and I took notes on the student discussions. I posted their re-envisioning of our library (and their encouraging statements about libraries/reading/studying (“Books are your friends! Treat them right!”) and made additional copies of the outline floor plan so students (and teachers) from other classes could join the conversation.

The students took their charge seriously and let me know what they wanted: more colorful walls; a raised ceiling; comfortable furniture for sitting individually and in groups; spaces to read and to “chill;” a redesigned area for the computers; a media lab so they could, among other things, design audio and video book reviews for posting; and a large aquarium in the center of it all. Many of their ideas echoed possibilities the director of instruction and I had considered. Their unprompted voices and ideas delighted me and confirmed the rightness of and enthusiasm for the redesign project.

This kind of “citizen participation” reflects one of my favorite elements of community planning: that which draws interested parties in and takes seriously their concerns. I also like that those who most use our library are brought into the conversation early on. A lesson about an ancient library and its similarity to our own school library, both tucked in the midst of an active community, provided a situational context and a rationale for action that our students will not soon forget. Topos, logos, and kairos have joined together in our library planning—and we will be the better for it.

IN PROCESS

Once summer arrived, I began work on the library’s courtyard and garden. There was weeding involved, of course, and flowers to be planted. In addition, I painted the plywood covering a couple of windows in our school color of blue and then painted that quotation by Cicero as well: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything that you need.”

A couple of white Adirondack chairs with some potted plants completed the transformation. Our student art club created a mosaic of a tree springing from the pages of a book on the other window. Students in the younger classes now enjoy sitting in the courtyard on the steps for storytime during fair weather.

Next I reorganized the layout of the library, clearly delineating a section for our youngest students, relocating the Teacher and Parent Resource Center to a conference room upstairs, shifting the reference area, and re-purposing the former reference area space to house part of our young adult literature collection.

Our school administration is also investigating various redesign possibilities for the building such as constructing a new playground, creating various outside garden areas at different levels, and unifying the color scheme throughout the classrooms and common areas. In particular such investigations for the library include how to reconfigure the space both to incorporate a technology media center and to address other new roles for the library. Currently, the school administration is in the early, exploratory phase of a fundraising campaign that we hope will bring these projects to fruition.

Fig. 1. Questions asked of students about the library design:

• Compare the “floor plan” of the Library of Pantainos to that of our library at The de Paul School. We, too, have a courtyard and walls around us that provide protection.
• While we are not likely to open shops or stalls outside the library, use our floor plan to design the kind of space you might like.You can draw certain kinds of furniture (tables, chairs, sofas, etc.) and rearrange things as you like.
• Plan to write one paragraph explaining the choices you propose.
• Think about the bigger picture of libraries:
  The inscription that preserves the Library of Pantainos rule, “No book is to be taken out because we have sworn an oath,” is not one that we would ever have at The de Paul School Library.
  We must remember, however, that this library’s rule was instituted because at the time there were not as many reading materials. The printing press had not been invented, or introduced, in Europe (that would come in the 1400s AD) so manuscript scrolls, written in Greek or Latin, had to be used by patrons in the library in order to protect them from damage.
  Even though we don’t have an inscription like the one at the Library of Pantainos, we do include displays in our library.
• Come up with an encouraging piece of advice about libraries or reading or studying that we could post in our library. It only needs to be one sentence, but try to think of something distinctive about the pleasures of a library.