“It Creates an Expectation That Everybody’s Story is Worth Being Told:” Librarians Countering Censorship Policies

• In Event: Controversial Issues Policies, Power, and Practices: How Educators Navigate Hostile and Divisive Political Climates

Abstract

Purpose
Policies excluding racially diverse and LGBTQ+ books demonstrate an effort to amplify whiteness as the dominant identity in the United States, disrupting what students are expected to know and whose knowledge is considered obscene or credible. The remaking of educational expectations in this anti-civil rights era seeks to systematically abolish historical accounts of injustices, casting new doubts about stories and lived experiences that do not align with entrenched white cis-heteronormative policies and practices. In this context, school librarians face waves of white Christian nationalist policies aimed at “unforgetting histories” via federal and state legislative as well as judicial moves to constrain access to diverse books. The targeted books on library and classroom shelves reflect past lived experiences, connect with current readers, and help us all imagine alternate futures. Situated in the current era of racist and anti-LGBTQ+ book ban policies, the purpose of this paper is to theorize how White school librarian leadership in the U.S. disrupts “settled expectations”— an educational dynamic where the pervasiveness of whiteness in school curricula subjugates LGBTQ+ and students of color to untenable epistemological positions— to develop alternative and meaningful modes of identification, belonging, and being (Bang, et al., 2012; Harris, 1993).
Perspectives
We utilized settled expectations as a theoretical framework to illuminate how lived experiences influence librarian leaders’ implementation of transformative expectations in the face of exclusionary book ban policies and practices.
Methods
This study originated as a partnership between a national education organization and [redacted] to conduct an analysis of librarians implementing diverse books while navigating book banning policies and the lack of legal mandates for inclusive curriculum. Using appreciative inquiry (Preskill & Catsambas, 2006), we implemented a two-stage sequential transformative strategy comprising surveys and interviews (Creswell, 2009).
Data
Participants from thirty-three states in the U.S. completed the surveys (n=1,480), half of whom were librarians (n=761). Out of the 143 educators who expressed interest in an interview, we prioritized educators of color, rural educators, and at least two participants from each state. The resulting nested sample, comprising 51 educators who participated in individual, semi-structured interviews on Zoom (Archibald et al., 2019), was selected purposively to achieve maximum variation (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Our analysis centers on four White, cisgender, and straight librarians who enacted transformative expectations during their implementation of the curriculum initiative. We immersed ourselves in librarians’ internal and external dispositions and how they implemented transformative expectations (Author, 2018). As such, we traced their perspectives under the threats of actual or proposed censorship policies.
Findings
These five expectational practices to include racially diverse LGBTQ+ books in K-12 school libraries consist of: (1) community-centric education, (2) ethics of caring, (3) empowering stories, (4) intellectual rigor, and (5) social capital. The study finds these school librarians enact anti-racist, LGBTQ+ affirming expectations in ways that decenter white cis-heteronormativity.
Significance
The significance of this research echoes the conference theme because our findings provide pathways for librarians and other educators to contend with current and future iterations of racist and anti-LGBTQ+ policy landscapes.

Authors

• Madelaine Adelman, Arizona State University

• Daniel D. Liou, Arizona State University

• Courtney Langerud, Arizona State University