Author: schumm (Page 2 of 2)

Last Wednesday, Sophia and I did an informal interview with the University of Mary Washington’s research librarian, Elizabeth Heitsch. We asked her about how we should go about getting information from Accomack County public schools in relation to the case in late 2016.

First, we asked about her experience with censorship and wanted to see whether or not she had personally dealt with a challenge. She said that because she works at a college level academic library, she has never had to deal with a challenge. Getting complaints at college libraries is not a common occurrence because parents aren’t paying attention to what their adult children are reading. Most books are challenged in grade schools because parents are more concerned about what their kids are reading.

We then asked her how to approach talking to the school because we were fearful that they weren’t going to provide information. I don’t know if they would want this case to be revisited due to the controversy surrounding how they failed to go through the proper book challenging procedure.  We wanted to get any tips that would heighten our chances of getting a positive response. She suggested that we should email rather than call because it would allow us to revise what we want to say and would help us to get our point across. I’m happy she suggested this because I really didn’t want to call them because I get uncomfortable talking on the phone.

Using Sophia’s email, we sent a message to the tech librarian of the entire school system because we could not find any school specific librarian. The case was for the whole school system so hopefully we messaged the right person. We made sure that we came across as non threatening and made it clear that we weren’t going to trash everyone involved in the case. We gave a link to the COPLAC page so they could see what our goals are in getting this information. For now, we haven’t gotten a reply, but hopefully in the next week we get some sort of response.

We are trying to find more information about what actually went on in the case because, as I said before, they did not follow the proper protocol in dealing with a book challenge. We have the basic understanding that the book that was challenged, To Kill a Mockingbird, should have been left on the shelves while the board voted on whether or not it would be banned. Instead, after the patron complaint had been filed, the books were immediately taken off the shelves. We would like to figure out why this happened and if there were any other mistakes that were made. The case was voted on by the board and the book was reinstated. I would like to try to figure out if the protocol errors had something to do with the end result.

For the next week we are going to try to contact more people and hopefully get an interview with someone involved. We found the name of the woman who challenged the book but we only heard her name and don’t know how it is spelled. Ideally, we would interview her to get her perspective on what happened. We will continue to work on our site and plan our where we are going to put all of our information.

Accomack County. Taken from Wikimedia Commons

Original post- 2/11/18

I had never thought about publishers contribute to censorship before. After reading The Dearth of Native Voices in Young Adult Literature by Metzger and Kelleher I realized that publishers play a major role in censoring content. As shown in the article, Native Americans are not getting published and are not able to accurately tell their stories. Instead, white Americans are telling Native stories. Stories that properly portray different cultures are needed so kids are able to see themselves in different types of media. Stereotyped versions are being published and put into schools causing students to believe false information about different types of people.

In the article they talk about how it is up to teachers to find diverse books. I think that it shouldn’t be fully up to the teachers because publishers need to make these books more available to the public. With all the work that educators have to do and all the time they spend working, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of one teacher to seek out these texts. Publishers are either not making an effort to market these books or they are not doing it at all. This type of censorship is different than a specific book being targeted because it is shutting down entire cultures and denying people access to their own histories.

In doing my own research for To Kill A Mockingbird, while it is not the reason that it has been banned, there have been complaints that this story is told from a white child’s perspective. The whole plot is centered around a black man but the story has its innate biases due to it being written by a white woman. While it is not accusatory or overtly negative towards Tom, it even presents him in a positive light, Harper Lee may be ignoring important cultural differences. Lee wrote the book based on a case she saw as a child. While the story is fictional, she wrote of her own experiences through Scout. If there were a version of the story written through the black lense, it might change the story.

As emphasized in Metzger and Kelleher’s article, the most famous cultural stories are written by people who are not a part of that culture. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells a black story but it was written by Mark Twain, a white man. The fact that black stories written by people within that culture are not getting as much attention shows that there is indeed censoring going on. It is unclear whether it is due to publishers not wanting to publish these stories or school systems not wanting students to read them. While there are many fantastic books being written, it is up to people in these powerful positions to allow them to be seen.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

On Wednesday, Sophia and I met with our university’s head of special collections and university archives, Carolyn Parsons. Sophia knows her as she is a former student so it is nice to have someone who knows more about the archiving process as my partner.

We will probably meet with her again to get an interview but for this meeting we discussed what our project was and we finalized our book decision. We had originally chosen Maurice because the backstory is really interesting to me but there is no local case so we had to change it. We chose To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee because it was recently banned in Accomack County in Virginia and it has been banned and challenged all over the country.

Carolyn showed us how to look up legal cases through LexisNexis. She also suggested that we look up school board meeting minutes that discuss the removal of the book .Hopefully, we can find the patron complaint as well.  After we have as much research as we can we will go back and get a more thorough interview so we can find more resources.

Once the meeting was over, we began to do our separate research, Sophia focused on the Accomack County case and she even found and audio recording of the school board meeting minutes that banned the book. We found a lot of news reports on other counties in Virginia going back to 1966. I focused on out of state because Sophia was finding a lot on local cases so I wanted to see how the cases differed based on geographic location. In Mississippi, the book was banned and unbanned within a two week period. The book wasn’t fully restored because students who want to read the book have to get their parents permission. Although not every case gets resolved,  I’ve found that the reasons for banning it are the same in every case that I have seen.

For now we are going to continue doing research and hopefully we will be able to contact some of the school districts that have banned To Kill A Mockingbird and get their perspective on the banning. We are mainly focusing on the Accomack County case but we would like to get statements from as many places as possible. 

The Simpson Library at the University of Mary Washington.