Category: Progress Updates

After lots of coffee and approximately a thousand years of arguing with WordPress, the first draft of our page is complete!

The Good News

I definitely feel much more proficient in using WordPress than I ever thought I’d be, and I’m impressed with what we’ve gotten our website to do. Baylee very skillfully placed some hyperlinked buttons around our site which look sleek and help with navigability. I, on the other hand, have been enjoying using the PDF embedder feature for the case documents.

The last few days have been mostly taken up by the “Significance” section of our site, where I tried to outline some of the case’s major themes in the larger context of censorship. I wanted to outline how our case works with the general argument between controversy and literary value/merit, as this seems to be at the core of most, if not all, major censorship cases. I also devoted some time to talk about the faulty handling of this case by Norman Public Schools, and how that reflects a general ineptitude on the part of school district administrations in handling cases like the one at Whittier in a way that does not allow the complaints of one to dictate the experience of all. I’m quite proud of this section–and it doesn’t even look that much like an essay! Yay!

The Bad News

Baylee and I were never able to find a way to embed our Venngage infographics onto the site. Although she was able to make some great graphs for her demographics page otherwise, I’m very bitter that I couldn’t use by beautiful, clickable navigation graphic. By the time we figured out it wouldn’t work, it didn’t seem worth it, time-wise, to make another one on a different site. I might still do this before the final draft of the site is due, but for now, Baylee’s buttons look just fine.

Also, I never heard back about permissions to use our clippings from The Daily Oklahoman. I’m going to keep them on the site for now and try emailing them yet again this week.

We also never got an interview with our professor, Dr. Rees, as her schedule got too hectic last week. We could still do this, but I think our site functions perfectly well without it. She also doesn’t know a lot about the author, book, or case, so I’m second-guessing how much this would contribute. I’ve been feeling somewhat anxious about the amount of material we have compared to other cases, but it should be good enough. The site is concise and navigable, and I think it accomplishes what it sets out to.

Onward!

Having this first draft done is a huge weight off my chest, especially considering the workload I have for other courses this week. I look forward to seeing what everyone else in class has to say about it, and I can’t wait to look at the other projects in more detail.

While Baylee and I were so glad to hear that Karin Perry would do an interview with us over email, we are now experiencing the downside of not doing a face-to-face visit: she still hasn’t answered us. To compensate and use this found limbo time wisely, I’ve been messing with our WordPress site and attempting to better plan out the next few weeks.

Website Construction

Our website, finally, is no longer called “USAO Project Site,” though “Glass by Ellen Hopkins” isn’t much more interesting. I’m trying to come up with something clever but not too silly; I named the TimelineJS project “Shattered Glass,” but I’m not yet sure if I think that’s good enough. Plus, I think Baylee thinks it’s too punny. We’ll see.

I was finally able to fix the homepage header so that the site title isn’t pushed up against the left side of the screen, and it looks great now! I also did some rearranging of the parent sites on the site menu because I thought that we had too many “abouts” that could easily be consolidated. This arrangement still may change, but for now, I think it works.

I’ve also been using this time to work on my Historical Context section, where I now I have two subpages: Young Adult Censorship and Censorship in Oklahoma. I think these two sections help to really hone the huge body of censorship history research down to the two things that make the Ellen Hopkins case particularly exigent. The Oklahoma-specific section discusses some of the major censorship disputes that have similar themes to the Hopkins case and illustrate the kinds of things Oklahomans often take issue with. Knowing my problems being essayish, I’m trying to restrain myself from going into too much detail.

I’ve embedded our TimelineJS project into the “about the case” section of our site, and it runs smoothly. It shows up awkwardly large on the page, perhaps because there is no other content. I hope to resolve that issue soon. I’m very happy with how the timeline looks and how it describes the events of the case, and I think it will be an indispensable facet of our descriptive section.

Moving Forward

Because she is the primary contact with Karin Perry, Baylee will send our interviewee a follow-up email soon to try to hasten her response. Hopefully we will hear back this week so that we can start incorporating her answers and viewpoints into the site. We also plan to interview an English professor here at USAO, Dr. Shelley Rees, about censorship of young adult literature.

In terms of website pages, my primary focus this week will be to complete my historical context situation in a way that is as non-wordy and approachable as possible, as well as to begin writing an engaging description of the Hopkins case to accompany the timeline in the “About the Case” section. Additionally, I plan to start figuring out what media we need to obtain permissions for, as well as making our site look clean, readable, and professional.

In the past few weeks, Baylee and I have made some tremendous strides in our research about the Ellen Hopkins censorship dispute in Norman. It looks as though this case will have a lot of material for us to discuss in our website, regardless of the fact that the school district did not end up taking Hopkins’s books off the library shelves of Whittier Middle School.

Norman Public Schools

Our initial email to Nick Migliorino, the current Norman Public Schools superintendent, was funneled through several layers of bureaucracy and suspicious questions about the publicity of our project. Eventually, we wound up talking to Kathryn Lewis, the Director of Libraries for the district. We spoke to Ms. Lewis in a phone interview last Monday in an effort to better understand the processes involved in challenging written material in the district, as well as the specific case from 2009.

Our talk with Kathryn Lewis was nothing like we anticipated; she was extremely pleasant, friendly, and seemed genuinely excited to help us with our project. She did not seem hostile or hesitant to answer our questions, perhaps partly due to the fact that the district’s policies on materials reconsideration take deliberate precautions against censorship. This is what the policy states regarding the challenging of a text by a parent or parent group:

“A student or his/her parent or guardian has the right to reject the use of instructional resources which seem incompatible with his/her values and beliefs. Alternate assignments will be provided upon request; no parent or guardian has the right to determine the instructional resources for students other than his/her own children.”.

NPS Policy 5002: INSTRUCTIONAL resources (revised 01/15/2010)

This final clause was likely instrumental in delivering the eventual denial of the parent complaint against Ellen Hopkins’s Glass and Crank; removing these books from the library shelves, rather than just asserting that they not be taught in the classrooms, restricts access to the entirety of Whittier Middle School. The policy that includes this, however, is marked “revised 01/15/2010,” which is about 4 months after the Ellen Hopkins dispute, so it is unclear whether this version of the policy is the one that was followed by the district administration when they kept Hopkins’s books but canceled her visit.

The Complaint

In addition to sending us a PDF of the district’s materials policy, Ms. Lewis was able to locate and send us the original reconsideration form submitted by the parent complainant upon hearing about Ellen Hopkins’s visitation plans. We do not know the parent’s name, but the form she sent includes over 4 entire pages of “age-inappropriate” quotes and passages from Glass that the parent supplied as evidence against the text. Most of them deal with either explicit language or sexual content.

The files also include a scanned copy of a memo from November 10, 2009 (about a month after the initial complaint), detailing the school board Reconsideration Committee’s decision to keep the books on the library shelves. The memo lists several reasons that the committee voted to keep the books, most notably this: “The powerful message on teen drug addiction far outweighs the concern about sexual content.”

Moving Forward

The resources provided by Kathryn Lewis give us a strong textual foundation from which to build our informative website. This week, Baylee and I will be at a conference in Albuquerque, so it will be a little bit more difficult to make substantial progress. However, we have already contacted Karin Perry, the original Whittier librarian involved with the case, who has expressed interest in answering any and all questions we have about what exactly went down in 2009. We will prepare some questions for her soon. I would also be interested in learning the name of the parent complainant and the names of those on the Reconsideration Committee, but I’m not sure if this will be possible. Regardless, in the next few weeks, we will probably focus on planning the website, gathering more information for a timeline, and perhaps visiting Whittier Middle School and the Norman Public Library system.

It has been a turbulent week for me and Baylee! We decided, after last week’s class, to change our topic entirely. While I was excited to get to talk about Brave New World (since I’m reading it right now, too), we couldn’t find more than a few newspaper articles about the 1988 censorship case at Yukon High School. Essentially, the case started and ended within 2 days, and there was hardly any material.

Fortunately, Baylee has connections in the librarian world. She learned about a case where an entire author was challenged: young adult novelist and poet Ellen Hopkins. Hopkins is the author of several controversial teen-centered books like Crank (2004), which deals with meth addiction, and Impulse (2007), which handles themes of mental illness and has some sexual content. However, the New York Times Best-selling author has been praised by experts on these subjects for the way her work handles them, especially in educating teens away from things like drug abuse.

The Case

In 2009, just a few years after Hopkins released Glass, the sequel to Crank, a librarian at Whittier Middle School in Norman, Oklahoma (just about 30 minutes from us) won a contest to have Ellen Hopkins make a speech at the school. In the time leading up to the scheduled talk, a group of Whittier parents submitted a formal challenge of Glass, but the administration did not process it in time, instead canceling Hopkins’s visit altogether.

Thankfully, Hopkins was allowed to speak at a college in Moore instead; the event drew crowds from all over the state due to the media coverage of the controversy.

This will be an ideal case for us to explore because we have already uncovered a rich store of documents and media related to the event. Ellen Hopkins herself responded to the incident with a lengthy blog post, including a poem about censorship. It can be found here: https://ellenhopkins.livejournal.com/7107.html

Moving Forward

While most of the records and resources so far have been easily accessible, some have evaded our search. In the wake of the Norman superintendent’s decision to not allow Hopkins to speak at any Norman Public School, conservative Oklahoma City local news anchor Kelly Ogle used his weekly “My Two Cents” segment to show support for the ban on Glass and Crank, saying he was glad that the “inappropriate” books were taken off the library shelves. The clip of this airing, however, seems to be removed from the internet entirely. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Hopkins herself blogged about the newscaster and riled up her devoted fanbase.

The superintendent at the time of the incident, Joe Siano, retired a few years ago. We sent an email last week to the current Norman Public School superintendent, Nick Migliorino, requesting information such as school board proceedings, patron complaints, and adoption or challenging policies and procedures. We received a reply from the district’s Director of Public Relations, asking us questions about the nature of the research and how publicly the findings will be presented. We are hoping to hear back from one of these officials sometime this upcoming week.

In the meantime, we have an appointment on Thursday with our university research librarian to inquire about research tools and resources. We are also planning on getting in contact with the Whittier Middle School librarian who originally coordinated Hopkins’s appearance, Karin Perry, who now lives in Texas. If we are able to set up a Skype interview with her, we could gain very valuable insight into how the incident unfolded.