Helping Every Student Find Their Story
By Becky Sniffen
As the school librarian for “a regional Chinese immersion public charter school”, Sniffen describes her job as “…finding the specific tools and resources that will appeal to a diverse group of learners while building bridges between their home languages, their cultures, and their academic requirements.”
She has made the library a welcoming place for every student. They can find answers to questions about classroom content, cultural issues, or their family’s home country. Students can find information about successful immigrants in the United States, and about global contributions in various fields by scientists and artists from their culture. This can help counter anti-immigrant sentiment currently promulgated in social media.
Although Sniffen and many of her students prefer printed books, she supplies digital books to close the gap between students’ English skills and classroom requirements. A simplified text or translation can be paired side by side with the classroom version. Using a digital text side-steps the stigma of using a simplified printed version or one in a graphic novel format in class.
The author collaborates not only with other librarians in the United States, but also with other staff from around the world to find authentic texts from various cultures. As students see themselves in a book, they can be encouraged to engage in pleasure reading and begin to find enjoyment in it.
For the reasons above, and in spite of the financial challenges schools face, Sniffen demonstrates the value of the school librarian’s job and the need to protect it.
The problem that Hammond poses is that while culturally responsive teaching has existed for a long time, exactly what it is and how to do it is not clearly understood. Her book, “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, …offers a neuroscience-based teaching framework that goes beyond surface changes to really build cognitive capacity in our students from diverse backgrounds.” Based on this, Hammond explains these four misconceptions.
