LIBR 262-11
Resources for Young Adults
Spring 2003

Joni Richards Bodart
Associate Adjunct Professor
San Jose State University
9015 E. Girard Ave., #25
Denver, CO 80231
303-752-2255
jrbodart@wahoo.sjsu.edu
jonirb@earthlink.net

Course Links

Course Outline

GREENSHEET

Important: Students must sign up immediately on the Blackboard course site!

The first class meeting (WHICH IS REQUIRED!!!) will be on Blackboard in the Virtual Classroom on 1/23 at 7pm PST.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
Materials for adolescents and pre-adolescents and methods for incorporating these materials into library programs. Collection development, needs assessment, and programming will be featured. Information services for young adults in a variety of settings will also be addressed.

INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS
REQUIRED:
Joni Richards Bodart. Radical Reads: 101 YA Novels on the Edge. Scarecrow, 2002
Diana Tixier Herald. Teen Genreflecting. Libraries Unlimited, 1997.
Patrick Jones. Connecting Young Adults and Libraries, 2nd edition. Neal-Schuman, Publishers, 1998.

OPTIONAL OR RECOMMENDED:
Joni Bodart. Booktalk!2 Booktalking and School Visiting for all Ages and Audiences. H.W. Wilson, 1984.
Kenneth L. Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen. Literature for Today’s Young Adults, 6th edition. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 2001.
Eliza Dresang. Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age. H.W. Wilson, 1999.
Patrick Jones and Joel Shoemaker. Do It Right: Best Practices for Serving Young Adults in School and Public Libraries. Neal-Schumann, 2001.

COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Students successfully completing this course will be able to:

• Evaluate selection tools, and use appropriate resources to develop a young adult collection including all appropriate formats.
• Apply information on adolescent development, psychology, sociology and popular culture to plan appropriate programming and services for teens.
• Understand and articulate their own philosophy of intellectual freedom and the importance of protecting this right when working with materials for young adults in any appropriate format.
• Understand and appreciate literature for young adults, including both the historical perspective and the current trends in the field.
• Understand the current reading, viewing and listening habits of teens, using this knowledge in program planning and collection development.
• Set up a school visiting program and do booktalks.

This course also supports the following SLIS objectives:

• Information transfer
• Information management, including the selection, organization, storage, retrieval, dissemination and utilization of information resources
• One or more specialized aspects of information management
  

COURSE REQUIREMENTS
1. Read texts as assigned and discuss interesting points with your group, posting at least two comments per week to your group discussion board. Groups will be set up during the first class meeting. Sign up for and participate in YALSA-BK. Instructions are on the ALA/YALSA web page. Participation means posting messages with your questions and responding to posts when you know the answer. Since I am a member of this group, I will know whether you are participating or just lurking.

2. Read at least 50 books and prepare a database of them. You may use any format you choose to, but must include the following information: complete bibliographic information, summary, evaluation, readers’ 1-2 sentence annotation, usefulness, genre or subject, and why you chose it. You may also want to include booktalk ideas, similar titles, or other information to help you remember the book for class discussion and for the future. You may listen to books on tape if you prefer, but ONLY if they are unabridged. Twenty titles (10 classic and 10 recent) from the list below are required, and will be discussed in class.

For the other titles, please look at Radical Reads, Teen Genreflecting, and Literature for Today’s Young Adults , the awards lists posted in the YALSA area of the ALA webpage, and at the various lists and titles I will be mentioning during the class. You can also take a look at any (or all) of my own books for ideas on good titles. The selection of these titles is up to you, but I encourage you to not waste time reading books that are not recommended somewhere. In addition, you should take a look at some of the popular YA paperback series. I will post of list of some of these series during the first week of class. You may also include up to 10 items in a nonprint format, including but not limited to videos, DVDs, CDs, computer games, ebooks, audiotapes, and so on.

PLEASE NOTE: You will be expected to discuss appropriate titles during the class sessions that focus on literature. It would be wise to have available the notes you have made on these titles, so that you will be able to comment on their quality and usefulness in various situations.

If you begin reading before the semester starts, make sure you take lots of notes on each of the titles you read, so you can quickly and easily remember them in some detail when you actually start working on your database and discussing them in class. This is definitely a case of more being very much better.

Required Titles
Classic Titles:

3. Examine at least 5 print and nonprint review sources or selection guides, evaluating them on their currency, scope, and reliability. Write an analysis and evaluation of each source. (Print edition Voice of Youth Advocates, Booklist, and School Library Journal plus Amazon.com (Teens) are required.)

4. Spend 15 hours during the first seven weeks of the course learning about the ways YAs use all kinds of media for recreation and information. These include, but are not limited to, movies, TV, radio, music, www, computer games, and videos. Keep a log of what you do, when you do it, and your reaction to it. Be aware of how your reactions change or don’t change during the course of the semester. This may be done in an informal or colloquial style if you prefer. Spend part of this time visiting the places where teens are—shopping malls, pizza places, etc, and observe different groups and how they are alike and different. Compare the stereotypes to the reality, and compare teens today to yourself when you were a teen. PLEASE NOTE: You can fit this in with your daily routine, i.e., listening to the radio while commuting, changing TV habits to include teen-oriented shows or MTV, watching videos or movies that are made for teens, etc.

5. Write a one-year plan for setting up and running a YA area. Include budget, collection development, programming, school visits, summer reading program, and setting up a teen advisory board, making your plan as realistic and detailed as possible. More details on this will be given in class. You may base your plan on an actual library, and work with a librarian if you choose to do so.

6. Write four booktalks on titles you have read for this class, two each for two different presentations, and post them on the class Blackboard site. Also post with your talks brief paragraphs describing the two groups you’d do these talks for, the purpose of the visits, and a list of the other titles you would include in your presentations.

7. Write a brief informal paper describing how your perceptions have changed regarding adolescents, their literature, their information needs and seeking, their culture, and the library services that help meet those varied needs. How have your perceptions of yourself been affected by these ideas or changes in thinking? If you have not changed your thinking or perception, then I need to know why not. How did you define being a young adult librarian when this class began, and how do you define it now? What is your professional philosophy about YA librarianship?

Assignments 2 and 5 will each be worth 25% of your final grade. The other assignments will count equally toward the other 50%.