Student Mailin likes practical activities
Maelynn: I just draw a canvas or do, like some bracelets, which is really cool for me. And then they also have video games that is cool because I like to play Mario Kart.
Ki Sung: 14-year-old Adam likes to make online content after finishing his homework, of course.
Adam: I just record the gameplay sometimes with my voice and it’s really fun because I’m pretty good at it, but the games I love to play just rejoice.
Maelynn: As if I never hear anyone say like Oh, we’ll hang out in the library. It’s just like, oh, I’ll hang in the mix, but not many people know about the mix.
Ki Sung: The mix has its entrance on the second floor of the library. There is everything you can imagine to encourage creativity. There is a room with 3-D printers, sewing machines, dummies and cabinets full of art items.
There are two sound rooms with tools where teenagers can make quality music records, podcasts or make videos with a green screen. There are games for games of games like Dungeons and Dragons, a carpet salon area for cooling or scrolling phones; seating corners for large and small groups; Row of video games games; And of course, frequent with books full of manga.
While I’m there, I see teenagers occupying every section of a mix that performs activities or just happily hangs
In today’s episode of Mindshift Podcast, you will hear three libraries transformed their services to create third spaces that are neither home nor school where teens can thrive. Stay with us.
Ki Sung: To find out the mix in San Francisco, you have to go back in time until 2009 in Chicago.
Ki Sung: Just then, the public libraries in Chicago began a bold plan through a program called YouMedia. It was part of a broader initiative called Digital media and learningS YouMedia is designed to provide students with access to technology and digital media while in a safe environment with reliable adult mentors. Remember that it was in an age when there were less computers with WiFi at home for children, so that there were these services in libraries, it made a lot of sense.
The idea was to lean on technology and build a bridge between leaving teenagers to do what they wanted and make sure that teens were in a positive environment. And then it was a really new idea.
In order to teach digital media skills, teachers tried a school -like structured curriculum, but found that this was not widely popular with young people.
Thus, they unfolded models of workshops that teenagers can explore at their own pace.
Eric Brown, who helped to conduct YouMedia’s impact research, explained how staff gets teenagers to engage in technology during the 2013 seminar:
Eric Brown: They don’t force it on your throat. This is a good place that gives you the opportunity. You can pursue it or you can just cool down. And you pursue it when you’re done. And this is the very ethos of teenagers who go to you the media.
Ki Sung: The YouMedia model was so successful that the Chicago public library system expanded it 29 places on the branchS
Other library systems across the country soon followed their example.
But teens will always keep you on your toes. So be careful about what they need is something that librarians are always focused on. And in New York they saw that one of these needs has recently emerged. Here is a gray Ramakrishnan, director of young adult services at the New York Public Library.
Gray Ramakrishnan: The pandemic is indeed, by putting a sharp relief, the need for spaces where teens can build a community again.
Gray Ramakrishnan: After all this insulation, you know, it was so difficult and strange for many teens as traumatic time, right? So we did a number of things in NYPL.
Gray Ramakrishnan: So one is that we have really invested in our spaces. It’s something like, you know, a historical trend in libraries across the country is that there is often no space that is actually reserved for teens, right? Just historically, there can be a common children’s zone and it tends to be distorted, quite young and charming, right? But then there’s an adult area, right? And it’s very quiet with adults who are like deep focus, right?
Gray Ramakrishnan: So we have really been working to work in the last few years in carving spaces in our teenage libraries.
Ki Sung: The important thing is that the library is not just a space, but it offers programming. And in the teenage centers of the New York Public Library, which are in several branches all over the city, they focus on Programs that teach civic commitment, college and career willingness, along with cool things like how to manage a 3D printer or make it easier for banned books for books or how to organize fashion design shoes.
Gray Ramakrishnan: We actually see a tone teenagers in our libraries. NYPL has over 90 neighborhood libraries. And as the last school year in the summer, we saw almost 120,000 teenagers who chose after a super day at school to come to the library at their local branch and participate in a after -school program.
Ki Sung: The critics of teenage spaces, which focus on things other than literacy, can take a heart because there is a truly captivating up for teens in New York. According to Ramakrishnan, they not only come to the library more, these teenagers actually read more.
Doreen: Um, there are so many types of different media that we are now consuming.
Ki Sung: This is Doreen, an ambassador of students to the New York Public Library, whose job is to teach children.
Doreen: I think people only perceive reading as books or physical books. I know many people who read on their Kindles or me personally, I have a heavy book bag. I take my iPad and download the PDF of my book or textbook and read there.
Music
Ki Sung: It turns out that being in a library can help facilitate reading, even if your original reason for display is not completely unrelated.
Ki Sung: Back to San Francisco in the Mix, Student Library Ambassador Shane Machias considers his current reading relationship.
Shane: As I checked books and I took the books that were there, they receive free. I read them at home.
Ki Sung: The mix really rediscovers what the library can be for its community. But when it started about a decade ago, the concept behind the teenage space also opposed the traditional understanding of libraries as a place where books are housed.
Eric Hanon: Some people were opposed to this project in the community and expressed concern, which sounded like a recurrence center and a teenage children’s center.
Ki Sung: This is Eric Hanon, a librarian who helped start the mix.
Eric Hanon: And I have worked in libraries for 35 years, this is not what libraries have to do, but often it is part of your job that you have what we called to call LatchKey Kids in the library after school, they have nowhere to go, both parents work or single parents who work, they cool down in libraries. So they will be there anyway, so we may take care of it.
Ki Sung: To take care of the teens, the library received an entrance from them. Board to advise young people (bay) weighed and designed the space in San Francisco around the idea of Homago (Ho-Mhk-Otide), an acroum for going out, mixing around, maniac outside. This Council has received a final opinion on specific aspects of space Like furniture preferences, programming and they even advocated a special bathroom in the mix. For the shane, the space designed by teens responds to the account.
Shane: I would say that there is a place like this is very important, because for me, at school and other libraries I went to, or I was stuck with adults or young children, which was not uncomfortable, but as if I was not around the people my age, so I felt really uncomfortable and I guess I felt uncomfortable. I was just worried why teenagers didn’t have many places to go. Such as obviously we can cool down in the park or go back home, but sometimes we may want more, I would say.
Ki Sung: It turns out because more libraries act as community centers for teens, they meet the needs that schools, among other institutions, cannot serve.
Eric Hanon: The library plays a big role in helping teenagers in particular to adapt to stress, stress in life, whether they are political or, you know, biological cow or fair development. They just go through a unique time, which is very short in their lives, six or seven years. And it can make many libraries to make it easier for pain.
Ki Sung: The Mindshift team includes Me, Ki Sung, Nimah Gobir, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Marnette Federis. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. Jen Chien is our head of podcasts. Katie Sprenger is a manager of podcast operations, and Ethan Toven Lindsay is our editor -in -chief. We get additional support from Maha Sanad.
Mindshift is partly supported by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and KQED members. “
Some members of the KQED Podcast team are represented by the Guild of Screen Actors, the US Federation of Television and Radio Contractors. San Francisco in northern California local.
