Concerned about Book Bans? CLA-SC Webinar Panelists Inform and Empower Attendees

By Emmaline Ellis, Laurie Esposito, and Jennifer Slagus

In response to an increase in attempts to ban and challenge various children’s and young adult books, the topic of this year’s Children’s Literature Assembly Student Committee (CLA-SC) Annual Student Webinar was “Book Bans: Who, How, and Why?” As a committee with diverse experiences, interests, and roles in the field of children’s literature, the CLA-SC members find these movements to be particularly concerning, as the targeted books are often those that feature characters who are LGBTQIA+, Black, or Hispanic. While some book challenges have received pushback, many others have been successful. These decisions made us wonder - how do books become banned? What is the reasoning supporting these bans? And, who are the decision-makers behind book bans? These burning questions were the guiding focus of this year’s CLA-SC Student Webinar.

In order to learn more about the decision-making processes behind book bans, we enlisted the expertise of four esteemed panelists, all of whom are CLA Committee or Board Members. In this post, we summarize and highlight each panelists’ professional or personal experiences and insight as they relate to book bans, and conclude by sharing the informative and helpful resources shared throughout the Webinar. CLA Members can access a video recording of the webinar within the members-only section of the CLA website.

Dr. Rachel Skrlac Lo
Our first panelist shared the story of a book challenge in her suburban Philadelphia school district. Dr. Rachel Skrlac Lo, Assistant Professor of Education at Villanova University and parent of a child in the district, described the district’s response when a fellow parent challenged Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer. In violation of its own protocol, the district removed the book from the high school library pending review by an anonymous ad hoc committee. Various district stakeholders justified the challenge with concerns about potentially harmful psychological effects and age appropriateness. Dr. Skrlac Lo countered these unsubstantiated concerns with empirical data on the harm under-representation in schools causes LGBTQIA+ youth.

Although Gender Queer was ultimately returned to the library’s shelves in June 2022, Dr. Skrlac Lo pointed out that a single complaint rendered the book inaccessible to all students for nearly an entire academic year. In concluding her presentation, Dr. Skrlac Lo focused on ways in which we can act against book challenges and bans in schools. She encouraged us to share our expertise through engagement in public discourse. For example, we could join community groups, attend committee meetings, write to legislators, and write op-ed pieces for local publications. Perhaps most importantly, she urged us to “resist and push against” deficit narratives as we listen to and support members of groups targeted by censorship efforts.

Breakout Quote for Dr. Skrlac Lo:
...in this case, these book challenges weren’t about pushing us to really think about concern for the child. They are political posturing of power.

Dr. Nadine Bryce
Dr. Nadine Bryce, an Associate Professor of Literacy at Hunter College, presented on “Book Challenges, Book Bans, and Anti-CRT Laws: New York.” Dr. Bryce spoke to the “how” processes behind book bans by sharing information about the history of book bans, particularly in New York, and included personal anecdotes from educators with whom she spoke about this topic. Book challenges and bans seem to occur with more frequency and noise in other states, and Dr. Bryce was surprised to learn that there are two bills currently pending in the New York State Legislature that would restrict the use of certain books or topics based on their reference to racism or Critical Race Theory. Dr. Bryce put forth a passionate argument that while certain books may not be appropriate for certain age groups, adults can make informed choices about whether or not individual readers are equipped to handle critical engagement with literature. Dr. Bryce echoed Rudine Sims Bishop’s (1990) seminal piece on windows, mirrors, and doors, and advocated for children’s access to all books so that they can locate themselves and others within literature. Book bans are restrictive, instill fear, and create complicated power relationships. Instead, by ensuring that children have thoughtful access to all books, literature can continue to create pathways for children to reimagine and transform our world.

Breakout Quote for Dr. Bryce:
​We can probably agree that not every book is good for every reader, but books with challenging subject matter that generates strong emotions can teach us a lot about how to harness the power of discomfort that is a part of our lives and our world. Parents are the first arbiters of whether or not a book was appropriate for a child, but banning books from all children is restrictive and has larger implications, instilling fear and seeking control over who has access to difficult stories, and limits opportunities for all.

Dr. Wendy Stephens
As an experienced school librarian and current Associate Professor and School Librarian Chair at Jacksonville State University, Dr. Wendy Stephens has experience navigating the topic of challenged books censorship with both high school students and parents and future librarians. Dr. Stephens poignantly made the case for school librarians to defend libraries as “laboratories of intellectual freedom,” citing the 1982 Supreme Court case Island Trees School District versus Pico, when a group of students legally challenged a movement by local parents to ban “permissive” literature from their district’s libraries. The Supreme Court ruled that based on the rights upheld by the First Amendment, public schools cannot restrict access to books based on their content. Due to this landmark case, Dr. Stephens provided the webinar attendees with “overarching intellectual freedom principles” to aid in the selection of texts for school libraries (i.e. “have a policy and stick to the policy”), as well as strategies for when a book is being reconsidered (i.e. have your reconsideration committee established before a book is challenged). By using these strategies, librarians can minimize outside scrutiny while still serving students’ needs and interests. To preserve students’ intellectual freedom, adults should shift their focus from defending specific titles and authors to advocating against book bans in general. In her conclusion, Dr. Stephens provided a list of useful resources from the Alabama School Library Association: Intellectual Freedom Committee.

Breakout Quote for Dr. Stephens:
​It’s incumbent on librarians to defend student expression as well as the right to receive information.​

Dr. Lester Laminack
Our final panelist, Dr. Lester Laminack, is a children’s author and educational consultant. He shared his experience growing up gay in the southern United States during a time when children’s books did not hold stories of kids like him. Dr. Laminack traced the historic resonance of this exclusion and discussed how exclusion and fear still inform the rampant book bans seen across the country today. Efforts toward literary exclusion and restriction have resulted in thousands of books facing challenges or bans, many for their LGBTQIA+ and anti-racist content. Yet, Dr. Laminack answered this bleak reality with hope. In harkening back to the 2021 and 2022 theme of Banned Books Week, he shared that “Books unite us, but censorship divides us.” He argued that a child’s only censor for what they read should be their own parents’ decisions, not the opinions of elected officials or other anonymous adults. Like Dr. Bryce, Dr. Laminack emphasized the importance of mirrors and windows (Bishop, 1990) within children’s literature, and provided an emotionally provoking discussion on the benefits of LGBTQIA+ representation. As it is through sharing the stories of diverse experiences—of the reality of fear and pain, but also of joy—that books offer insight and spark conversations that can “help students focus on what they have in common. Those are the windows.” And it is those mirrors and windows that, Dr. Laminack notes, enable children’s literature to have the “power to make us more human.”

Breakout Quote for Dr. Laminack:
​Literature provides our youth an opportunity to broaden their visions of what it is like to share their deepest truth, to face their greatest fears, to live through the aftermath of their experience…But until we have access to books, we don’t have those windows. We can’t broaden ourselves.

Conclusion
This year’s Student Webinar was eye-opening and insightful, thanks to our four wonderful panelists whose passionate presentations helped us to understand the decision-making processes behind book bans and book challenges. We hope we can speak for all of the attendees of this event when we say that the webinar helped us feel informed and empowered to push back against such processes.

Throughout the webinar, our esteemed panelists shared a number of resources about banned and challenged books, as well as strategies to advocate for children’s access to all books.


Webinar Resources:

• Recording of 2022 Webinar available to CLA Members 
  
• Alabama School Library Association: Intellectual Freedom Committee Recommended Resources
• Articles from The Radnorite, Radnor High School Student Newspaper:
  • "To ban or not to ban: What belongs in Radnor’s classrooms"
  • "I experienced censorship, now I fear for our democracy"
• Blogpost by Dr. Laminack, "Why We Need LGBTQ+ Literature for Children and Youth"
• It Gets Better Project, resources in support of LGBTQIA+ youth
  
• Kenneth Kidd’s “Not Censorship but Selection”: Censorship and/as Prizing (2009)
• Nancy Larrick’s The All-White World of Children's Books (1965)
• Podcast Read the Room
• Video of Rudine Sims Bishop on Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors

Emmaline Ellis (she/her/hers) is a PhD Candidate in the Literacy and Learners program at Temple University and the current Chair of the CLA Student Committee. Emmaline’s research interests include investigating how the design of picturebooks influences book-related discussion in early learning environments.

Laurie Esposito (she/her/hers) is a PhD Candidate in the Literacy and Learners program at Temple University and a member of the CLA Student Committee. She is interested in the use of reader response theories to explore students’ use of immersive reading technologies and culturally conscious texts.

Jennifer Slagus (they/she) is a multiply-neurodivergent PhD student in Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts of Education at Brock University (Canada) and a member of the CLA Student Committee. Their research focuses on neurodivergent representation in 21st century literature for middle grade readers.


CLA-SC Member List:
· Emmaline Ellis
· Laurie Esposito
· Wenyu Guo
· Ling Hao
· Ashley Johnson
· Jennifer Pulliam
· Jennifer Slagus
· Meghan Valerio