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An interview with Pat Scales.

Article Excerpt
Currently president of ALA's Association for Library Service to Children, Pat Scales is a longtime advocate for children's reading. She has created programs adopted across the country for using books in the classroom, reading with parents, and supporting intellectual freedom. After serving as the library media specialist for Greenville Middle School in South Carolina for more than twenty-five years, Pat was the director of library and information services at the state's Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities until her retirement in 2006. She is currently on the faculty of ALA's Lawyers for Libraries program and works as a consultant to schools, libraries, and publishers nationwide. There is no more enthusiastic missionary for reading than Pat, and we are pleased to talk to her here. Note to teachers, librarians, and parents: do try this at home!

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ROGER SUTTON: It seems to me that the school library is by its very definition a place where negotiation has to happen. What does a teacher want from a book? What does a librarian want? What does a parent want, and what does a kid want?

PAT SCALES: First, it's crucial to acknowledge that the teacher and librarian need to work together on behalf of the kids. I worked closely with all teachers, not just the English teachers. For instance, in a planning session I had with a science teacher, I suggested she use books like Julie of the Wolves in addition to nonfiction to teach about animal habitats. For her class, I'd booktalk a bunch of different books, and the kids could choose which ones they wanted to read.

RS: Choice--that's always a plus.

PS: For a social studies class, I designed a unit introducing fairy tales of different cultures, and discussing how the folktales of a culture reflect that culture. We looked at fairy tales from various European countries and talked about how they differed--for instance, how are the English tales different from the Scandinavian ones? Then, in seventh-grade social studies, when the kids studied China, we used Jean Fritz's Homesick along with folktales from China.

We did a huge project on Appalachia; that was a great success. We read the Cleavers' Where the Lilies Bloom and Barry Moser's books, and added in Cynthia Rylant's Missing May when that came out. We identified all the things in the books that are unique to Appalachian culture and had the kids choose one to research further. We also took them camping in the mountains, and did lots of storytelling there, and we interviewed the Cleavers by telephone. So it was reading, it was writing, it was thinking, it was interview skills--but it all grew out of the books.

RS: So it's embedding the books within a whole matrix of activity.

PS: Absolutely. Once I did a fairy-tale unit with a gifted and talented class that I also did with a very low-achieving class. Those kids had poor reading skills, so I had to alter the amount of work because it took them so much longer just to do the reading. But when I went into the classroom, I said, "We're going to do exactly what the gifted and talented class is doing." And those kids produced, because there was something about knowing they were doing the same thing as the allegedly smarter kids that made them able to do it. Where the gifted and talented class read five fairy tales, this class read one, but they were really into it. It's all about teamwork, doing that kind of project, and I was usually the person who knew the books best. But the teachers all read those books, too.

RS: Because you made them?

PS: Well, they chose to, because we planned the unit together. When we were planning a project around I Will Call It Georgie's Blues by Suzanne Newton, we decided...