Make the Curriculum Connection

Providing dynamic materials that buttress the textbook is critical

Evan St. Lifer, Editor -- School Library Journal, 10/1/2003

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If there ever was a time when quality trade books and instructional materials were needed to supplement textbooks to provide students with richer, more meaningful learning experiences, it's now. In her recent book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, Diane Ravitch meticulously chronicles the sterilization of textbooks used in virtually every classroom in America. Ravitch, an assistant secretary of education under former President George H. W. Bush and now a research professor of education at New York University, documents a multitude of shocking and outlandish examples of censorship and the pervading culture behind it. According to Ravitch, whole swaths of text or images from textbooks are often excised in order to pass muster with various state textbook adoption committees.

"What I did not realize was that educational materials [textbooks] are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive," writes Ravitch. "Some of this censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school."

This wholesale dilution of core curricular materials in turn dilutes student understanding and perspective. However, as the school's de facto information and resource expert, you can make a significant difference by collaborating with your teaching colleagues to buttress a sagging textbook by integrating into the lesson plan dynamic, engaging books and related media. Consider how much more riveting a fourth-grade unit on aviation would be for a nine-year-old girl if she had the opportunity to read about aerial pioneer Harriet Quimby in Brave Harriet: The First Woman to Fly the English Channel , or about the first African-American aviatrix in Fly High! The Story of Bessie Coleman.

Public librarians also find themselves with an unprecedented opportunity to rescue neighborhood schools that, in some cases, have drastically reduced book budgets or shuttered their school libraries altogether. Two public libraries in Oregon are proof of what can happen when public libraries devote some of their extensive resources to meet a school's curricular needs (see "Back-to-School Blues Felt Nationwide," News, p. 20).

In an effort to help you align the materials you need with the curriculum, we've created a new resource, Curriculum Connections , which makes its debut this month in this issue (after p. 48). Featuring an easy-to-read format that presents books, multimedia, and Web sites by curricular subject and grade level, Curriculum Connections enables library media specialists—as well as teachers, curriculum coordinators, and reading specialists—to select the best materials and resources released in the last year. Curriculum Connections is the first resource of its kind in education: no one else has compiled as comprehensive a collection of reviewed and recommended materials—each with its own annotation. This month's issue offers more than 400 books, audios, videos, DVDs, CD-ROMs, and Web sites.

Curriculum Connections will serve as an invaluable tool to help educate and inform the rest of your faculty about how to energize learning with top-notch, recently published materials. As a library media specialist and an agent of change, we encourage you to pass along Curriculum Connections to those influential colleagues in your school who have a keen interest in boosting student achievement and utilizing the best materials to make that happen.

We hope you share our enthusiasm about Curriculum Connections. Please send us a line at curriculum connections@reedbusiness.com with your comments, suggestions, or feedback.