Courtesy of Laura Silver

Postcrossing. The name evokes a bygone time of galloping hooves and bleating steamships. But the project, which involves the randomized exchange of postcards through a global network, offers an opportunity to step away from digital devices and delve into analog communication.

The anachronism and novelty of global postcard exchange seemed like it might attract students at New Utrecht High School, which sits at the crossroads of Italian, Chinese, Guatemalan, Mexican, Ukrainian, African American and Caribbean American communities in Brooklyn, NY. The 102-year old building houses a Title I school for 3,200 students whose collective roots connect to five continents. In addition to English, students speak Arabic, Bangla, Georgian, Polish, Tajik, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Urdu, to name a few, but are admittedly less well-versed in communication by post. Before we launched Postcrossing, only a handful said they had encountered an actual postcard.

Digital platform, analog activity

The Postcrossing.com website invites individuals to send postcards to and receive cards from random participants around the globe.

After signing up on the online hub (free, but donations welcomed), a participant gains access to profiles and addresses of three people in varied countries. The new postcrosser must send three cards. After those arrive at their destinations, the sender will receive cards from different locales—and the opportunity to launch more postcards into the stratosphere. To date, our postcards have travelled to Germany, Ireland, Malaysia, Finland, Switzerland, the UK, and Canada. Two addressed to Turkey and China are still en route. We have received cards from Germany, Portugal, and Australia, featuring comic strips, superhero stickers, cartoon characters, koalas, and kangaroos.

The postcard process

Since student communications are circulated outside the building and around the world, I secured my administrator’s approval before launching the project. To get involved, students select a postcard from a designated trove or can design their own. They compose a note and sign it with their first name or initial. (To protect student privacy, last names are not permitted.)

I read all postcards before they are mailed. In some cases, I ask students to read the messages aloud to me. After getting my OK, students deposit them in the school’s outgoing mail bin. (Postage is funded through a DonorsChoose project.)

We are notified by email when a person receives a card sent from our school library. After a batch of cards we’ve sent is received abroad, we get a new list of “Traveling Postcards,” including addresses and biographies of new recipients. I print the blurbs for students to choose from. One person from Canada, who was studying Ukrainian, requested a card written in that language. When two students, newly arrived from Ukraine, stopped by the library in search of applications for public library cards, they took up the challenge.

Several months into Postcrossing, the benefits are far-ranging: Writing cards gives students the opportunity to forge links with correspondents all over the world and take ownership of the project. Ninth through twelfth graders learn the mechanics of composing a postcard: how and where to write an address and where to affix the stamp. I created a large-format laminated postcard with annotations to serve as a model.

There is also a communal aspect to our postcard work. A dozen student library volunteers recreated the Postcrossing logo as a heading for our postcard-tracking world map, cutting out letters, troubleshooting and building on each other’s work. The title was affixed to the magnetic white board that displays a 4-foot-wide scratch-off map where red (received) and blue (sent) strands of yarn denote the journeys of postcards. We plan to introduce white strings as well, to indicate cards sent or solicited from outside the framework of Postcrossing, e.g., a friend in Paris who posted a card at my request.

When a new postcard lands in the library, students’ faces light up. I read the response before showing students, as the correspondence is with people of all ages. When I share the card, students read and re-read it, examine the stamp, log the card on the Postcrossing site, identify the country the card is from, and integrate it into our display.

An international postcard is a potent reminder to all of us of how much there is to learn, within and beyond the walls of the school library.

Laura Silver is a librarian at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, NY.