As I’m diving into the world of blogging again, I’ve been thinking a lot about my past life as a blogger for the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Blog. This time around, I’m writing blog posts as a professional wellness practice: it’s a way to flesh out my questions, frustrations, and ideas, and I hope that it will help me to be more prepared to sustain my collaboration toward humanizing education and anti-oppressive change within educational systems.
The inspiration for creating this blog, though, was because of my experience working for the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom as a News Intern from November 2016-August 2020. Every other week, I compiled the Intellectual Freedom News, a web-based newsletter that featured links to the week’s news articles related to censorship, privacy, access to information, First Amendment rights, and more. And each month, I wrote a blog post about something related to intellectual freedom.
Sometimes writing the monthly blog post felt like pressure: Come up with something worth writing about, Kate! But more often than not, it felt like a release: This is a place where you can think through your questions, test out ideas, and explore the world!
That writing and thinking release is why I’m back to blogging, and I’ll even take it with a dose of pressure to keep me moving. I’m starting with a seven posts in seven days goal to help me sort through all the drafts I’ve started and not published since I started this site two years ago. I’m behind already—it’s day 3 and post #2 (and the first post is a revision and expansion of something I first posted back in August), but that’s ok. The goal will keep me moving toward a regular practice of turning frustrations into reflections and questions into possibilities.
So to take stock of my past blogging life, I looked back at my OIF archives and did a little inventory of the types of posts I did. Below are the six subjects I found that I wrote about as I looked back: self-critique, schools, literature and popular media, library policies and issues, the Supreme Court and politics, and research. A little self-indulgent, maybe, but I think the time I’ve spent looking back will help me move forward with my public thinking and writing in this new setting.
Critiquing my practices
My favorite post is one in which I share my own censorship story, five years after it occurred. My experience responding to a book challenge with teachers in my school was a turning point in my career; it’s how I metthe amazing folks at the OIF, and it was a major catalyst in my choice to pursue doctoral work in literacy teaching and learning.
My first blog post was also a self-critique, in which I apologized to my students for “political seepage” in my own classroom” in the run-up to the 2016 election. I continue the self-critique with my confessions of a privacy novice post, in which I re-examined my embrace of Google without considering their privacy policies. Three years later, I wrote a similar reflection on my use of Zoom, once privacy concerns emerged during the early days of the pandemic.
And even closer to home, some posts allowed me to think through how I live (and sometimes violate) my intellectual freedom ideas in my parenting. There’s the post where I reflected my impulse to censor my daughter’s teen romance reading, and the one where I talked with my daughter about what’s “appropriate” for youth in media after watching the television show Rise, which follows high school students putting one our favorite musicals, Spring Awakening.
School explorations
My experience as a teacher and school librarian also led me to write a lot about intellectual freedom and schools, particularly in curriculum.
Often, these posts, too, were about my own efforts to improve my teaching practice or my understanding of school-based censorship issues. I reflected on how to make my classroom more like a library, wrote about my suggestion to “make partnerships not permission slips” when students choose books that might be considered controversial, argued for teaching kids how to engage in complex talk rather than banning the book that inspires the talk, and pondered the question of whether removing a book from the curriculum is simply a routine curriculum change, or whther it some curriculum changes could be considered censorship?
In addition, I wrote primer on students’ rights in schools, I collected resources for having classroom conversations post-Charlottesville, and offered back to school intellectual freedom reminders. Sometimes I responded to intellectual freedom challenges in particular schools, like when I reflected on a news story about a community’s response the N-word in a school musical, a pyschology lesson about gender bias leds to policy change, and one school’s choice to remove Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the curriculum.
Literary & television inspirations
The posts some of the posts that were the most fun to write were those inspired by the literature I love. I wrote an ode to John Green, a letter to Jacqueline Woodson, a fan-fic conversation with Harry Potter to celebrate his 31st birthday (that ends with dated praise of J.K. Rowling, before she voiced anti-trans beliefs). Oh yeah, and there was that one (rather rambling) post that pissed off a YA author who shall go unnamed because I think he might have a Google alert set up for his name. How else would he have found my obscure blog post?
Television, too, inspired my writing and thinking about intellectual freedom. I wrote about what Game of Thrones teaches us about fake news, and I wrote a two-part series about Euphoria; part one was about the expectation that youth media like Euphoria must have “positive messages”, and part two was more broadly about the role that Common Sense Media‘s reviews play in demonizing stories about youth that don’t end with a neat moral like a cautionary after school special.
Many of my literary inspirations were also reflections on the state of intellectual freedom during our own political reality. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale inspired two posts, the first about how the Hulu the series’s portrayal of Serena Joy’s literary history made me rethink some key ideas about women’s rights and intellectual freedom, and the second about forbidden literacy in Atwood’s sequel, The Testements. And in the summer of 2020, I reflected on protests after reading John Lewis’s March books.
Library world analyses
Obviously many of my posts were about traditional issues of censorship in libraries, but I also explored other ares related to library policies, standards, and practices. I wrote about whether genre-based classifications could restrict intellectual freedom and the notion LGBTQ library displays are political (because everything is!) but not partisan. And I took time for a rare celebration of good news, when a school did follow the selection and reconsideration policies during a challenge.
I also looked at ALA institutional work, including a behind the scenes with Kristin Pekoll about how the Top 10 Most Challenged Books works, and how April Dawkins, a fellow News Editor and I compiled the Intellectual Freedom News. Since I also worked on the American Association of School Librarians’ Standards Implementation Task Force during these years, I also wrote about intellectual freedom in the National School Library Standards.
SCOTUS & political reflections
You may have noticed that my years with the OIF covered almost the entirety of the Trump administration, and there were certainly ample political issues to write about during that time. Interestingly, I wrote only one post specifically about a Trump executive order, one about open access in academic publishing that the Trump administration considered. Perhaps because every week that I did the Intellectual Freedom news, I was inundated with articles about new restrictions or issues related to intellctual freedom springing from the executive branch. It was too much for me; Friday mornings were often the worst part of my week because that’s when I had to scan all the headlines.
Intellectual freedom issues on campuses and in libraries became even more divisive during these years. I wrote to argue that inclusivity and free speech on camus are both patriotic, and I examined laws under consideration in Missouri and Florida with the potential to criminalize libraries with “pornographic” books, as well as Florida’s instructional materials law. At the time, though I had no idea how much more heightened the political landscape around books and libraries would become with the misinformation and misguided laws about critical race theory and the crusade against LGBTQ books and books by and about people of color in the past two years. I argued then and still believe now that book selection is not a politician’s job.
And of course, since I still hope to be the first Supreme Court justice appointed directly from the public schools (with no legal degree or experience), I did a lot of posts about SCOTUS cases and other consitutional issues, including one about Tinker v. Des Moines, one about freedom of speech and privacy on NPR’s More Perfect podcast, Justice Stevens on intellectual freedom.
Research geek-outs
And finally, since I was working with the OIF while I was a full-time doctoral student, I also used my blogging as a chance to reflect on my life and research in academia. I reflected on other people’s research, as I did in a post called “Some thoughts on ‘Questioning the Dogma of Banned Books Week’” and another about intellectual freedom reflections after attending two literacy education conferences. I wrote about living in the bubble of the progressive academy and wanted more diversity of opinions in the debates about academic freedom.
I transformed some research I had done into suggestions for refreshing teachers’ and librarians’ text selection processes and criteria. And to finish it out, there was the post I wrote about teacher identities and book selection, which should have been subtitled, I just finished my dissertation and I needed to write a blog post!
What I learned from looking back: Audience & purpose
The most important epiphany I had in my retrospective is that without my OIF blogging, the seeds of thought that spring up in everyday life wouldn’t have yielded the same level of intellectual, emotional, and relational growth in my life and work. Truly, the audience was secondary: the idea of clicking “publish” made me write and revise toward a level of clarity that pushed my thinking beyond the more informal babble-writing that I do every morning. I realized that in those blog posts, my primary audience wasy myself and my primary goal was to prepare myself to do better work and thinking in the future. And that’s the my goal in this blog too.
Kate Lechtenberg, PhD 