aesthetv

This took me forever to finish. Mostly, it was a research review of teen development and behavior, which you would have already learned about if you have taken a child development course. I was hoping for connections from teen research to practical library applications, but that's not what this book is about. It was pretty dry and some sentences were so jargony and awkward it took reading them 4-5 times before they made sense. But, for librarians who haven't studied teen development in the last 10+ years, it could be helpful. A quote from Aidan Chambers inspired this excellent excerpt that I plan to use next time I hear one of my colleagues worrying that 'these teens just don't read' or 'I don't know about this generation, they're on their cell phones all the time': "There is no such thing as an adolescent. It is a state in life. They are as diverse as we are." These ideas challenge librarians to consider the adolescent as an individual rather than a member of a cohort with particular characteristics. It suggests that for every video-game-playing teen there is a quiet reader, or even that the gamer may want reading material that might seem to be at odds with his or her screen-involved persona. Instead of thinking of youth appeal in reductive terms in order to make easy connections between resources and young people, Chambers presents the need to consider each young person as an individual.

2023-01-24 07:21