The elementary school library: Tensions between access and censorship

Children’s news media offers access points for students to learn about the complex and evolving world around them, and school libraries are spaces where students develop the skills and knowledge necessary to interact with media. Yet despite the potential of children’s news media, school libraries often become regulatory spaces where children are directed away from texts (both digital and printed) that are deemed inappropriate due to sophisticated content (Heins, 2007) or in some cases, are encouraged to read on their “level” (Kontovourki, 2012). This constructs children as vulnerable and in need of protection (Robinson, 2013). Instead, I seek to position the focal children as active, critical agents at the center of their own lives. In this article, I analyze conceptions of childhood innocence (James and Prout, 1997), arguing that both childhood and literacy are fluid and permeable constructions. I ask: What are the ways in which texts and literacy practices are censored in one elementary school library? To investigate this, I followed one school librarian, Deborah, and three first-grade students in their school library at City Partnership School as they navigated texts, learned about the world around them through multimedia platforms, and constructed their own identities as readers in a system with clear expectations for what a “readerly” identity looks like.