Michal Brandon- Muller Road Middle School
Blog 3: Michal Brandon- Muller Road Middle School
(Muller Road Middle School, n.d.)
Michal Brandon is a current librarian at Muller Road Middle
School in Richland School District Two.
When I asked Mrs. Brandon how she became a librarian she
said that she was working at a bank and just so happened a one of the customers
was the Richland County Public Librarian. The customer mentioned the MLIS
program to her. She wanted to be able to be on a school schedule with her
children, but she also knew that she loved books and loved children. Therefore,
she decided to go back to school and get her MLIS.
During the interview, we focused on the competency include.
Include:
(Discus, n.d., Follett, n.d., Sora, n.d.)
The way Mrs. Brandon implements the competency include is
purchasing books that represent the diverse community of Muller Road Middle
School. She said that she received a stipend in 2020
which to update the social justice nonfiction area. She bought books that
included sports based on stereotyping and breaking the stereotypes present in
athletics. She uses the subject headings present in Titlewave to see
updated lists of materials to order and she also worked with Deb Salmond of
Salmond Library Services for the 2020 order.
In order to find other books that meet the diverse needs of the
community she uses her social media accounts to follow well-known authors to
see what type diverse books they are writing or promoting to purchase. She also
polls students and teachers to see what their book needs are or what they think
needs to be added to the library collection to make it better. Mrs. Brandon also promotes usage of DISCUS and
Infobase eBooks. She says that she also uses Sora (an online library provided
by the district) give students a way to access diverse books, too. She said that she has purchased picture books
that detail important events in our history to allow for diverse perspectives
and representation for her library collection. All of these practices and
resources that Mrs. Brandon uses helps to include the diverse student
population at Muller Road Middle School.
In order for Mrs. Brandon to
implement include in her library, she collaborates with teachers. She mentioned
that when she collaborates with teachers she suggest titles for class novels
that address diversity in classrooms or offer a variety of perspectives so all
students feel included. She gave me an
example that when she was collaborating with an English teacher, the teacher wanted
to use a book that had all white character list for her classes. During their
collaboration session, Mrs. Brandon said that it would be better to give the
students a variety of choices instead of giving the students just one book to
read. This way the students could choose from diverse options that would
inclusion to the student population. She feels that the more opportunities
students are offered to read diverse books will lead to greater discussion
about diversity in literature, and then in turn build a respectful school
culture of diverse people. Also, knowing that she has a diverse group of teachers
from different countries she shares cultural difference on the News Show so
that students have cultural awareness. For example, she shared much information
on the News Show about Hispanic Heritage Month so that students wound be
aware of the Hispanic culture.
Even though it seems that Mrs.
Brandon does so much to include everyone in her student population in her
library, sometimes she runs into problems. First, she says that she loves
getting classes into the library, for students to be able to choose books or meet
with teachers about to plan diverse lessons.
Unfortunately, teachers just do not have time to bring in their classes
or even meet with her to plan lessons. Also, she said that last year she was
pulled so much to cover classes because of a sub shortage that she did not have
a lot of time to really do her job as a librarian. Thankfully, this year it has
gotten better and can get back to really do her job. Then she says that another
problem is that much of the content that is in libraries is politicized. She
feels that because of this certain books are not in libraries and therefore
could be taking away from her library collection being diverse.
I know I have spoken about Muller
Road Middle School being Mrs. Brandon’s library, but she loves to say that it
is the school’s library and that the students have a say of what should be in
it.
References
Brandon, M. (2023, November 7).
[Personal interview by C. Smith].
Discus. (n.d.). Discus [Image]. https://www.scdiscus.org/discus-logos
Sora. (n.d.). Sora [Image].
https://gg4l.com/product/sora/
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