The Restorative School Library: Building Spaces and Programs Where Students Are Seen and Celebrated (Equity and Social Justice in Education Series)

School libraries today are faced with budget cuts, book challenges, "job creep," and more. What is a school librarian to do? Award-winning librarian and ALA author Julia Stivers details how you can navigate these times and build library collections, spaces, and programs where our students are both seen and celebrated.

Stivers shows how restorative practices―including community building, group circles, and actively repairing harm―can work to create more just, equitable spaces where identities and relationships are centered. You’ll learn how to build collections that reflect students’ identities, lived experiences, and interests, and how to avoid inequitable systems like book fairs, lost book fees, limited check-outs, and biased cataloguing, which create barriers to access for our most vulnerable students.

With the strategies in this book, you’ll be able to rethink your procedures, collections, and spaces to make your library restorative for all users.

Julia Stivers (she/ her) is a high school librarian in Durham, NC. As an American Library Association Emerging Leader, she helped develop AASL’s Defending Intellectual Freedom: LGBTQ+ Materials in School Libraries. She is proud to have been named NC’s 2022 School Library Media Coordinator of the Year and the 2023 School Library Journal School Librarian of the Year. Find her at linktr.ee/BespokeLib.