Crimson and Gold Connection; Jorge Leon

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro and I want to thank you for joining me this week for the Crimson and Gold Connection. This week I'm joined by Jorge Leone, easy learning outreach librarian at Pittsburgh State's Axe Library. All right, thank you for joining me this week on the Crimson and Gold Connection. Pleasure to be here. Now we're right around the corner from Band Book Week here at Pittsburgh State University. Now for somebody who's never heard of Band Book Week, what is it all about? The American Library Association tries to celebrate a week out of the year that they focus around our freedom to read and the opportunity to look at materials that have been challenged and attempted to be banned from the curriculum from high schools, middle schools, public libraries, etc. The whole idea for us is to try and highlight this national activities and events and to bring a focus to some of our local conversations, partnerships, promotions, just to make sure we can kind of honor in the same themes and same ideas. So this is a national event to stay wide and it's also something that's held here at Pittsburgh State.

We're just some of the books that are being highlighted for PSU's Band Book Week. Well, we're taking a bit of a different approach this year. This is several years I've been doing this at the university and this year I want to try and broaden to how many different professors and subject areas and students I can reach out to. So one of the focuses for us is to try and make sure we have three different events on Tuesday the 26th, Wednesday the 27th and Thursday the 28th and each of them is going to have a bit of a different flavor to them. The first one will be how and other obscenities on Tuesday, September 26th, the 6 p.m. Focus there is Professor Dr. Chris Anderson and students from the Alpha Siomega. Have a bit of a fun with our play by Alan Ginsberg. How? They're going to have a little bit of introduction, talk about the obscenity trials, then go through and have a live reading of it. It should be nice and fun. It should be very informative and then an opportunity for Q&A. Very coffee shop, kind of poetry read. On Wednesday I think a number of our professors Jim McBain, Don Viney and Chris Childers will be out here talking about Darwin, the curriculum, the focus on here and pit state and Southeast Kansas.

And then on Thursday, professors who's in now will be talking about from the perspective of students who are going to be soon out on the field teachers, early educational and mentoring professors. What should they do when they run into things like challenges, parents having issues, somebody coming in saying, my kids shouldn't read this, we should take it off of the library, those kinds of situations. So three different events, the first one, September 26th, 6 p.m., the second one, September 27th, 3 p.m. 115 acts library and the third one, September 28th, 3 p.m. as well in X 115. And one of the things that I like about when I saw in your flyer about this event is that you're holding three of them, each one of them have a different focus, different professors and they seem like they're going to be interactive for students. Definitely. Every year we try and make them activities where we have a professor give a little bit of a guided discussion,

but the main focus is to have that back and forth conversation. I think last year we had a very productive conversation with students asking about, well, I'm going to be soon. And so in this district, what do I do? And that brought about this third conversation from Professor Nell, focusing it on, if you're a student who's now going to be in the field, how do you deal with it? We want our students to be prepared and we want them to interact. So we want to have this back and forth conversation with them. Yeah, this isn't a passive event, although if you don't know anything about ban books or ban books week or the books that are being presented, you could just take it in and just watch. But if you do have read these books and you want to participate, this is something that you can watch and involve yourself in. And I was wondering who are some of the organizers of ban book week event? Organizing this event with me is usually Professor Sandra Cox over in the English and modern language department. Definitely cannot make it happen without the professors that will donate their time and expertise. Professor Chris Anderson, Jim McBain, Don Feini, Chris Childers, and Professor Susan Nell. Same this year with the students directed by Kathia Ariens as part of the Alpha Siamega group coming out to have their interpretive read.

It is really community oriented. Regardless of what level you work on or maybe you attend PSU. I like these events where everybody can participate and everybody does get involved. This for me is an important event. I think it's a good opportunity for us to bring the community together and have everybody get a chance to be aware of some of these topics. I run into people who just don't see that this is a necessity. They go this day and age. We really don't ban things. That's not something that goes on. But the reality is that we have constantly challenges. The American Library Association, they have their office or intellectual freedom that tracks how many challenges we get. And last year just on their own, they had a little bit over 300 challenges, 323 challenges to schools, public libraries. And others to remove a book. That's almost one a day. This is definitely something that affects everybody. Something that at every level we need to be looking at or at least being aware that it's going around.

So we know what is our perspective. How do we react to what we do about it? And we want the people to be able to bring their perspective and share it with us. Yeah, and this is what this is really bad. It's about freedom of ideas. Correct. You know, which is really at the root of why we're Americans and why we love to live here. You know, we like to share and share free expression. You know, so I really like this event that it's being held inside the library, not somewhere else on campus. You know, which is kind of a beacon for free expression. I love that you're putting it that way. For me, I've always wanted to have them in the library for a few reasons. One after a lot of events, students go, well, what now? And I want them to be able to go, well, now they've had the chance to hear this. If I want to check it out, the books are here. If I want to have a different opinion, I can research it here. So they have that connectivity to follow up a more information on more knowledge and more wherever they want to take it. So yeah, I want the library to have that central role in helping navigate these conversations. You know, one of the things earlier in our conversation, you talked about preparing future educators.

How to handle band books, wherever they go to work. And I think that's really unique, taking that proactive step to say, hey, you're going to deal with this. You might deal with this in a school district, or maybe another state you're going to work in. And this is how you can handle it. It's already planning seeds for those future educators. I completely agree. One of our professors, Dr. Nell, has just vast amount of experience in education before even coming to PSU. And she tries to share that with the students because she's seen a number of different challenges herself and knows how to deal with them. Jorge, I want to thank you for joining me this week on the Crimson Ant Gold connection. Perfect. Thank you very much for having me. This week, I was speaking with Jorge Leon, learning outreach librarian at the X library here at Pittsburgh State University. For more information about band book, week events, visit Axe Library's website at ax.pitstate.edu. For all of us here at 89.9KRPS, I'm Fred Fletcher, Fierro. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection Wednesdays at 8.50 and Fridays at 350.