THE UNEXPECTED
These days, a good news story or an uplifting book comes as a welcome breath of fresh air, and perhaps my best read of the year so far has also been rather unexpected.
Set in an out-of-the-way local community in the giant conurbation of Tokyo, What you are looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama caught me by surprise. It is quiet and matter-of-fact, but captures how ordinary life, with all its frustrations, can be transformed when people are prompted to think and take action.
Five people visit a small library in a local community centre, hidden behind a little school. Curiosity takes each of them inside, where, one by one, they encounter the enigmatic (and quite formidable) librarian Sayuri Komachi. She seems to know that they need something different to make sense of their lives.
She recommends a book to each of them and gives them a puzzling little gift. Each book is so far removed from what they think they are interested in that none of the visitors have any idea why it might be relevant to them . . . until they start reading.
What you are looking for . . . is a beautifully understated allegory that puts the library itself at the centre of things. Which brings me to Jane Hayes and Fiona Shea, Co-Directors of the school library at Dulwich College, Singapore. Their article about how they persuaded their community to change a much-cherished tradition at the school – Book Week – appears in this month’s edition of ITM. I suspect we all love Book Week for similar reasons, but Jane and Fiona wanted something more and set about their plans. Their approach is a case study of how to achieve transformational change from the ground up.
They had all the change bases covered: educational of course, but also political, social, financial and cultural, which meant that they were able to bring their community with them as they created something different – Literacy Week. Their premise? Every area of learning, from Science to PE, has a required literacy that deserves to be supported and developed. What better place to do this than the library? The fact that they did so to such good affect will, I think, have profound implications not only for their library, but also for the school and its community. For a long time to come.
Going back to Aoyama’s book – it is a triumph of compressed but accessible prose and it has to be said that the English translation by Alison Watts is quite beautiful. One of the most important propositions is that we must be open to experiences that we did not know would be so enjoyable, but which happen to come our way. In an age of ‘personalised learning’ we should all take note. What Jane and Fiona have shown us is that what you are looking for will indeed be in the library, and it might not be what you expected.
Andy Homden is Editor of International Teacher Magazine.
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FEATURE IMAGE: by Đào Việt Hoàng on Unsplash
