From: Charles Bayless <charles.bayless_at_ttmd.com>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:52:21 -0500

How do we define the norms of issue, behavior, values, etc. beyond which we become concerned? I think this is the critical question. Since it has been at the heart of so many disputes for so many years, I would be surprised if no one has at least attempted to put it on to some sort of objective footing but I am unaware of any such effort. Perhaps someone in the community is.

I am not referencing some sort of movie rating system (far too blunt). This is almost the inverse of E.D. Hirsch's efforts (Cultural Literacy) to identify the critical minimum knowledge (beyond the core curriculum) every citizen ought to have obtained by graduation in order to be considered an effective, functioning member of the community. In this case, we are identifying all those categories of information which are both optional (not necessary to everyone) and might be challenging or might be contra a major belief system. A scenario to illustrate. While a book having suicide as a central issue might conceivably be bibliotherapeutic to a child who has lost a neighbor or relative to suicide, it might also be massively inappropriate for a child who is subject to depression and suicidal tendencies. It is certainly not a theme that is necessary to everyone and its appropriateness to any particular person is highly variable.

Is there a way to create some set of tools which would minimize the emotional heat and advocacy surrounding these topics? Perhaps. It would appear to me that there are two tools that someone such as an NEA or ALA might develop in order to take some of the noise out of the system, reduce the flak that teachers/librarians face, increase the ability of parents and teachers/librarians to communicate effectively with each other and increase the odds of a book being appropriate to a particular child. These tools might be called the Index of Appropriateness (IoA) and the Community Norms Assessment (CNA).

Index of Appropriateness - Listing of issues against which a book is measured in terms of their prevalence and scope. Index score between 1-500, 500 being a pervasive use of many challenging elements.

The IoA would focus on individual titles and would assign some sort of index number say on a scale of 1-500. It passes no judgment on whether a book is appropriate or not, or whether it is well written or not, merely puts some objective parameters on the nature of the book. You would start with a set list of bibliotherapeutic and challenging issues and then indicate the degree to which the issue is central or not to the story. Might look something like: Alluded to (for example Marc's overseer's rape record), incidental (a paragraph), important (a chapter), and critical (pervasive theme of the book). You would probably also need some form of intensity measure such as: euphemistic, factual, descriptive, lurid, and gratuitous. In statistical terms, you are trying to find the zone which covers 70-95% of the population (one or two standard deviations) in terms of sensitivity. The bibliotherapeutic and challenging issues might include gender orientation, moral ambiguity, racial stereotyping, religious self-questio ning, harsh language, physical violence, sex, criminal activity, drug use, policy advocacy, FGM, etc. The list could be quite long and significant effort would be required to prune it to a manageable length while remaining relevant to parental concerns and children's interests.

For every new title you would assign an IoA index number made up of the aggregate of the line item scores. A parent or teacher/librarian would be able to look at it and see 1) on a scale (whatever that scale is, say 1-500), that the average IoA for the most popular 100 books is, say, 235, 2) that the IoA score for this book is 320, i.e. a containing a reasonable amount more challenging material than the norm, and 3) that the higher score is driven by a more pervasive use of harsh or inappropriate language. If it is a book that, by its content, is likely to deeply appeal to a child and therefore feed their hunger for reading, then a parent and/or teacher/librarian can make a trade-off decision: is this score too high or am I concerned enough about the language use to restrict this book at this time, or can I address the language use with them in a fashion that makes it valuable for them to read the book.

For example, an historical fiction book about Celtic Roman Britain such as Mika Waltari's The Roman might have great historical information a child can pick up from the book, but it also has a number of elements that might be considered challenging. These would include rape (alluded to, factual), violence (incidental, descriptive), sex (important, lurid), etc. It would have low marks for rape, medium for violence, and high for sex. An aggregate high point rating would be indicative of caution required. Possibly acceptable for a high schooler but maybe not a middle schooler. Unless it is the most anodyne of books, every book worth its salt will have at least some points on the scale. I can look at this IoA rating for The Roman (and its constituent components) and make an assessment whether the types and degree of inappropriateness make it acceptable or not or whether I need to keep looking to find another book that will interest this child. That's the context we can't ever forget. The harder we make it for ch ildren to read books they will enjoy, the less likely they will be to read.

The second tool might also help reduce some of the potential conflicts out there.

Community Norms Assessment - Take a statistically relevant sample of parents to evaluate a title in terms of at what age they would allow their child to read that book based solely on content (again not an assessment of how well written the book might be). For any title there is a percentage figure by age indicating the percentage of parents thinking it is appropriate for that age.

This approach would require some centralized administration by someone like the ALA. Take a few hundred books, including the most consistently popular books as well as the most frequently challenged books. Take some reasonably large, statistically meaningful sample size of reading parents. Have the population of parents rate each title by age level, indicating whether it would be appropriate to read that book at that age. You would end up with some distribution curve over the ages of community acceptance. For example, the results might be: 65% believe unabridged Huck Finn to be appropriate material for 10 year olds; 85% believe it to be appropriate for 13 year olds, and 97% believe it to be appropriate for 15 year olds and older. This sort of information tells you two things. At what age do most parents think it is best to introduce the book (and whatever challenging issues there might be such as language use, racial stereotyping, etc.), and the degree of parental acceptance. So while Huck Finn has some issu es which some people might find objectionable (and the IoA would give you a sense of which issues), the CNA would tell you that it is broadly accepted anyway and at what age it is deemed best introduced. Indirectly it also tells you, if you are electing to introduce it an earlier age, the degree of resistance which you ought to anticipate and prepare for.

There are wrinkles in this. For more obscure books, you are likely to have to rely upon thumbnail summaries for the parents to assess against.

Some of the advantages that would arise out of these tools:

Parents and teacher/librarians would be able to better comprehend individually what might be appropriate and inappropriate for a particular child at a particular age.

Teacher/librarians would have a better sense of where community sensitivities lie and allowing them to address those sensitivities in advance of an assignment or acquisition.

Teacher/librarians would have a mechanism to dispassionately address parent concerns, particularly where there is a disparity between the individual and the CNA, e.g. a parent thinks the book is highly inappropriate but 85% deem it to be appropriate allows them to see that it is not a teacher/librarian issue so much as an individual parent issue.

The IoA allows teachers/librarians (and parents) to shape whatever prefatory or follow-up discussion might be appropriate.

The CNA in combination with the IoA might make it easier to introduce contemporary challenging books that have similar IoAs to established accepted books. Basically seeking cover for the new from the acceptance of that which is well known. For example, "Lord of the Flies has an IoA of 175 driven by violence and moral ambiguity; this new novel also has a similar IoA for the same reasons and is terrifically well written."

If we could just pull this topic out of the mud of subjective opinion, strawmen stereotypes that different groups hold of one another, and begin dealing with some facts, we could probably significantly expand the environment of acceptance of books and themes.

One of the side effects is also likely to be relevant to another issue which keeps showing up in our discussion - the asserted ineffectiveness, temerity, conservativism (add derogatory adjective of your choice) of editors in their acquisition of manuscripts. While they may not accept as many manuscripts around challenging themes as authors might wish, I suspect that their choices are more in line with what the CNA might show. Regardless of what I believe, whatever it shows, one way or another, everyone could make better decisions with the factual knowledge available rather than speculating. There is no point in wasting time and effort trying to find suppressed gender orientation discrimination (or whatever the accusation is of the moment) among editors when in fact there simply is not a very big market as revealed by the CNA.

Charles
Received on Sun 27 Nov 2011 01:52:21 PM CST