When I was teaching classes in Young Adult Library Services in Croatia, I hammered home the twin mantras: "work with not for" and "listen to the teens." In both Zadar and Osijek, we invited local teens to talk with us about their lives; the photos show a panel of students in Zadar and two teens from Osijek. The library school students were surprised at the candor with which the teens shared details about their lives. This last weekend I read 30 papers from my library school students in Osijek, Croatia, and it was evident that they wanted to learn more. All but two of them chose the option of interviewing five teenagers, asking them the classic questions that Elaine Meyers and I posed in our book TEENS AND LIBRARIES: GETTING IT RIGHT.
1. How do you know when an adult cares about you?
2. What are the three things teens need to succeed at home, in school, and in the community?
3. What is the hardest thing about being a teenager?
Judging from the responses, there are some universal aspects to adolescence in Western society. Almost all teens talked about the ambiguity of being neither child nor adult. They realize that they are not grown but don't wanted to be treated as children either. They desperately want to be listened to and taken seriously. Like teens everywhere, Croatian teens complained that their parents make unreasonable (or unpleasant) demands on them and that they don't understand their lives because their own teen years were so long ago when life was so different. Drugs and alcohol are easily obtainable. Sex is definitely part of their lives.
What was different about the Croatian teens was the lack of caring adults other than their parents in their lives. There were some grandparents, but nobody else. No teacher, no athletic coach, no piano teacher, no neighbor, no priest, and certainly no librarian was there to care for them. Every single teen interpreted the adult in the first question as their mother and/or father, as though no other adult might care for them. In spite of their evident chafing under their parents' rules, they also saw the rule-setting as evidence of caring.
Croatian teens were unanimous in their dissatisfaction with school, a stressful place where teachers are cold and boring, where their own interests are ignored, where they must shut up and pay attention.
Like so many American teens, the Croatian teens read very little except when they must as a school requirement. They see the public library as an unfriendly, forbidding place (and all too often, it is -- for teens at least.) They are unaware of the one teen club in the central library in Osijek. The staff in the library's teen club see this as a problem of public relations and marketing.
Croatian teens are not optimistic about their future prospects. They are cynical about their government's ability or will to improve the quality of life in their country. They are gloomy about the economy and what it means for their own future employment. And most importantly, they have little sense of their own ability to improve things.
Social supports for teens are almost nonexistent in Croatia, but young people fill their spare time with all kinds of hobbies. They draw and build models. They write poetry. They sing and play musical instruments. And yes, they play computer games -- a lot. "World of Warcraft" is very big. A few, a very few, read.
The library school students rightly saw that the library might be a positive force in teens' lives by providing young people with a safe place to be with their peers and to develop a positive relationship with at least one other adult, the young adult librarian. However, like the teens, they were also pessimistic about their ability to change libraries enough to create the nurturing places that were needed. I can only hope that these students who have seen the need and crafted a vision to mitigate it will be empowered to do the small things that will begin to transform public libraries into significant suupports for teens.
No comments:
Post a Comment