Teens, the same only different

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.

First impressions of my first public library visit in Croatia

Martina is a doctoral student at the University of Zagreb, working as an assistant at the University of Zadar. She is passionate about public libraries and how they can transform communities and has wonderful stories to tell about how they did this in Zadar. Today she and her husband and one-year-old son Luka took me to Sibenik to see this beautiful old coastal city and to visit its public library.

Like many Croatian public libraries, the Sibenik library occupies a converted army building. Unlike many, it is in the center of town. The renovation results in a modern building of glass and steel. There are some oddities due to its former use. In the basement, for example, a former bowling alley has been turned into a storage space with compact shelving. For the most part, however, its former military function is not apparent. And isn't that a nice symbolic transformation? From a military operation to a library! I like that.

I wish Jonathan Furner had been there to help me make sense of what they called their scientific collection which to me appeared to be just nonfiction (books on winemaking, origami, and many other miscellaneous subjects). It used a classification scheme that originated in some Croatian academic setting. Because of this, the public was not allowed into this room but had to have books paged from here. When I asked if this worked for them, the librarians said it did. OK. Whatever.

There was a pleasant preschool corner filled with blocks and soft cushions and picture books. There was a children's computer lab crowded with boys using the computers the same way they do everywhere -- for games in noisy packs. There was another bank of computers with special software for children under the age of 8.

The collection looked like a collection anywhere, with books written in Croatian and others translated into Croatian. Harry Potter is still very popular, and the librarian showed me a scrapbook documenting a whole series of Harry Potter programs. Lots of children in wizard hats.

More impressive to me was a program on children's rights. Children from the ages of ten to fourteen had participated in a discussion -- or maybe a series of discussions, I'm not sure -- about rights and then produced their own Bills of Rights. They translated one of them for me, and it seemed very wise and also very childlike. This child included the right to eat candy along with a child's right to know his father and to visit both parents.

This library also hires an artist to work with the children on various creative visual arts projects. While I was there, the project was creating bookmarks; and the results were lovely. In an earlier project, the children had looked at incunabula from the cathedral library that is just a block or so away and then created their own illuminated alphabets.

There was so much to admire about the library and its staff who obviously care about the library, about their patrons, and about their city. What is missing? Teen services! After the age of fourteen, young people are "sent upstairs" to the adult section. There is no teen collection or programming.

Before I had come to Croatia, I had only read travel guidebooks about the country and the nonfiction accounts written by Rebecca West (BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON) and Robert Kaplan (BALKAN GHOSTS). I wondered in my last post how my impressions of the country would differ. In 1938, Rebecca West seemed to see this part of the world through a Freudian lens in which sex and death seemed to color her experiences. Robert Kaplan was influenced by Rebecca West and by his conviction that history dominated the present.

Yes, this country has a colorful and important heritage and a history that was often terrible. (My friend Ivanka's 96-year-old mother says she has lived through three wars and doesn't want to live through another one.) But there is something quite wonderful about a country that can turn its army bases into libraries and universities and recognize that its children have rights.

When I left the Sibenik Public Library, the librarians said they had a present for me. They gave me a gift bag. Inside were a children's picture book about a wonderful inventor from Sibenek who had devised the first parachute a very long time ago, a book the library had published about its beautiful old cathedral -- and some local brandy in a bottle that had been decorated by hand by one of the librarians. There is something quite wonderful about a country that produces books, inventions, and brandy.