WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
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 then take action.
Five visitors, come upon a small library in a local community centre, hidden behind a little school. Curiosity takes then inside, where they encounter 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 personal interaction – and 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 and especially because it promotes a love of reading. 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, with more than a little of their energy and belief throw into the mix – 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 and needs to be supported and developed. What better to place at the centre of this initiative 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 text – it is a triumph of compressed prose. It’s seldom you come across so many ideas contained in such readable and relatable form (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 happed 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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