Do you and your library staff need help serving the social and emotional needs of your community? We’re here to help.
Impact your community by prioritizing “whole person librarianship” with help from our course, Social Emotional Librarianship, starting Oct. 7. This online workshop and guest speaker program is ideal for teams because you can work with your colleagues on an actionable, social emotional-focused project to bring change to your library services, culture, and programs. All live sessions are recorded for on-demand viewing.
Here are just a few of the powerful takeaways you will gain from this course. Learn how to:
Conduct a community needs assessment
Use social emotional librarianship as a tool for organizational change
Integrate restorative justice into your organizational culture
Advocate for yourself and your staff in the workplace
Apply social emotional librarianship to a variety of library contexts, including schools, publics, and academics, as well as small and rural libraries
and work with your colleagues on a project for your library.
Purchase 15 or more registrations and apply them across multiple courses.
Want to get started learning right away? Register now for any fall course and get immediate on-demand access to bonus content from past courses.
Check out the live guest speaker program:
SEL Foundations: CASEL, Needs Assessments, and You
This session will lay the groundwork for understanding SEL and the specific ties it has to librarianism. From there, we’ll unpack the idea of “social emotional librarianship” and define the ways it can be applied to a range of library contexts. This session will also teach you how to conduct a needs assessment to better understand your community’s needs and how best to support them. This session will be the foundation from which everything else in this course is built, and will bring together SEL theories with tangible applications you can implement in your library today.
Speaker:
Lindsay Welles-Wyczalkowski, (she, her) Educational Leader, Social and Emotional Learning District Coordinator, Professional Learning Expert
Community & School Programs that Change Lives: Roundtable
In this rapid-fire session, you’ll hear from several minds behind new initiatives that address the needs of community well being. Each panelist will present a short snapshot of their latest work, and the group will host an extended Q+A session to answer your questions about partnerships, parameters of success, budgeting, and whatever else you want to know!
The Healing Library - Learn about The Healing Library, a series of kits to help ease healing from trauma, and the way Anne Arundel County Public Library adapted the unique lending program to meet their community’s SEL needs.
Speaker:
Megan Emery Schadlich, (she, her) MLIS, is the founder and director of The Healing Library
Intergenerational Community Circles - Learn about this Restorative Justice-based program that combines peace circles and intergenerational community reads–building community, offering support, and more. The program is led by trained library staff, community partners, college students, and local middle grade students who all act as guides through thought-provoking and challenging discussions of titles like Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You and the March series at Oak Park Public Library in Illinois. Originally intended to be in-person, the program launched during the pandemic and has been a success in a virtual setting.
Speaker:
Beronica Garcia, (her, ella) Children's Librarian II at Chicago Public Library
Slam Poetry in Schools:Community through Art - Learn about ways to center equity, social-emotional learning, and community art in your school library with slam poetry. This art form is inherently communal and has been proven to provide young people with tools to express themselves and to build empathy for others with different life experiences. This program will be led by nationally-recognized slam poet and PhD student whose research focuses on the integration of performance poetry into educational spaces as a method for student engagement with justice, community, and wellness.
Speaker:
Lyrical Faith, (she, her, hers) Educator, Activist, Spoken Word Artist, 3rd Ranked Woman Poet in the World
Highly targeted for rural and/or small libraries: Lessons From The Social Workers in Rural and Small Libraries Project
Learn ways that small, rural or underfunded libraries can partner with social workers or social service organizations to address needs in the library community. You’ll learn insights into the transformational program, The Social Workers in Rural and Small Libraries Project, which has helped connect librarians and patrons to available resources and deepen their understanding of social services available to patrons. Leave this session with ideas for wide-ranging community partners and grant writing tips to support this work.
Speaker:
Tiffany Russell, (she, her) Licensed Clinical Social Worker
Social Emotional Communication: How To Develop Compassionate Communication as Personal Philosophy
Strong leadership skills ideally extend to all library staff as they take ownership of their individual roles and contributions to the library at large. Best-in-class communication practices benefit from strong social-emotional skills and can be the ticket to reaching patrons and colleagues during challenging times. In this session, you’ll learn strategies for communicating openly and honestly as a way to shift organizational culture, connect with employees, and engage your community. You’ll learn a framework for participatory decision making and tips for communication strategies you can adopt as an individual or as part of your department or team.
Speaker:
Sonia Alcantara-Antoine, (she, her) CEO of Baltimore County Public Library (MD)
Restorative Justice as Organizational Culture
Restorative justice is practice that focuses on repairing harm, and healing for both the people directly involved in a situation as well as the community at large. The restorative approach relies on proven techniques of forgiveness and empowerment rather than punishment. In this session, you’ll learn how restorative justice can guide a powerful shift within an organizational culture. There will be actionable takeaways, like de-escalation techniques, that you can include in your practice immediately, as well as resources to measure the success of outcomes, ways to continue learning about restorative justice, and how to engage with other libraries already doing this work.
Speaker:
Stephen Jackson, (he, him) Director of Equity and Antiracism, Oak Park Public Library
Highly targeted for academic/public libraries and/or leaders: Solidarity as Strategic Plan
Embedding social and emotional support and solidarity into libraries requires intentionally weaving these values into the foundations of our work. In this session, you’ll learn how to advocate for yourself and staff members or colleagues by setting clear, values-driven policies, practices, goals, and objectives directly into your institution’s driving documents at multiple levels: strategic plans, vision statements, needs assessments, and action plans.
Speaker:
Callan Bignoli, (she, her) Library Director, Olin College of Engineering
Wellness, Rest, and Boundaries: How to Advocate for Yourself and/or Your Staff
Frontline workers have to face some of the hardest challenges in libraries and classrooms, and no matter how much you might love the work, it’s easy to burn out quickly. This session is all about centering teacher, librarian, and staff needs, including strategies on setting and maintaining boundaries, advocating for yourself in the workplace, and prioritizing wellness through rest and connection to others through affinity groups.
Speaker:
Fobazi Ettarh, (she, her) Librarian, Independent Consultant, and PhD student at UIUC's iSchool
Whole Person Librarianship: Lessons from the World of Social Work to Modernize Librarianship
Lessons learned from social work-library collaborations can bring profound change to the practice of librarianship. In this session, you’ll learn about Whole Person Librarianship – the application of social work to improve library public service – and how it can serve you. You will learn examples of the evolution of social work partnerships in libraries, discuss how to choose and prepare for these types of partnerships strategically, and how to set healthy, supportive boundaries to grow personally, professionally, and as a community.
Speaker:
Sara Zettervall, (she, her) author of Whole Person Librarianship
Highly targeted for school libraries: Social Emotional Librarianship in School Settings
Learn ways that teacher librarians can incorporate social-emotional and trauma-informed practices into their schools. Advocating for social-emotional content and practices can be especially difficult in schools because of constraints from administrators, parents, and state governments. This session will teach you tangible ways to manage those challenges and give you practical ideas to infuse your school library with healing-centered programs.
Speaker:
Dr. Rose Prejean-Harris, (she, her) Social Emotional Learning Director, Atlanta Public Schools
New Fall Course Features We Know You’ll Love:
Channels for community building and ongoing networking after the course ends
Live, peer working groups with expert facilitators to immediately apply and practice skills
Companion courses with bundled pricing to extend learning
A mix of 1-day intensive workshops and 3-week workshops to fit your schedule
Optional drop-in sessions highly tailored to specific library roles and functions
Our transformative online courses have given thousands of librarians the tools and vision for meaningful change. Here are just a few of the features and benefits you receive when you take part in any of our immersive online workshops:
Programming designed and led by library leaders
Live sessions (also available on-demand)
Asynchronous, facilitated classrooms
Project-based courses with individualized, expert feedback
Comprehensive supporting materials and resources
Certificate of Completion + 15 hours of PD Credit
Early-bird rates and group discounts available
Here’s what one past participant said about their learning experience with one of our courses:
"This was a fabulous learning experience, and the information was timely and relevant. The speakers provided so much depth to course. Completing an audit of our collection was eye-opening. We were able to identify with real numbers what areas of our collection could use more focus to add diversity. I highly recommend this course!"
-Amanda DeKnight, Library Director, South Park Township Library
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