The authors surveyed public libraries to learn about the opportunities for play they offered and children's freedom to engage in such play without adult supervision. The authors conclude that, in recent years, public libraries in the United States have increasingly created spaces and programs enabling free play for children and teens. These…

Public library storytimes provide rich learning opportunities for young children and their caregivers, yet little is known about how inclusive they are for children with disabilities and developmental delays (CwD/DD). The purpose of this study was to identify and describe ways that librarians support the inclusion of CwD/DD and their caregivers in…

Literacy is a common goal of early childhood programs in libraries. Through the "Every Child Ready to Read" initiative of the American Library Association, librarians emphasize educating caregivers and parents to work with their children on early literacy skills (Every Child Ready to Read, n.d.).This program identifies singing as one of…

This article responds to the endemic, intergenerational, and pervasive racism endured by Black children in the USA and the need to reimagine classrooms as cultures of peace where Black histories, literatures, accomplishment, oppression, resistance, resilience, and joy are taught as central to the curriculum. To do so, the article shares a…

Purpose: This study aimed to understand how parents and librarians describe their lived experiences in a modern children's library that aims to create a triad bond through the organization of multiliteracy events and activities. Design/methodology/approach: The study used a phenomenological case study approach using two semistructured interviews,…

This article details the findings from Project LOCAL (Library Outreach as a Community Anchor in Learning), a mixed-methods study that explored how public libraries contribute to educational equity by going into community locations to reach and serve families and children in underserved communities who cannot come into the library due to a variety…

In 1966 the photographer Martine Franck was commissioned by "Life International" to document the experiences of children in a new library in Paris. The visual essay she produced illuminated the materiality, the design and the children's use of the space. In Birmingham, a recent unconnected research project, 'Libraries in Women's Lives',…

This article examines the role of the arts in education through a detailed sharing of a research project, Hum Hindustani, on children and citizenship. Using examples of work co-created with children in art workshops for the project, the article offers an understanding of the place of the arts in the classroom to provoke a larger conversation that…

While the Philosophy for Children (P4C) method has been adopted within classrooms by individual teachers and into some school systems by schoolboards, public and school libraries, the ideal users of this sort of programming, have been slow to recognise the benefits of this didactic methodology. This is particularly surprising given that the P4C…

Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper investigates the gendered involvement in early literacy programs at one central library in the Greater Toronto Area. This study consisted of observations and field notes across family literacy programs, along with in-depth interviews with librarians and mother attendees. In particular, this research…

Theoretically framed by public pedagogy, the study explores teachers' use of public sites for undocumented migrant children. The findings demonstrate that teachers utilized various non-school, informal, and public spaces including libraries/museums, open marketplaces, and public parks/squares as powerful platforms to foster children's learning,…

This study explores the translingual writing and making practices of bilingual mothers and their children in a library-based storytelling workshop, where writing and language were positioned as two of many materials that could be used to share stories. Situating this work within literature that positions libraries as "pockets of hope"…

Librarians love stories, and libraries are among the few forums that can offer exposure to collections of stories in various formats as well as encourage independent exploration and group discussion. Librarians read, encourage talking, writing about, and searching for stories, but this is text-based. What of the students new to the English…

Children's attitudes towards, and frequency of recreational reading influence their reading skill level. The aim of this study was to determine the relative influence of research-supported intrinsic and extrinsic variables that can shape this attitude and practice, and to investigate the use of artificial neural network as an adjunct approach in…

Digital reading is now an important way for children to read. This article defines the concept of children's digital reading based on the current situation, reading needs, and research progress of reading promotion methods. Aiming at the problem that only simple matching method is used for entity extraction in BAG model, this paper proposes an…