Goals
It is the goal of both the Green Valley Public Library and the Green Valley Middle/High School drama departments to introduce storytelling into the drama curriculum. With the support of their time and effort the Green Valley Library Youth Services staff will build a stronger, more extensive relationship between the schools and library. The students will help forge this relationship. Teens have found libraries to be the primary place where they find stories that speak to them. Storytelling allows them to share that voice with everyone!
Both parties see the art of storytelling as the ideal way to initiate a renewed and ideally lasting reciprocal relationship in which the resources currently available to our fine community, both in materials offered and staff expertise, are made more public and thusly recognized. As part of the Green Valley Public Library’s reintroduction to the citizens, both young and old, we hope that the storytelling program will help encourage broader usage of the public library by a larger variety of the population.
Though not the standard method for uniting the public schools and the public library; storytelling offers all parties the opportunity to highlight the individual offerings for a common goal. The Green Valley Library Youth Services staff feels that this unique approach will breathe new life into both communities and parties involved. Instead of trying to just serve the needs currently expressed in the curriculum, as we presently do, by helping to broaden the existing curriculum, we are not only furthering our own long term goals, but offering the school system the opportunity to do the same without it incurring excessive costs and research.
Storytelling
programs for teenagers and young adults are hardly a novel idea in the
world of
public libraries and teen programming, but applying it in the school
setting via
the public library is innovative. Groundbreaking, though our efforts
may be, it
is our hope to expand the library presence in the
As a means of documentation a webpage will be
constructed explaining
the program, following the students progress through diary/blog entries
and pictures, the page will include a detailed schedule for the entire
year and Youtube presentations of the some of the student's
stories. The page will be linked to the Green Valley Public
Library webpage as well as both the Green Valley Middle and High school
webpages. Practices and the final performances will be
recorded for evaluation purposes as well as use for future
semesters.
At the conclusion of each semester, a teacher/library staff/student
evaluation will be administered to ascertain if the program is an asset
to the Green Valley Public Library as well as the school and the
student's
education. The evaluation will also be used to make improvements
upon the existing program and highlight areas where the program is
working.