New location opens opportunities for Reading Express, outreach
A room full of professionals, dressed in button-downs and pencil skirts, held two fingers above their heads, snipping through the air with “scissors.” Dean Charles Bierbauer stretched a long, invisible ribbon across the front of the new Literacy Lab to Director Kim Jeffcoat, and Cocky snapped his beak at the center of the illusion.
The participants were channeling their childlike senses of imagination, Bierbauer said, at Monday’s opening of the S.C. Center for Children’s Books & Literacy.
The center, which had operated on the mezzanine level of the State Library for the past 11 years, moved to its new location across the street (at the corner of Bull and Senate streets) Aug. 13 and hosted its official opening for the first night of I-Comm Week.
Garnet and black balloons decorated the entrance of the center, which opens to Bull Street, and the shelves were stocked with picture books and young adult fiction — some organized by holiday, and others by region. South Carolina authors had their own special nook, with a displayed copy of “Sunday Week” by USC English professor Dinah Johnson.
The center is an outreach of USC’s School of Library and Information Science, and as one of its most public endeavors, organizes Cocky’s Reading Express. It houses 8,000 titles, and is classified as an examination collection, according to Jeffcoat, the center’s director.
In all of its efforts — research, reference and outreach — the main goal is children’s literacy. Although it is a working library, open to the entire state, the center extends beyond the check-in and checkout of Dr. Seuss and Junie B. Jones.
There is an ongoing support for research in children’s literacy through a partnership with the Augusta Baker Chair in Childhood Literacy, Dr. Michelle Martin. The actual outreach component, Cocky’s Reading Express, has delivered 50,260 books to pre-K through second graders in 44 of South Carolina’s 46 counties as of this week, according to Jeffcoat.
The literacy center’s new, larger space will allow for more versatility in its programs and more visibility as well, said Bierbauer, the dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies.
“We all know too well the level of achievement. What we don’t know is the capacity of achievement,” Bierbauer said.
The dean classified the center and its initiative as an “all-comers approach.” In its research and outreach, it is targeting everyone from 3-year-olds to their parents and extending literal literacy to nutritional, financial and environmental literacy.
Cocky has also played a big part in the Reading Express success, outlining the road from reading to college in one visit.
“Can you imagine a, let’s say, Tiger, carrying the same appeal?” Bierbauer quipped.
The center has been open since day one of its August move, hosting USC classes for quick tours and workshops. A party-goer actually returned a stack of books, with a chuckle, as she signed in to the opening event Monday.
It serves university students who are going to school to be teachers, librarians and educators, Jeffcoat said.
Sara Chizari, a first-year library and information science doctoral student, said she hopes to use the library to research her interface for an information retrieval system for children.
What has been dubbed the “Literacy Lab” is stocked with Caldecott and Newbery award-winning titles, folktales, fairytales and children’s poetry. It also serves as a classroom for continuing education and professional development.
But it’s not just a resource and a project for those with direct ties to the research, or to children’s literature as a whole.
“I think the whole state has a stake in this,” said Jason Alston, a second-year information policy doctoral student. “If we don’t support childhood literacy, we’re throwing our future down the drain.”
Jeffcoat simplifies the solution: “We’re making sure our students are reading at grade-level.”
Cocky’s Reading Express visits schools across the state almost every Friday, and any USC student, undergraduate or graduate, is invited to volunteer. Training is done during the bus ride, and participants can pass out stickers, organize the books or read to the children.
The Center for Children’s Books & Literacy is funded through grants and community contributors, which also work toward extended literacy. In addition, the center’s move, to a visible spot in the heart of the city, has put it in reach of all of its sponsors, Jeffcoat said.
But at the end of the night, it all went back to one statement.
“Every single person benefits from the literacy of society,” Jeffcoat said.