By Dr. Jason J. Griffith (Penn State University) and Dr. Stephanie F. Reid (University of Cincinnati)

As former English teachers and current teacher educators alarmed by widespread upticks in book-banning, we wondered how best to support educators in resisting censorship and preserving students’ right to read. We decided to visualize acts of resistance as reported in digital journalism through a series of graphics that might inspire educators to consider the best critical responses in their own contexts. This series of four blog posts highlights our graphics and actionable takeaways for educators.

When students and educators in schools and districts face book-banning and censorship attempts, the experience can feel extremely isolating. Stories of educators publicly resisting book-bans are often framed as individuals fighting against advocacy groups and school district or state policies, school administration, and government officials. For students, Rudine Sims Bishop’s metaphor of books as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors provides a simple framework for understanding how detrimental it can be to not encounter characters that both reflect us and help us learn about others in the books we read for school or have access to in our libraries.

It makes sense then, that building coalition, or individuals and groups joining together in various ways to fight back against censorship, was the most common act of resistance we noticed throughout the digital journalism we collected for our project. Finding like-minded partners was not only a way for many actors to feel less alone in the face of book-banning and censorship but partnering with others was also often a meaningful first step to more impactful action. For example, Book Ban Busters is an initiative developed by a collective of anti-censorship parents known as Red, Wine, and Blue. Parents joined with authors like Ashley Hope Pérez to speak out at school board meetings, and they worked with local book sellers to procure and distribute copies of banned books at the same meetings.

For our project, after we developed the anchor chart (featured in our last blog entry) of the core acts of resistance and the major actors engaged in that resistance from our collection of digital journalism, we wanted to zoom in and further explore the patterns we were discovering with some of the actions. Since building coalition was the most common resistance action across the articles we read, we thought it would be valuable to explore what kinds of partnerships we were noticing and where opportunities might exist for future partnerships.

With the help of our graphic design partner, Kelly Griffith, we developed this chart to show all the different permutations of coalition we noticed between actors.

The key at the bottom of the chart shows icons for each of the 23 actors named in the articles we read, and we have those further divided up between individuals and groups. Our chart includes each icon along with a list of the other actors we saw each engaged with throughout our data. The only two actors from the key we didn’t include in this chart were state courts and federal courts, since their actions were limited to adjudicating cases related to book-banning and censorship in a judicial setting which didn’t involve engaging in coalition.

As you can see, we found some actors to be much more engaged in a variety of partnerships, while others didn’t appear to be working with many (or any) others. Students, librarians, authors, teachers, national and local nonprofit organizations, community members, local businesses, and publishers were all engaged with several other actors. On the other hand, we found eight actors to be engaged with only one other actor or none at all. These included scholars/professors, teachers’ unions, school boards, state legislators/legislatures, journalists, and media figures/celebrities.

To be fair, the data we collected was based on the articles that Jason encountered via his digital networks and corresponding algorithms (as we describe further in our article). So, it’s possible these actors in our chart are building partnerships and working in coalition, but that we didn’t see these actions because they are either not as frequently reported on or not preferenced by the algorithm. That being said, these less connected icons also raise our eyebrows as to future possibilities for coalition-building. Who could be more involved? What fresh partnerships could be helpful in fostering and preserving students’ rights to read?

Also, the existing combinations of coalitions we saw throughout our data provide lots of inspiring models for resisting censorship and book bans. We saw several instances of local small nonprofit advocacy groups in local contexts partnering with organizations like Lambda Legal so that they had a pathway to litigation and fighting local bans in state and federal court. We saw publishers like Penguin Random House partnering with local libraries through initiatives like the Banned Wagon, which distributed information and copies of banned books as it travelled from locations across the country.

Perhaps the most inspiring coalitions were formed by students. In Texas, for example, Cameron Samuels, a nonbinary student, rallied fellow students and procured the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to resist efforts by conservative parents and school board members in the Katy Independent School District to censor LGBTQ+ web resources and ban books they deemed obscene and vulgar from school curricula and libraries. After getting websites like the Trevor Project unblocked in the Katy ISD, Samuels further partnered with Texas students, like Da’Taeveyon Daniels, in other districts to form Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, an anti-censorship group dedicated to distributing banned books and advocating for more books on shelves.

For educators feeling overwhelmed by book-banning attempts and censorship restrictions, a good first step is finding like-minded others to partner with. By asking what you can bring and what resources you need, you can consider if there are other local actors, both individuals and groups, who you could work together with in coalitions of resistance. Who can you partner with? What can you do together?

For educators looking to partner with others and build coalitions, here are some resources which might help:

Penguin Random House Secondary Education

Message History

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