Scott Summers, assistant director of the Media and Education Technology Resource Center (METRC) at North Carolina State University, was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for his work developing a program to help new teachers understand the growing problem of book censorship in school libraries, and how to work with librarians against it. We recently spoke with Summers about why he developed the program and what it teaches.

LJ: What was the impetus behind starting Get Students Protecting Intellectual Freedom for Youth (Get S.P.I.F.F.Y.) ?

Scott Summers: Before I got this role, I was a school librarian, watching that well-orchestrated, continuous attack on literature. I thought someone should say something to argue against these challenges in censorship. We were getting a lot of questions from our students, like, “Are we getting rid of books?” I said, “We’ve had no challenges at our school, but in other schools in our county, it’s happening.” It was a scary time.

When I got my current job, the students who are becoming teachers asked, “What if someone challenges a book in my classroom? How do I support my librarian if something happens at my school? How do I support the community? What even is the process?” There were so many questions and unknowns about, first of all, who’s doing the challenging, and then when it happens, how do we respond? We’ve seen many times how a book is challenged and the principal says, “We’ll take it off the shelf.” As librarians, we know the best practice is to keep the book on the shelf until the challenge is complete. The material should stay available. We want to make sure that the processes are followed and we’re doing what we should to ensure that students still have access to that material.

How did you come up with the idea of approaching it from the teacher-training level at the university?

It lingered in the back of my mind—what can I do to let my students at the college know what the process will look like, or what is case law that supports material in a classroom, just so they’re well-informed and can be more proactive, have more information and knowledge, versus a knee-jerk reaction. I spent a summer coming up with things like, What do I know? What do I want my students to know? How do I make it accessible?

It's a crash course, a two-hour asynchronous course. I didn’t want to inundate them with so much information that it’s overwhelming. In the evaluation form at the end of the course, everyone says, “It’s just the right amount, I know something I didn’t know before, I feel more prepared than I did before, and I feel more informed about what I can do and what precedent I can rely on if something happens to me or my librarian.” That’s been really encouraging.

What are some of the components of the course?

There are several modules, including What Is Intellectual Freedom Like? We talk about Tinker vs. Des Moines and how students have a right to protest—they don’t shed their constitutional rights at the schoolroom gate. We talk about Minarcini vs. Strongsville and how students have the right to receive information. We talk about Island Trees vs. Pico [that found that under the First Amendment, junior and senior high schools had limited abilities to remove materials from school libraries].

They watch short videos, and we check their understanding. Then they have an opportunity to say, “Based on all these court precedents, what is your understanding of intellectual freedom issues? How might a school respond if a challenge happens? What precedent can they rely on?” That’s the first module.

Then they look at PEN America statistics to see how bad it is and if it’s really happening everywhere. They’re shocked when they see those statistics. We look at collection development policies so our future teachers can say, “I’m not going to have a collection development policy for my classroom library, but I can be mindful about what I pick. I could talk to a librarian about what things I might want to select.” We talk about books reviews, award winners, representation in the library and age relevancy—we’ve migrated away from age-appropriate, because maturity isn’t just based on age.

Then we get into the resources that are available such as Unite Against Book Bans, the Freedom to Read Foundation, the Texas FReadom Fighters, and other banned books week resources. In the end, students do an advocacy project where they take what they’ve learned and say, “How can I get the word out?” It’s open-ended. Some people have done short PSAs, like a commercial. Others have said how they plan to get other teachers involved when they start their career. [Some] talk about how they’re telling others to take the course.

How has Get S.P.I.F.F.Y. been received?

We’re up to almost 40 completers. We’re continually trying to get the word out because this is what’s called a professional growth unit (PGU). It’s optional for our students, but they have to get four PGU credits before they graduate. This asynchronous course counts as one PGU. Because it’s asynchronous, there’s no time limit, so students can do one module at a time or half an hour at a time. The feedback we’ve gotten has all been positive. Everyone says they’ve learned something.

What are your plans for the course going forward?

We were fortune enough to hire an intern last fall for the fall and spring semesters. One thing I tasked them with was to take the course and let me know what they thought, if they had suggestions for improvement. They took the course and offered to add the new year of data, which was a great idea. They’ve really helped me evaluate. They had an outside view that I needed to help me make the course more dynamic and updatable, and they found more resources to add.

What are you seeing in the current book challenge environment?

There are the 97 books that parents challenged in South Carolina; the group that was fighting back in Bucks County, PA; things in Texas and Utah, Florida. No matter where you go, those cases are still being litigated. It’s somewhat discouraging to look at all this advocacy we’re doing, all the work we’re putting into pushing against these things—it’s still an incessant attack on literature. It’s so disheartening. But that doesn’t mean we should stop or that we give up, or that it’s not something our teachers and librarians will need to know about. I think the more we can build up that advocacy, the better, the more people who speak with one voice, saying, “We want people to have access to books”—if we lose access to books, that’s just the beginning of a path that is very scary.