In my work as media assistant, I assist my media specialist with the day-to-day operations of a middle school media center, like processing books and encouraging student literacy.

The flagship of our media center is our daily lunch program. In a typical week, Monday is a mystery activity, usually a craft of some kind. Tuesday, we host small student clubs, including Board Game Club, Puzzle Club, Book Wars, and Napping Club. Wednesday, we tend to be closed during lunches so that we can facilitate book checkout for English classes, which are concurrent with lunch depending on student grade level. Thursday is Game Day, where a large group game is announced at the beginning of the week and students sign up ahead of time to reserve a spot. Popular games are Guess That Song and seasonal Pictionary. Friday is for relaxing, and we cultivate a serene space so kids can come in and hang out away from the noise of the cafeteria.

This is a graphic I designed to display the schedule. It currently hangs as a poster in the media center, and I made the activities movable using velcro so that we can advertise changes to the schedule every week.

I am often asked to create graphics to highlight our permanent displays in the media center. This year, we’ve decided to rotate between highlighting specific under-acknowledged sections in order to encourage circulation, which we’ve found relatively successful. I design our displays to be colorful in order to emphasize the vibrance of our library space and catch student eyes.

The comedy reads and sports non-fiction graphics on the left are examples of graphics created for the specific purpose of highlighting our less popular sections. The everybody books sign is a permanent sign for the section that houses our picture books and early-development focused reads. We have a sizeable population of English Language Learners (ELLs) at our school and the everybody books are extremely helpful for practicing reading fundamentals.

I also create graphics to advertise special events in the media center. We have several annual contests, like our creative writing contest (flyer pictured left), our bookmark design contest, and our book cover re-design contest. The bookmark and book cover design challenges often draw students who are not especially passionate about reading and encourage them to get involved with media center activities. We also have monthly challenges which are often related to holidays or cultural celebrations, like our Halloween-ish Spooky Read-A-Thon and our annual celebration of Native American Heritage Month.

I am also very proud to say that we’ve been able to have two guest speakers in so far this year, one of whom is a friend of mine who also went to school in the area. Students were able to hear about her creative work as a short-form documentarian at the New Yorker, and she was named to the Forbes 30-Under-30 list for Media a week later. I made this graphic so that teachers could use it to introduce her in their classes prior to attending her talk.

I have also been asked by other teachers and staff members to make flyers and signage for them after they saw some of my media center work. The first flyer was made to advertise our parent open house; the second to encourage donations to the Outdoor Ed fund; and the third to use as a sign to mark the location of our new security office.

This year, I also became a cosponsor of our school’s GSA (now known as the Gender and Sexuality Alliance). It has been incredibly rewarding to work directly with queer kids to discuss the issues they face at school and help them advocate for themselves and others through school action. For our first activity, I came up with a craft where students were given the opportunity to make their own personal “pride flags” as an entry way into discussing identity and communicating complex ideas creatively. For LGBTQ+ History Month in October, students were really excited to do research about famous LGBTQ+ icons in history and share with each other, which any middle school teacher will tell you is a huge feat.

Working with the GSA has been some of the proudest work I’ve done in my career as an educator, however short it is. The graphics on the left are slides I created for our introductory interest meeting. The full slideshow explains what GSAs are, what they do, and who we, their sponsors, are.