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In this teacher chat, Everyday Advocacy’s Cathy Fleischer sat down with PEN America’s Sabrina Baêta, the Program Manager of Freedom to Read and the author of PEN’s “Spineless Shelves, Two Years of Book Banning.” In her role as program manager, Sabrina engages in research and awareness building around censorship attacks on public K12 education, especially as it relates to literature accessibility in libraries and in classrooms. Listen as she shares with Cathy what her research found, what surprises she discovered, and what organizations like PEN can offer classroom teachers.
“The main thing I hear from librarians and educators is ‘It’s so isolating,’ ‘I feel so alone,’ ‘I feel like I’m shouting into the void.’ One of the things we like to do is to reassure them they are not alone. If there’s one silver lining to this being such a huge crisis it’s that you are not alone. What you’re seeing and what you’re experiencing, other people have seen, experienced and have learned how to deal with it – learned what to do, what steps to take to be able to help fight that censorship that is at their doorstep.”
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