Elaine Levia

Librarian.  Educator. Brooklyn, NY | [email protected]

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Welcome! I’m Elaine Levia (she/her/hers).

I endeavor to bring joy, curiosity, and cohesion to the daily process of information seeking.

My dual roles as an educator and librarian shape how I show up for people: with empathy, and with deep regard for evidence-based practices and resources.

My lifelong love of dance and abiding fondness for poetry and creative writing also play integral parts in my work: I aim to stay embodied in present experiences with students, classes, and colleagues, and I derive joy and pride from collaborative creative processes.

Want to collaborate on a library, education, poetry, or social justice project? Drop me a line.

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Students found out that mistakes sometimes make for the best learning opportunities, trial and error is not wrong, and sharing is a good thing!

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Librarians' Changing Roles Can Inspire School Communities

A 21st-century librarian can inspire a school by modeling responsive teaching, advocating for student involvement, facilitating new approaches to writing, and encouraging user-centered spaces.

While I firmly believe that 21st-century librarians are simply librarians, I particularly like these four approaches and find that they reflect my beliefs and those of my colleagues. 

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Literature is a shared experience between the writer and her audience.

“Our ability to read for pleasure is taxed by the amount of reading we do. There is such a glut of blogs, emails, texts and tweets that the distinction between literary works and nonliterary works has become badly blurred and people tend to read everything in the same way, pragmatically.”

Fiction should be read with imagination, for it is a work of imagination. If that’s how we should read, how should we teach, enforce, or encourage reading?

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"Schools are increasingly drawn to conversations about privilege and race because they understand that "raising students to live in a bubble... is not to your benefit in a global society."

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Never neutral: Libraries, technology, and inclusion

"So I start with the premise that it isn’t just that libraries aren’t perfectly equitable or neutral because we live in a society that still suffers from racism, sexism. ableism, transphobia and other forms of bias and inequity; but libraries also fail to achieve any mythical state of neutrality because we contribute to bias and inequality in scholarship, and publishing, and information access." I support Bourg's statement both as a school librarian and critical information practitioner. Bias is woven into our work, yet it's cloaked in this altruistic, untouchable neutrality.

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Lifelong Information Literacy Conference

The inimitable Sarah Clark (from Windward School) and I are presenting at LILi 2014 in San Juan Capistrano today. We're speaking about taking high school seniors on a research trip to UCLA.

See our presentation here.