Connecting with Spanish-Speaking Communities

Instructor: Katie Scherrer
Dates: July 1-28, 2013
Credits: 1.5 CEUs
Price: $175

    

Description: A 4-week online course through which participants create an Outreach Plan designed to increase library use by and service to Spanish-speaking immigrant communities. This course is designed to be most useful to organizations and staff serving communities of first-generation, Spanish-speaking immigrants and their families, particularly when organizations lack bilingual/bicultural staff. Participants learn strategies, discover resources and develop confidence they can use to reach out to this underserved community and connect them with library services.

Learning Objectives:

• Students will identify and select appropriately useful online and print resources available to libraries serving Latinos and Spanish-speakers.
• Students will generate strategies for building relationships between Latino community and the library, based on case studies and real-life examples of successful outreach.
• Students will identify specific barriers to library access experienced by Latino and Spanish-speaking communities and articulate specific outreach steps to remove access barriers.
• Students will apply the outreach process to their own specific organizations by identifying potential partner agencies and community leaders serving Spanish-speakers in their communities.
• Students will generate ideas for effectively marketing relevant library services to Latino and Spanish-speaking communities.
• Students incorporate this learning into the creation of an Outreach Plan for their organization.

Katie Scherrer is a library consultant and training specialist whose work focuses on improving library services to Latino and Spanish-speaking children and families. She previously worked as the first Spanish Program Specialist for the Columbus Metropolitan Library and as a Children’s Librarian at the uniquely bilingual Village Branch of the Lexington Public Library. Katie has presented many workshops on bilingual storytime and library services to Latino families for librarians across the country, including at the 2010 Virginia Hamilton Conference on Multicultural Literature for Youth. Katie's Website, Interview with Katie

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