Written by Dr Alison Hicks (Associate Professor, Department of Information Studies at University College London)
What links paper masks, a copy of Making a Baby, and day-glo stickers? No, these objects had nothing to do with your average craft activity but were, in fact, part of a book-banning workshop that was sponsored by the School Libraries Group and the School Library Association and held at UCL in Spring 2026. They are not really materials that would be found at an average academic workshop either, but this event had a remit of firstly, facilitating insight into school librarian experiences of book-banning and secondly, helping the outside (literacy, publishing, intellectual freedom) stakeholders that were invited to this event understand the impact of these events on librarianship. Theatre techniques, in which participants used the above-mentioned props to play out book-ban scenarios to the broader group, were seen as ideal way to bridge this gap.
There was one final twist, though, as these were also not your average theatre techniques. Instead, the workshop was informed by Theatre of the Oppressed, a participatory theatrical method that was created in the 1970s by Augusto Boal. In this approach, passive spectators are turned into active “spect-actors” who direct the action on stage by suggesting changes and substitutions, for example removing a character. In influencing how a scenario plays out, “spect-actors” gain insight into the power structures of specific situations, while also enacting solutions to their struggles. Given the vulnerability that school librarians often feel in book ban challenges (Hicks, 2025), this approach felt like a powerful way forward.
So, what did the scenarios that played out at this workshop reveal? Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, scenarios were peopled by a similar range of characters with almost all featuring the school librarian, who was often presented as a caring advocate, and an authoritative head-teacher, who was presented as time-poor yet dismissive of concerns. Children and young people often featured, though rarely at the start of the scenario, but were often invited in at the request of the librarian. Almost every scenario was further catalysed by a complaint, and involved participants talking at each other, often using quite aggressive language. Tactics used to uphold complaints included cherry-picking pages and excluding librarians from the conversation, while the changes that helped to mediate challenges included adding in young people, collaboration between the school librarian and other teachers, and shared reading events.
By this stage, you might be thinking well yes, this all sounds realistic but is it new? Yet, in discussing the scenarios afterwards, it was surprising to see how power suddenly became visible when we subjected these scenarios to scrutiny. In looking at the stressed head-teacher, for example, we started to see how business models affected their actions, including budget and pupil number targets. While this doesn’t excuse poor decision-making (or even the perpetration of challenges, as in the recent Salford case), it does help to shed light on why book challenges may be playing out in a certain way. Similarly, the exclusion of children and young people from decisions about their reading materials can be seen as a continuation of increasingly authoritarian actions designed to silence them, for example through the growing use of isolation as a school punishment. It also became clear how much the attention economy, in which digital platforms and advertisers compete to capture and monetise user engagement reward aggressive book-ban tactics.
A final stage of the workshop was to draw upon these insights to establish some potential next steps for the sector. Counting and tracking data was by far the most frequently mentioned step, as we still don’t yet have a mechanism that would help us to assess how challenges are evolving as well as the extent of the problem. Relatedly, there is still more work to be done to support librarians who face these incidents, including through alerting authors and publishers of affected books, too. The power of social media means there is a need to consider how we can have more control over book ban media narratives, while book challenge tactics point (again) to the vital importance of collection policies that address who can challenge materials, as well as the process and timeframe for doing so. Finally, there is a need to continue collaborating- with teachers via CPD events so they are informed about events, as well as with intellectual freedom groups, publishers, author groups to counteract and defend the rights to read. While these are just ideas at the moment, there is movement afoot and I hope to be able to report back on progress towards these goals soon.
Thank you to all participants for their valuable insights, UCL for sponsoring this workshop, and for the support of project partners, the School Libraries Group and the School Library Association.
A more complete workshop report will be included in the next issue of School Libraries in View (SLiV).