Challenging the stereotypes and why we need new perspectives
S
CHOOL Librarian Phyllis Ramage is just about to start her second year as a judge on the Yoto Carnegies awards. Like all judges, she joined for a two-year period so she will be standing aside after the 2024 winners ceremony next summer.
Before moving into school librarianship, Phyllis worked in public libraries, starting out “in 1994 in a junior position with the London Borough of Barnet as a library assistant”. Phyllis says her early experience of visits to the library as a child helped shape her love for the profession, saying: “I’ve had a passion for libraries since I was seven.”
Having set out as a library assistant, Phyllis soon realised that she wanted to spend her professional life in libraries, saying: “I enjoyed the work so much that I decided to qualify and in those days you had to have an accredited degree. I went to the University of North London and got my BSc in Information Studies, accredited by the Library Association, as it was then [now CILIP]. I started working professionally in the London Borough of Harrow in 2000. “I became a librarian with the express intent of doing children’s work – that was definitely the way I
wanted to go.
“That was partly influenced by my upbringing and my early experience of libraries, but also I was the mother of a young child (who fortunately inherited my passion for books). She now has children of her own and is encouraging them to love books.” Working in libraries has been a source of joy and pride for Phyllis – she remarks that during her time at Harrow Libraries “we had the highest children’s issues of the entire country. We had very busy libraries – activities as well as book borrowing”. However, she also realised that many of the books aimed at children were problematic in their depictions of people of colour.
She decided to undertake an MA in Children’s Literature and the focus of her dissertation was an analysis of representation of people of colour in non-fiction books depicting colonial and post- colonial countries. “My dissertation was on the representation of ethnic minorities in non-fiction from the 1950s to early 2000s. I was looking from a post-colonial perspective and trying to see if there was any improvement in representation of minorities – specifically in a social and economic context. The question was whether people are more sympathetically represented in those areas. I’m talking about whether there were a professional class of
Phyllis Ramage.
people, whether people are living in cities – that modernity of life that was missing. Even in books from the 2000s that modernity simply wasn’t acknowledged.”
It was clear to Phyllis that not a lot had changed in the post-colonial era – unhelpful tropes were abundant in books published long after the end of Britain’s colonial past. Phyllis says that there was a shift in the language used, but not the tone. Authors continued to present a paternalistic view of the relationship between the UK and its former colonies. There was little in the way of movement or change, “so these non-fiction books would focus almost exclusively
Autumn-Winter 2023
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