Lauren W. Callihan
about
I am the Assistant Librarian and a 9th grade English teacher at Baylor School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. As the assistant librarian, I work with students in grades 6-12. My passion is finding the perfect book for a student that will ignite their brains to help them make connections across their school life and their personal lives. I'm a passionate supporter of diverse books and one of my goals is to develop my library collection so that each child at my school will be able to find a book that speaks to their life and experiences. I am currently working on my MS in Information and Library Science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and I am focusing my studies on Young Adults and school libraries.
Prior to Baylor, I served as the programming specialist and a library assistant in the Charleston County Public Library's Young Adult department. Along with the rest of the Young Adult services staff, I worked with a teen advisory board to dream up and create innovative library programming.
I earned my BA in English Literature from Berry College in 2011 and completed my MA in Literature at Auburn University in the spring of 2014 with a focus in American literature. At Auburn, I served as a teaching assistant for undergraduate literature courses, instructed freshman composition courses, mentored faculty, undergraduate and graduate students as an ePortfolio ambassador, and served as a writing coach at the Community Writing Center. My literary research interests include 20th and 21st century American prose, poetry, and short stories, as well as a particular interest in Southern literature.
librarian
As the assistant librarian at Baylor School, I am responsible for readers' advisory, collection development, technology support, and fostering an overall welcoming environment for each student as they walk through our doors. With several hundred students visiting the library each days, our space is busy and vibrant, and I love providing readers' advisory to students and faculty. I enjoy trying to find just the right book for each person's reading preferences and seeing a student's face light up when they return a book they connected with. My main goal each day is to foster a love of reading in our school and to be a positive example for each student.
As both a librarian and a teacher, utilizing my creativity, flexibility, communication abilities, and time management skills are a must for balancing my day to day duties in the library and in the classroom. I work to build positive relationships with my students and fellow teachers, and I have a passion for helping our teens gain knowledge and confidence through our library collection. Libraries are often safe havens for teens and I am dedicated to making sure each teen feels supported, accepted, and valued in our space.
teacher
As an instructor, I encourage my students to use their writing for inquiry, critical thinking, and communicating their ideas with the world. My teaching method centers on structuring the classroom as a creative space where the students will learn to evaluate their own work and other’s work through collaborative environments. Through the use of technology and writing groups, students can build off each other’s ideas, re-invent concepts, and aid each other in understanding the writing and communication processes. Reading and writing are both ongoing processes and I encourage my students to draft and read texts in a circular manner, turning back to specific passages and returning to their writing to expand and better articulate their developing ideas.
Above all else, I strive to instill my students with the idea that effective communication skills begin with writing and I believe these skills are essential tools to have in their arsenal throughout their academic, professional, and personal lives. I teach to help my students understand reading and writing as a method of learning about themselves as humans, individuals, and scholars that can use writing to express their thoughts and influence others and then carry a positive writing experience with them to the next stages of their lives.
As an MA in English, it comes to no surprise that reading has always been my first love. Through my research in my graduate coursework focused on American literature, I understand one of the major issues at work in contemporary American literature to be the process of overcoming trauma and finding or creating identity. I explored this issue in two major research projects: the first, "Exploring Anne Carson's Nox: Elegies and Histories," centers on loss and finding identity in the face of great tragedy. The second, "Trauma and Superstition in Huckleberry Finn," utilizes Cathy Caruth's work in trauma studies to explore the superstitious behavior in the text as both an emotional response to abuse and trauma.
Though literature is my primary field of study, the open source movement and open source educational materials has ignited my passion as a researcher. I am a firm believer in the classroom as a common space and a common ground for all community members and I believe that individuals across the globe and even in my classrooms deserve access to the very best educational tools available.
