Week 2 Blog Post Eleni Pallotta

I concern myself a lot with children and children’s programming in public libraries because I have a background in Early Childhood Education and would like to become a children’s librarian after graduation. Because I work for TPL, most of my research would stem from their system.  I often enjoy observing what kind of children’s programming my supervisors offer and ask myself, “What works well? What can be improved? How can programs be tweaked to benefit children with diverse backgrounds, abilities, knowledge, etc.”

I think that to answer these questions, it is important that the staff who run these children’s programs know general background knowledge on child development, specifically on the five developmental domains of children.  If I could start somewhere regarding a research question, it would be based on questions such as: What background information, training, and resources are staff directly working with children at TPL given? Is their background knowledge “sufficient” in order to know how their programming is benefiting children’s development? If not, can new training methods be created so that this fundamental background knowledge is taught?  Keeping this in mind, my research question could be:

Do the trainings and resources provided to children’s staff at TPL offer enough background information on the five domains of development for staff to make connections on how their programs are really benefiting child development?