MOTHER TONGUE PROJECT LIBRARY

Critical to encouraging student parents to become readers is providing them with quality, engaging literature that speaks to their personal journeys and offers a window into others’ experiences with pregnancy and parenthood.

Experience is said to be the best teacher. Students who experience the richness of a book that speaks to their lives are more likely to seek out another book. Students who experience the power of an essay that addresses something they care about are more likely to read another essay. Mother Tongue Project works to link academic literacy with family literacy, and the creation of literacy rich practices and environments at home is critical to this aim.

College: MTP@Santa Fe Community Collge Library

The MTP@SFCC English Composition I course provides lists of books that are linked to unit themes in the course syllabus. These lists address a range of ages and literacy levels, from baby board books to middle-grade options to novels, poems, and essay collections. We share these lists with the Santa Fe Community College Library, which can work with MTP to help students locate specific books.

MTP has donated a selection of parenting and children’s books to the SFCC Library to help make more titles in these genres accessible to the college’s parenting students.

The Family Study Room at the SFCC Library—equiped with computers as well as toddler toys and books—is a wonderful resource for student parents with young children! Learn more about it here: https://libraryhelp.sfcc.edu/services/FamilyStudy

High School: MTP@Capital High School Library

Teen parents frequently read below grade level, which means they’re less likely to seek seek out literature with no apparent link to their lives; reluctant readers won’t read stuff they aren’t interested in. Currently, Santa Fe school and public libraries do not have large, diverse, or high-quality collections of works that address teen pregnancy and parenthood.

This is a hole the Mother Tongue Project aims to fill through the Mother Tongue Library, a collection of relevant reading options made available to all teen parents—developed through careful selection and in consultation with teachers, librarians, and teen parents—and shelved with easy student access.