Mars Hauser's Professional Blog

 One of the things I love about working in a high school library is that I am a partner with so many departments, and when my fellow staff invite me in to assist, I get to help them build educational opportunities from the ground up and explore student learning in many different directions. And sometimes, that's as fun and educational for me as I hope it is for our students. This text set is a recent example. As my ELA department is hard at work retooling lessons for their curriculum year, my Language 10 teachers came to me about a particular unit on personal narrative and nonfiction writing that's a staple in their teaching, but needs a little TLC to improve how students interact with the material and what they learn that can improve their grounding in it. Language 10's unit involves a deep dive into autobiographical writing with a particular emphasis on memoir, and every student will read a book-length memoir in the course of this project. What my teachers came to me to d...

Whenever curriculum shifts, the high school library moves with it. My school’s ELA department has been hard at work designing and redesigning new class offerings and updating their lesson plans together, and one element that has emerged that I’ve been working on contributing to in my role is media literacy.   Skills in information and media literacy are obviously central to the library mission, and ELA’s new course offerings include a new version of our Media Studies offerings and more units that emphasize these skills in both standard curriculum and in electives. Naturally, my coworkers are looking for a sounding-board to work with them in finding the most useful texts and choices for unit activities.   If you had asked me about my comfort level and understanding of media literacy some years earlier, I might have expressed greater surety about my knowledge and the current state of this topic. AI, fake news, and other immediate trends have really awakened me to the r...

 Hello everyone!  I am so pleased to get to work with you all this term and to get to know my fellow classmates.  My students in the HHS Library Makerspace taking advantage of our equipment.   My name is Mars (Martha) Hauser ( she/her) . I have an unconventional professional life story. After more than a decade as a library education assistant, my school encouraged me to pursue 1902 licensure to act as Holmen High School's Library Media Specialist. I've worn many hats before working through this education at Milwaukee. I've been a social media manager for a set of very famous television shows, earned my MFA through the Hamline program for Writing for Children and Young Adults, freelance edited for an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, helped research book bans and challenges in school districts nationwide as an assistant to EveryLibrary and PEN America, and earned the nickname "The Human Google" at my library home in Holmen, WI.  The Human Google ...