Welcome to My Professional Blog!

 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 herself.

I'm passionate about helping young people find themselves in books and texts, and making sure my colleagues at all levels have the tools and texts to succeed and improve student learning. I love the moment when I can reach out to a student and give them a reading experience that boosts their relationship to reading and learning, or even just inspires a deeper love of the activity. I'm equally involved with extracurriculars - I sponsor our gaming club, our writing club, and our Gender and Sexuality Alliance as advisor and regularly host library programming.

My advisory crew kicking their feet up and investigating the bottom row of the stacks.


The pictures I've shared might make my library seem to be a place without furniture (I swear there are lovely couches and seating!), but I like these pictures of my students sprawling, interacting, and using my tools and materials and not keeping themselves at arm's length from our resources. We are not a quiet library, but a real learning commons, and I take pride in walking the fine line between being a place of safety and good use and being a place of welcome and freedom to explore. 

I envision myself as a role model for lifelong learning, and many of my professional goals involve encouraging the modeling of reading for pleasure, providing good guidelines for ethical use of technology including AI, and outreach to all content areas I work with. 

Speaking of AI, I've been digging into this Planning Guide for AI as I work as a resource for developing strategies for best practice use of these tools in my district. It's among the resources for thinking through the use of these new technologies that I consult and use to help colleagues work through the ramifications and pitfalls of these tools as part of the new normal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where I Am and Where I Want to Go

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...
Read more

Blog Post #3: Text Sets: Memoir and Autobiography Project

Image
 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...
Read more