That’s the beginning of the first episode of End Book Deserts, an Apple podcast created this past summer by Molly Ness, Ph.D., an associate professor in curriculum and teaching at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education. 

She started the project, she said, to shed light on the fact that in low-income areas, books are often scarce. 

“We have all this academic work [on book deserts], but most people don’t read academic journals. So I started the podcast as a way to raise awareness around this reality,” Ness said. “We can create a nationwide conversation about this.”

Since July, the podcast has grown to 26 episodes and featured several famous guests, including Newbery Medal awardee Jason Reynolds and Major League baseball player Sean Doolittle. The listenership on End Book Deserts, which is found on Apple Podcasts, has been growing by up to 20% month-on-month, Ness said. In a recent interview with Fordham News, she spoke about book vending machines and school bus libraries, how she was able to collect 10,000 books for donation, and an inaugural conference she plans on hosting in Chicago later this year. 

What inspired you to create End Book Deserts? 

I’ve always been interested in book access. But the statistic that 32 million American children today don’t have access to books in their homes, schools, and communities really made me angry. That anger turned into action with the podcast and the work around it.

And you mentioned there was another statistic that spurred you into action. 

Last summer, I read a number of research articles by Susan Newman, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education and current professor at New York University. Dr. Newman found that in Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood, which has a poverty level of 61%, 830 children would share a single book, whereas children in Capitol Hill had 16 times as many books. The huge disparity between book access in a high-income area and a low-income area really shocked me. Our goal in literacy education is to develop kids as lifelong readers, and that’s almost impossible if one of their most important tools isn’t available to them.

Who are some of the featured guests on your podcast? 

I have interviewed New York Times best-selling author Jason Reynolds, who is now the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Sean Doolittle, the closing pitcher for the Washington Nationals, who won the World Series last year. He is now the national ambassador for independent bookstores and really brought reading to the forefront of a lot of people’s visibility. 

What are some of the creative ways your guests have brought books into low-income communities?

Every summer, JetBlue Airlines chooses a low-income portion of a city and creates these book vending machines. They buy tons of brand new books—the top reads, the most popular ones for kids—and put them in a particularly high-traffic area. Kids can go up and take as many books as they want. I’ve also featured educators who have transformed dilapidated school buses into libraries and then spent their summer weekends driving into low-income areas and giving books to kids in their homes and communities.

More people are doing this work than we originally thought, which is a good thing. But we have to get their stories out there so that other communities can take their approaches, learn them, modify, and replicate programs all across the country.

Tell me about the power of a book. How can it change a person? 

We know how they build our vocabulary and our comprehension. But more importantly, books build us as human beings. As we visit characters, stories, times, and places that are different than our own, we build the social skills of empathy and understanding and compassion—which, goodness knows, our world needs now more than ever. Books inform us and they transport us. Books shape our paths. So, the power of a book—and the power of the right book at the right time in the hands of the right reader—is transformative.

Growing up in Baltimore, you were an avid reader. So were your parents. 

They had book clubs—they’re still in the same book group that they’ve been in for 40 years. This is long before Oprah made book groups cool. I remember the nights that they would have a book club, complaining that the adults were making a whole lot of noise past my bedtime, but secretly eavesdropping and getting the extra desserts they would sneak up to me. I also remember my mom dropping me off at the public library in the family Volvo station wagon and the name of the librarian from my elementary school. Libraries and books were second nature to us. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for too many kids today. 

What is the one book that really transformed you as a person?

A book I read in college: Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol. It’s an expose about the condition of American public schools. Before I read that book, I was going to go to law school. After I read that book, it started me on the path of education. I, out of college, joined Teach for America because that book made me so angry about the condition of public schools that I wanted to do something about it. Had I not read that book, I wouldn’t be at Fordham, almost 15 years as a professor in literacy.

This August, you’re hosting “Literacy Warriors United,” the first-ever conference on book access as a topic of social justice, at a book bank in Chicago for two days. 

We are bringing together people from all over the country who are doing this work, including Dr. Newman. The hope is to foster collaboration, conversation, and to push forward a national conversation about book access. So far, we’re expecting around 300 people. 

Since 2019, you’ve distributed 10,000 used books to Title 1 schools and community projects in Westchester and the Bronx. How did that happen? 

Last August, I posted on my local Facebook group that I was collecting gently used children’s books through a recycling bin on my front porch. We call it the Porch Project. My fourth-grade daughter and I go through every single book and check it for readability. We want books that are attractive, engaging, relevant, and high quality. We have about 20 different Tupperware bins that we use to sort the books. We’ve donated these books to about five different community centers, schools in the Westchester area that are low-income.

How can people who read this article help increase book access? 

Connect with the book banks that are out there. Make a $20 anonymous gift on DonorsChoose to, for example, a fourth-grade teacher in Kansas who can’t afford a classroom library. If you don’t have the money, you can donate time to sort books and bring books into schools.

Sometimes when we look at the world and see there are so many issues—the environment, society issues, poverty—it can become very overwhelming. You think, how can one person do anything? But the issue of book access is addressable.

Visit https://www.endbookdeserts.com/ to find out how you can get involved. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“It’s ok to say to our kids, you can read a book that’s a little harder than what you’re normally comfortable with,” she says. “They’re getting a lot of books at school that they’re supposed to read, and so having home be a place where they can read a graphic novel, or informational text, is fine.”

In the podcast below, the associate professor of curriculum and teaching at the Graduate School of Education, walks us through “Think Alouds,” the topic of her new book, Think Big With Think Alouds: Grades K-5 (Sage, 2017).

Full transcript below

Patrick Verel: This is Patrick Verel. And today I’m speaking with Molly Ness, an associate professor of childhood education in the graduate school of education at Fordham. Now your new book Think Big With Think Alouds came out this year. And as I understand it, the big take-away from research you conducted in New York City schools is that teachers and parents can really benefit from what’s called a “Think Aloud”. Can you tell me a little bit about what this is?

Molly Ness: So, a Think Aloud is when a proficient reader, a teacher or a parent gives a verbal dialogue of the thought process that they are using to counter a text. So they stop periodically and reflect on their understanding, they think through places that they may be struggling to understand and they use eye language so that they really show kids what the thought processes are that are going on in their head. So they might stop and say, “I’m really confused here. Let me re-read to see if I can find my answer.”

Typically what happens in Read Alouds book, at home and at school is, we ask kids literal comprehension questions that are things like, “Where does the story take place?” and “What do you think might happen next?”. And really what that is, is that is a check for comprehension. So it’s a way for us to gauge whether or not a kid is understanding the text. But children that way don’t get a reflection of what they should be doing to understand the text.

So when we as proficient readers take the responsibility for showing kids how we are thinking, they’re more likely to internalize those thought processes and apply them to their independent reading.

So there’s a fair amount of research that shows that Think Aloud’s are highly effective, but yet they’re not really commonplace in classrooms today. And the reason that teachers are not doing them as much as they can is, it’s often hard for us as proficient readers to look at a second grade book or a fourth grade book and pinpoint where a child might fail to understand. The purpose of my book is really to make the Think Aloud process visible, easy and enjoyable for teachers and children.

Patrick Verel: And you learned this by conducting the research in New York City schools?

Molly Ness: I worked with a group of pre-service and in-service teachers who were all Fordham graduate students, all in the school of education. And we, over a year long period, we did a whole lot of work around Think Alouds. And what we saw was that most of the participants were really able to say, “Wow. An effective Think Aloud doesn’t emerge off the cuff. It’s not an extemporaneous thing that I can just open up a book, sit in front of my class of kids and viola, here’s an efficient, effective Read Aloud. Really it takes advance preparation.”

Patrick Verel: Now when it comes to reading comprehension, you’re a big fan of encouraging children to ask questions and in using expository text to answer the questions. And how does this help exactly, when it comes to reading?

Molly Ness: Sure. My interest in asking questions as a comprehension skill really stem from my home life. I am the mother of a second grader. And when she was in pre-school at age three and four, I would wake up every morning and she would just pepper me with questions. And that’s pretty common, if you look at the research. Kids ages four to ten ask about 288 questions a day. And so, what that shows is that kids are naturally inquisitive. They’re naturally curious about the world around us. And what happens is, they get to school and the questions that they are asking are shut down. Instead teachers are the ones generating questions. We find that when kids are the ones who hold responsible for generating questions, they’re more motivated to answer their questions, to use learning as a tool to answer their questions, their reading is much more purposeful.

For example, when my daughter was in kindergarten, we had a slew of snow storms in the town where I live. And she was seeing all of these snow plows go by and wanted to understand how snow plows work. And I of course know nothing about this. So we used that natural stopping point where she was generating her own questions as a opportunity to go to the library and check out snow plow books and use informational text to answer the questions that she was naturally asking.

Patrick Verel: Now, for you, what is the most exciting development in education these days?

Molly Ness: So what I’m really excited about is a trend called visible learning. And it comes originally out of Australia. A professor and researcher in Australia named John Hattie. And he has written a series of books that looks at all the education strategies. Not just in literacy where I’m interested in, but classroom strategies across the age level and across content area. And what he’s done is he’s compiled effect sizes, which measure the effectiveness of a particular strategy. We’re always talking in education about using data to make decisions. And this was an instance where he really was able to say, “A strategy like cooperative learning or having kids work in groups, here’s the effect size for that strategy”, so that we really have some hard data that can actually really say, “These are the strategies that are worth our instructional time.”

I’m working on a book now where we’re taking that approach of visible learning and translating it into literacy education for kids K through 5.

Patrick Verel: What advice would you give to parents who want to start the new year off right with their children?

Molly Ness: So the number one thing I think parents can be doing is encouraging reading at home. I think during the summer, we are much more on top of our kids reading at home, because we know there’s a summer slide for kids who are not reading at home and we tend to think that really young kids are the ones who should be read to. Well, there are benefits to reading to kids in seventh grade and eleventh grade.

The other thing that I would encourage is to allow kids some choice of what they read at home. Typically what will happen is a kid will come home with a book that their teacher has assigned, it’s a guided reading level C book. And really what I think should happen at home is that kids should be able to choose the books that they read. It’s okay for kids to read a book at home that is a bit above their instructional level. If they’re motivated to read it, their motivation to read that for whatever reason will close the gap of what they might not understand.

Patrick Verel: So if I were to ask you, what should they read? The answer is?

Molly Ness: Anything. It’s hard for us as parents to look at books that we think as sort of low quality books. This past summer, a movie came out out of the Captain Underpants books. And if you look at the Captain Underpants books, they’re not high quality books. They’re not necessarily rich with story and character and vocabulary. But kids are absolutely drawn to them. And so there was a pretty big conversation in the field of education about whether kids should be reading these kind of books. And my answer is always, “If kids want to read them, let them read them.”

The other advice I would give to parents is, have kids see you reading an actual book. So putting away the Kindle. Putting away the iPad. Because kids don’t necessarily know … my husband for example, he is always reading on his phone. So he’s reading, but he reads through a Kindle app on his phone. If my daughter looks at him and says, “Why are you on your phone so much, that’s device time.” And she doesn’t necessarily equate that he’s reading text. So having kids see you reading, whatever you’re reading. A magazine, it can be the New York Times, it can be whatever beach read, but really having them see you read an authentic book that isn’t a digital text, is valuable and priceless.

Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, 

In his new book, Strate, professor of communication and media studies, examines how smartphones, apps, and social media shape us as human beings. He expands on an intellectual tradition, one spearheaded by Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan (who taught at Fordham), that’s about much more than understanding any one particular medium.

“It starts with the understanding that those things we pay attention to, like screens, are not just gadgets,” he said. “We think we can turn them on or off, but when you look at them as part of our environment, we can’t escape them.”

Even people who don’t use social media will be inadvertently affected by it, said Strate, because its use is ubiquitous—much the same as persons who don’t fly and yet must content with planes continuously flying overhead. “We are living in an environment that is full of these mediations that influence us.”

“We all speak with a language we didn’t create. That influences how we express ourselves and in how we think,” he said.e

Forensic Social Work: Psychosocial Legal Issues Across Diverse Populations and Settings, 2 ed., co-edited by Tina Maschi, Ph.D., and George Stuart Leibowitz, Ph.D. (Springer Publishing, 2018)

“We’ve come a long way from forensic texts just being about expert testimony in court, but to include the systems of care,” said Tina Maschi, Ph.D. associate professor in the Graduate School of Social Service, the book’s co-editor. “Whatever angle or systems you are looking at, the problems still emerge.”

A collection of articles by leading academics and professionals, Forensic Social Work looks at the latest research and practices in the field. Readers learn to integrate socio-legal knowledge when working with diverse populations, and to become familiar with common forensic issues in the major settings of health care, social and protective services, the child welfare system, the criminal justice system, school systems, immigration services, and addiction treatment facilities, among others.

Among the topics discussed are the use of restorative justice around the globe; the application of “cultural humility,” in which social work practitioners are mindful to put aside biases when working with clients with cultural differences; and the importance of teaching ethics in forensic social work environments.

(Listen to Tina Maschi speak about the book.)

Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts, co-edited by Fran C. Blumberg, Ph.D., and Patricia J. Brooks, Ph.D. (Elsevier Science & Technology Books, 2017)

Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts provides a survey of the impact of digital media on key aspects of children’s and adolescents’ cognitive development pertaining to attention, memory, language, and executive functioning.

The co-editors sought to present content pertinent to how children and adolescents evaluate the content presented to them via different types of screen media; what many scholars see as an aspect of media literacy, according to Blumberg. Both women had a goal to highlight how cognitive development was impacted by exposure and use of digital media.

“This focus has surprisingly remained largely neglected amid societal concerns about pathological media use and vulnerability to media effects such as demonstrations of physical aggression, cyberbullying, and Internet addiction,” said Blumberg, associate professor in the Division of Psychological and Educational Services at the Graduate School of Education.

The intended audience includes educators, researchers, policymakers, and media designers dedicated to examining and promoting children’s and adolescents’ cognitive growth in the digital era.

Essays in International Money and Finance: Interest Rates, Exchange Rates, Prices and the Supply of Money Within and Across Countries, by James Lothian, Ph.D. (World Scientific Publishing, 2017)

A collection of papers by Lothian, Distinguished Professor of Finance and holder of the Toppeta Family Chair in Global Financial Markets, Essays in International Money and Finance focuses on the empirical performance of international monetary and financial theory. Within the broad scope of topics, one paper focuses on a study of exchange-rate behavior over the 200-year period from 1791 to 1990.

The featured papers were written over a 40-year period and have received the attention of other scholars, said Lothian, which is why he decided to assemble them together.

“The papers share a broadness in scope of another sort, with concerns for both history and in some instances, the history of economic thought and with emphases on both open-economy and closed-economy models of economic behavior,” he said.

Ethics in Anthropology of Business, co-edited by Timothy de Waal Malefyt, Ph.D., and Robert J. Morais, Ph.D. (Routledge, 2017)

Malefyt, a clinical associate professor in the Gabelli School of Business, said that the anthropology of business is a relatively new field that takes a “cultural perspective of how people in groups may fit particular patterns.”

The timely collection of essays examines ethical challenges for anthropologists working in industries such as advertising, market research, and design. In a contributed chapter on advertising, Malefyt writes that ethics in that field can often prove complicated. He cites the popular Virginia Slims ads, which, in spite of being advertisements for cigarettes, had a positive effect on the feminist movement with their “You’ve come a long way” tag line.

“Anthropologists are good at studying cultural issues and how they impact business,” Malefyt said. “Adding ethics can be very valuable.”

Think Big with Think Alouds, by Molly Ness, Ph.D., (Corwin, 2017)

In her new book, Molly Ness, Ph.D., associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, helps elementary school teachers focus on five strategies to develop strategic reading habits and improve K-5 students’ comprehension. These include: (1) Asking questions; (2) making inferences; (3) synthesizing information; (4) understanding the author’s purpose; and (5) monitoring and clarifying. The book builds on Ness’s long-term research on reading comprehension instruction.

Specifically, she presents a three-step planning process to build teachers’ ability to “think-aloud”. In a think aloud, a proficient reader models the thinking process that s/he uses to understand a particular piece of text. The new book is based on a yearlong research study that Ness undertook with public school teachers who were simultaneously enrolled in GSE classes.  Findings from the research study showed that, although think alouds are highly effective, they are not yet commonplace in classrooms today.

(Tom Stoelker and Veronika Kero contributed to this report.)

Ness, an associate professor in childhood education at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education, has published The Question is the Answer, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). The manual is devised for teachers to help young readers become more familiar with expository text, a writing form common in news reports about world events, weather reports, recipes, and other adult-focused prose.

Ness noted that 10 years ago, children were spending the majority of their time entrenched in narrative text. Now, thanks in part to changes brought on by the Common Core, they’re reading 50 percent in narrative text and 50 percent in expository text.

The path to understanding a piece of expository text lies in posing questions, which has traditionally been the province of teachers who ask questions for students to answer.

Yet, research has shown that, at home, children ask one question every 2 minutes and 36 seconds, or between 400 and 1200 questions each week. Within one year, it’s estimated they’ll ask approximately 105,120 questions.

Ness’ book suggests that teachers should encourage the students ask the questions.

“Anecdotal research says that kids aren’t really asking a lot of questions in the classroom, but there isn’t any research that actually pins down the frequency . . . or the kinds of questions they’re asking [when they do ask],” Ness said.

Ness’ research team has begun a project in the New York City schools, going into classrooms and coding for the frequency of questions as well as analyzing “the kinds of questions they ask.”

“We can look at what teachers can do to increase them,” she said.

The book provides examples of instruction that Ness has either led or observed from kindergarten to fifth grade, and also features instruction for struggling readers and ESL students. One of the key points is that teachers don’t have to use sophisticated text to get children as young as 4 years to ask good questions. Even nursery rhymes will do.

But what to do with the head scratchers that kids posit that are off base? Ness advocates the “Parking Lot,” a concept she uses in her own home. When her own daughter recently asked Ness if her heart was the same shape as a Valentine’s Day heart, Ness wrote it down and taped it to a paper “parking lot” list at home.

“When we went to the library that week, I said, ‘This is a question you asked; would you like to learn the answer?’ and she said ‘Yes.’ So we got a book about the human body,” she said, noting that it provided more expository text exposure.

Unfortunately, most of the texts that kids are exposed to at home are more narrative, Ness said. “For their bedtime stories, most parents still pick out stories like Where the Wild Things Are.”

In this way, the “Parking Lot” practice can also help provide the technical vocabulary and the text structure that young readers will need, she said.

“It’s an easy thing that a parent can do to bridge the home-school connection as well.”

Molly Ness, Ph.D., associate professor of education in the Graduate School of Education’s Division of Curriculum and Teaching, wants teachers to embrace the innate curiosity of children that might lead them to ask queries such as “When you lose weight, where does it go?”

“Having kids generate questions themselves is one of the most effective strategies not just in reading comprehension, but in general content knowledge and retention.  Recent research indicates that brain’s chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information.” she said.

“But if you look at the research, questioning is really not happening in classrooms.”

There’s a certain irony in that the average four-year-old girl will ask 390 questions a day, but when they enter formal schooling, the situation is flipped. Teachers will ask on average 400 questions a day, and often view off-topic questions as distractions that they don’t have time to address. Or worse, they view it as a challenge to the power dynamic in the classroom.

“Teachers are not all that proficient at leading classroom discussions, and there’s a fair amount of research that says that letting kids initiate discussions is somewhat of a shift for them,” Ness said.

Enter the Parking Lot. While visiting the classroom of a former student of hers who is now a third-grade teacher, Ness found that he’d been letting students write their off-topics or difficult questions on a piece of paper, which was then “parked” on a poster on the classroom door. Although he’d planned to answer them in a timely manner, he conceded that questions would sometimes go for weeks without answers.

Ness set out to help him use the questions, and detailed the experience in “Moving Student’s Questions Out of The Parking Lot,” an article she published in The Reading Teacher last year. That in turn lead to “The Question is the Answer: Supporting Student-Generated Queries in Elementary Classroom,” which Ness wrote over the summer on a Fordham Fellowship, and which will be published in 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield.

“The book will showcase how naturally curious and inquisitive young children are,,the academic and motivational benefits of question generation, and practical solutions and teaching strategies to help kids to come to the answers themselves. The goal is to help teachers and parents implement engaging ways to not promote questioning but to also help kids discover the answers to their own questions,” she said.

Inquiry-based instruction is not new, but it has taken on added importance in classrooms today thanks to the Common Core State Standards, which places a greater emphasis on both question generation and addressing these questions with informational or expository text. Ness’ research focuses broadly on reading comprehension, as well as the instructional beliefs and decisions of K-5 teachers.

“Kids 10 years ago were spending the majority of their time entrenched in narrative text, and now they’re are spending about 50 percent of their time in narrative and 50 percent in expository text,” she said. “That means a whole different way of approaching texts.”

Informational text conveys information about the natural or social world. Children struggle with it the most because it often features an overwhelming amount of information with no  real text structure, technical vocabulary, and timeless verb tenses.. But it’s crucial to master, said Ness, because as we transition into adulthood we read more informational text and less narrative text.

“If I were to ask you – as a proficient adult reader –  to make a list of 15 things you read today, the majority of them would probably be informational: directions on a subway map, an article that you read in USA Today, an e-mail, or a recipe—those sorts of things,” Ness explained.

She has found the Parking Lot concept so useful that she uses it with her own four-year-old daughter when she wants to know (at 7:30 a.m.) why the sun seems to follow her through the day. Ness will jot the question down on sticky notes. When it’s time to go to the library, she retrieves the notes, and they decide which questions to address using informational text.

Throughout the process of writing the book, Ness has been amazed at the number of “thick” questions that friends and colleagues have shared. Thick questions are the big, juicy ones that lead to debate, discourse, reflection, and conversation.

“A child was asking about the water cycle, and they had learned that the percentage of salt in our bodies is the same percentage of salt in the oceans,” she said. “The child said, ‘If the salt in my tears is the same amount of salt in the ocean, why when I go swimming, does it hurt when I open my eyes underwater, but it doesn’t hurt when I cry?” she said.

“The teacher and I were like, ‘I have no idea, but that’s a brilliant question.”