Learning Café: A Community Engaged Scholarship Series with Thuy Vo Dang

Join us for our monthly Learning Café series highlighting the community engaged work of our faculty and graduate students. Listen, learn and engage with the work of our school.

Featuring IN-PERSON PANELISTS:

• Thuy Vo Dang, Assistant Professor of Information Studies and Asian American Studies/Project PI
• Angela-MinhTu D. Nguyen, Volunteer at Los Angeles Public Library–Chinatown Branch
• Joanna Fabicon, Senior Librarian, Children’s Services at Los Angeles Public Library, UCLA Lecturer
• Candice Mack, Senior Librarian, Young Adult/Teen Services at Los Angeles Public Library, UCLA Lecturer
• Mads Le, Ph.D. and MLIS student, UCLA Information Studies

VIRTUAL PANELISTS:

• Shirley Ly, Children’s Librarian–Echo Park Branch, Los Angeles Public Library
• Kim Chu, public librarian and Viet Storytime Club member

The panel will present a UCLA Center for Community Engagement Social Impact Collaborative grant project that supports an international peer collective of Việt storytime facilitators. This collective arose from a need to build community to address feelings of isolation in the struggle to research, translate, plan programming, and manage collections. For immigrant and minority communities, language-appropriate resources are essential to foster a foundation of cultural identity and a sense of belonging, alongside promoting literacy and early learning skills. By developing and promoting culturally sustaining bilingual Vietnamese storytimes, the collective provides a model of uplifting diverse community’s cultures, stories, and songs in order to foster communal joy, which is inseparable from individual heritage, resilience, and empowerment. The exploratory grant phase enables UCLA researchers to bring together Việt storytime facilitators with Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) and the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) experts as partners.