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themed texts and those that had a history theme being traded. We were curious about
the timing of the trends and found that the low point of based-on-a-true-story social
studies books was February 2022, when Ukraine was invaded by Russia. A sharp
drop also happened in social-studies-themed books being traded starting in February
2023, and the numbers never quite recovered, even at the conclusion of this research
7 months later.

Figure
Analysis of Little Free Library Titles

Question 2 asked, “How can exchanging books in LFLs that are not controlled
by government bodies reflect a community’s curiosity about social studies issues?”
We determined after conducting the study that the answer to that question did not
necessarily lie in the data we collected but rather in the impact of the discussions we
had about the data from study with others. During a roundtable session at a regional
teacher-educator’s conference in which we delivered preliminary findings, we
learned that teacher practitioners and teacher educators were already participating
in grassroots efforts to provide banned and “controversial texts” to students in the
communities they serve using LFLs as dissemination points. One participant in our
session offered that The Hate U Give (Thomas, 2018) is now a banned text in a
partner district with which she works. The novel follows the story of 16-year-old
Starr Carter, a young Black woman who lives in a low-income neighborhood but
attends a wealthy, private prep school. Starr experiences police brutality, racism, and
grief, and the novel addresses these social constructs and realities. Understanding the
necessity and importance of the text for the community that she serves, the participant
and her colleagues had strategically purchased and placed four copies of it into an
LFL located near a school in that partner district. Even though this self-report could
be considered merely anecdotal, it could also be classified as an unintentional micro-
case study that can help illuminate an “understanding (of) a larger class of similar
units (a population of cases)” (Gerring, 2007, p. 37), meaning that if one colleague
reported intentionally adding texts to LFLs in her region, perhaps there are others
adding similar books for similar reasons across our region.

Promoting Professional and Personal Growth of Educators and Excellence in Education 53