Student Voice: The Year Students Revolutionised the Library

Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi is made up of students from around the world, with a depth and breadth of experiences that create a vibrant, thriving student body community.  

In this series of Student Voice articles,  we provide a platform for the students in our community to share their experiences and passions and we explore how Dulwich has helped them Learn Worldwise, so they can Graduate Worldwise.

Student leadership is important at Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi. We encourage our students to get involved and make an impact throughout the community. This manifests itself in many forms, from eceo-entrepreneurship to fundraising for charities and more. Most recently, a group of creative students have helped revolutionise the way our library operates by creating a series of ‘Genre Stickers’; bringing student voice to the way our books are classified. Head of Libraries, Mrs Stewart, explains;

Genre stickers on the spines of books help students select a novel of the kind that they like.

However, many of the genre stickers available on the market are not particularly modern in design, and don’t appeal to our students. I searched through many resources to find ones that would work, but all of the options were bland and unappealing. The solution – have our pupils design bespoke Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi genre stickers. A competition was set!

Middle School Assistant Head and Senior School Art Teacher, Ms Sneath sent out the brief:

• 2.3cm x 2.3cm square stickers
• Original images
• Simple design symbolic of the genre
• Image only (no words)

Students were given the 18 categories that the library wanted to highlight.  The winning entries were from Ellie, Leona and Emily in Year 7.  I am sure you’ll agree they did an amazing job!

We spoke with the winning students to discuss their creative process.

‘First we played a game of word association. We read out the genres provided by Mrs Stewart and noted down the first words that came to our minds. This helped us generate a list of images we thought students would easily associate with the genres. Next, we did some research to find simple and clear examples of these images that we drew inspiration from. We pulled these together and did some sketches of what we wanted the genre stickers to look like. Finally, Emily used her iPad with Pencil to create the final images.’

These genre stickers are now being added to books across all three libraries in the College, along with reference posters to be put up in the libraries.

Congratulations to Ellie, Leona and Emily. What a fantastic example of student voice in action!