After an abysmal beginning to my Monday (is there any other way to start a Monday?), I crept into a conference room on campus ten minutes late for a lecture called "Words Change Worlds" which I'd been looking forward to for a weeks. I couldn't have picked a better remedy for my dark mood. Over the course of the hour and twenty minutes I spent in that room, I found myself growing more and more excited until all traces of my former gloom were washed away.
Pam Allyn, the speaker, is the founder of an organization called LitWorld. She's a graduate of Teachers College, too, and her mission, to put it simply, is to make every child on the planet literate. Talk about fearless - I can't think of too many people who would dare to take on that kind of challenge. Pam is thin with very short hair. Her style was at once funky and sophisticated, and she came across as confident, competent, and easily approachable. She had a way of telling anecdotes and posing questions that should have come across as touchy-feely treacle, but which somehow felt hugely significant instead. She accompanied her lecture with a PowerPoint presentation featuring photos of teachers all over the world sitting in conference rooms or standing at blackboards and gorgeous children from places like Liberia clutching colorful picture books.
Pam talked about the work she'd done and its challenges. Her tales reminded me of just how much one must shift one's perspective when working with people in countries so very different from the developed ones we inhabit. Nothing can be taken for granted. One teacher she met in Africa spent his evenings in a library copying chapters from a textbook, which he would copy again onto the blackboard in his classroom the next day. This was his way of coping with the lack of textbooks at his school. The students would cope with the fact that virtually none of them have access to writing paper by memorizing the information on the board. Pam wisely pointed out that, when looking for ways to help improve literacy in this situation, she has to look at things from a very specific perspective if she is to make an impact. In another instance, Pam led teenage girls, also African, in designing their ideal classroom. Number One on nearly all of their lists? Sanitation. They fantasized about having a wastebasket in each room, and a designated place to empty that wastebasket (preferably not right outside the classroom door) so that students' environment would be conducive to learning and not feel dirty. Their second unanimous priority was single-sex classrooms; the number of girls in Liberia who drop out of school because of harassment from their male peers is pretty scary. While LitWorld's goal is not school reform so much as it is spreading literacy, the two factors are connected in many ways. Students who leave school because they fear for their personal safety are not going to learn to read.
Another hurdle is getting appropriate books to children. Never mind collecting the actual books; a bigger problem is that appropriate books may not even exist in print. Many children's storybooks are not available in the languages LitWorld needs them to be, in part because so many of them don't translate well. Many books would be confusing to children from developing countries because the authors take certain kinds of knowledge for granted, the kinds of things that would be second nature to a child from the US but which would baffle a child in Laos. A character scrapes his knee badly on the road after falling off his bike. A child in a village with dusty roads may interpret that very differently from a child growing up in a world of paved thoroughfares. (Never mind the concept of owning a bike. Never mind the concept of having ridden a bike even once and the sensation of speed and precarious balance.) What's a refrigerator? How do you explain a swimming pool to someone who's never seen one? Pam's solution to this problem is (surprise!) ambitious, but very appealing: teach kids to write their own stories so they will grow up to be authors who will provide appropriate books for the next generation. One of her biggest priorities is balancing reading with both creative and autobiographical writing for the children with whom she works.
One of her biggest triumphs is conceiving and arranging World Read Aloud Day, which began this year and is to take place annually from here on out on March 3rd. She showed us pictures sent to her from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, different parts of Africa. Children sat cross-legged on the floor openmouthed as teachers in colorful costumes, sometimes assisted by similarly dressed older students, read and acted out stories. She said that over 40,000 people participated this year, and she hopes for more next year. I will certainly keep that date in mind and spread the word.
LitWorld has some sort of project going in Harlem. I didn't get specifics, but I have emailed the organization to volunteer my time in helping get it off the ground. I know there is a library involved.
Pam made copies of her latest book, What to Read When, available for us for free! I haven't had a chance to look at my copy in depth, but it's essentially a collection of books matched with different ages and developmental levels. It'll be a great resource to have, I think.
For interested parties, here is the website for her organization: http://www.litworld.org/
Read on!
