Multilingual Minds-- First of Many Productive Events!

On Saturday, August 6th, IU Books & Beyond hosted a workshop entitled Multilingual Minds. In the words of the graduate and undergraduate organizers, here is what we accomplished.

Dorcas: The introductory activity gave attendees a chance to collaboratively come up with their stories based on some illustrations from a story in The World is Our Home collection. Participants worked in pairs to decide the sequence of the pictures, the storyline, and the title. A variety of themes were creatively generated based on the same set of illustrations. Stories about friendship, self-development, group support, feminism, and cultural sensitivity breathed out their lives, so as a group they worked on understanding what reading, writing, and collaborative creating stories for multilingual kids might mean.

Dorcas prepared a story development activity based on "Joe Makes a Friend" in Volume 8 of TWIOH

Lydia: The presentation highlighted the need for digital, open-access extensive reading materials. The pandemic has disproportionately impacted students in the Global South, with some children losing up to a year of schooling. Additionally, extensive reading materials in underserved languages are not widely available in print. Creative Commons Licensing expands access to extensive reading materials in children’s native languages, allowing for literary development without the price barrier that traditional publishing models pose.

Yunwei: We compared Gross National Income (GNI) per capita with the average price of the books in print; our results showed that the cost of one book in some low-income countries can take up nearly 1% of the annual income. For instance, the average price of a print book in Rwanda could take up 1.7% of a person's income, which limits children's literacy development through extensive reading.

Yunwei and Chen build their version of the story.

Kathy: All participants discussed the importance of composing culturally-responsive, culturally-sustaining storybooks and shared participants’ experiences and ideas about how to practice programs in class and outside classrooms in children’s daily lives regardless of their economic conditions, education policies, and students’ various demands. Data on mobile phone subscription per capita and Internet usage helped the attendees to think about timely response and economically feasible ways of sharing and publishing stories for global children.

The group met in person and online to share their passion for literacy equity.