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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. 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. 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.

When we started collaborating with students to publish their stories, we knew that making the stories freely available was an important step. We needed to honor the work of the authors, illustrators, translators and other contributors who made the work possible. We are proud to announce that Volumes 1-10 of The World is Our Home are available on IU Scholarworks. IU Libraries will keep our work safe, and we check usage statistics regularly to see how many people around the world are discovering our work. Please drop us a comment if you have found the stories helpful. We accept donations for our work through the Indiana University Foundation. Make your gift to the IU Books & Beyond Project Fund. We will be supporting multilingual creators of reading materials for children through our Multilingual Minds hangout. We also hope to resume our annual trips to work with partners in Rwanda to offer English day camps for primary school children in 2023. Thank you for your interest and your support!

2022 is the first year of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. The goal of this initiative is to preserve, revitalize, and support indigenous languages globally. Here at IU Books & Beyond, we are delighted to promote this important effort, and we hope to make a contribution where we can. IU Books & Beyond entered its second decade in 2019, and we hope to be around for a long time to come. The last few years have challenged us all, and like so many others, we have re-visioned the ways that we approach our mission. As always, our goal is to support and develop students and teachers to become literacy leaders in their chosen fields. Until 2019, we focused on a partnership with a single school in Rwanda, where we developed deep ties with teachers, parents and families committed to improving education in their community. We hope that we will be able to resume annual study abroad trips through Indiana University in 2023. We have also decided to expand our digital and linguistic focus to include support for the creators (writers, editors, illustrators, and translators) of extensive reading materials for young readers in indigenous, minoritized or underserved languages by uploading our best The World is Our Home stories to excellent platforms such as the African Storybook, the Global Digital Library, and Storybooks Canada, where they can be downloaded, read on a laptop or tablet, or shared via open licensing so that others can translate them. We also hope to create a community of creators at Indiana University who are interested in sharing their skills to help develop more reading materials. Our first meeting of the “Multilingual Minds” collaborative is scheduled for August 6 and is open for in-person or virtual attendance. Anyone who is interested can join us to learn more about why we believe that we can make a significant contribution to the education of young readers around the world just by helping them to have more culturally relevant, high-quality books to read. As a child I was a voracious reader. I read through whole shelves of books at the little local library. Each week I toted home as many books as I could carry. In the northern US winter, I walked through the cold. In the summer, I rode my bike. There was no stopping me, and I would have felt desperate if I had not been able to read as much as I wanted, what I wanted, and when I wanted. If the world is going to succeed at providing all children with an education that they deserve, we are going to have to provide them with more than they can read. That means libraries stuffed with culturally-relevant books in many languages, including those that have been minoritized or underserved, that they can browse through and choose according to their interests, without having to worry about how they are going to pay for these books. We have the tools to make this happen: we have digital publishing, digital platforms, reading devices, growing connectivity, open licensing. We just need to put in the work. No one should be left behind or left outside the library of knowledge without a key to the door. Register for the Aug. 6, 2022, Multilingual Minds event.