What does a volunteer in a FAVL library do?

Check out Chelsea's blog entry from her stay in the village of Bereba.

Kathy Knowles on CBC

Kathy, who as director of Osu Children's Library Fund has been a supporter and inspiration for a lot of our work at FAVL, will be profiled in a CBC story.
The story of Kathy and the Ghana libraries she initiated will be on Sounds Like Canada. This Friday at the top of the show - that is 10AM (EST). CBC radio one.
http://www.cbc.ca/soundslikecanada
People can listen live anywhere in the world on the net.....or on Sirius radio across North America ....or on the CBC Sounds Like Canada podcast http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/index.html?newsandcurrent#slc

Family literacy, storytelling at home... should we be skeptical?

It is an truism for most people like me, who work a lot helping to establish and sustain small community libraries in rural Africa, to think that the model of literacy I practice with my own children (lots of shared reading and storytelling through age 6 or 7, until they are firmly reading on their own) is going to be replicable in African villages. But it is painfully obvious that our librarians in Burkina Faso and Ghana have, most of them, a hard time doing that kind of shared reading. Most village parents have even further to go.

So do I (and FAVL) have to work a lot harder to change the librarians and the village reading culture? Or is it I (and FAVL) that needs to change?

I've been reading a nice collection of essays, edited by A. van Kleeck, S. Stahl and E. Bauer (the E stands for Eurydice, which makes me like her automatically), called On Reading Books to Children. Many of the chapters are essays by left-leaning deconstructionist types... lots of dominant paradigms being tilted at. But there point, that my model of literacy acquisition may not be the most effective model to promote, is not lost on me. I confess, though, that I am disappointed in that no alternative models are proposed. What would an alternative literacy model look like? Whenever I try to imagine alternatives, I use as a touchstone the family/convent alternative of much of Europe for so long (yes, an aunt was a nun!). So the nuclear family isn't for you, what do you do? Join a convent. Very different living arrangements. So what's the parallel for literacy? The One Laptop per Child is going to bypass book reading? Television and radio in rural areas? Does anyone honestly think that promoting these at the expense of promoting shared book reading is the right course of action?

So the answer to my earlier question: I'd love to change, but I really have no good idea of how to do it! I'm stuck in the family literacy-shared reading rut and I don't have a machete to make a new path.

Recommended reading....

I am not a book critic, just an avid reader, and over the past several days I have been re-reading Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People . It's just fantastic, in the ambiguity of the theme.... is politics really character? The writing is sharp, wonderful turns of phrase here and there, and the characters are memorable and never overbearing. Chief Nanga... simply amazing. I was in western Sudan in a small village during the time that General Omar al-Bashir in Sudan was just consolidating his power, in 1989, after a coup d'etat. The local reaction to the coup and the new military rulers was so exactly like Odili's father... wise resignation.

Uganda Community Libraries Association

The Uganda Community Libraries Association now has its own website. Visit it at www.ugcla.org

Uzo and his father - Ernest Emenyonu

A very nice short novel for children... Exactly the kind of father I would like if I grew up in a village in Africa!

Dinaw Mengestu - "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears"

Pass the PLE...

In 2005, Kate Parry did an analysis of all the books borrowed to date from the Kitengesa Community Library. There was plenty of activity, and people of many kinds were borrowing books, but there was one worrying feature: very few children were included. So the librarians, with help from friends in Kampala, organized a Children’s Reading Tent. Books were put on display, local dignitaries were invited, and a lot of speeches were made. More to the point, children from six different primary schools were invited with their teachers, and when the speeches were over, they spent the day reading, drawing, and otherwise engaged in activities to do with books. Since then, the Kitengesa Library has held a Children’s Day about once a month. A single primary school is invited each time to send a class with a teacher, and, as at the Reading Tent, the children read, draw, paint, play games, and have stories read to them. In this picture, the children are playing a game called “Pass the PLE (Primary Leaving Exam),” made by a company –Mango Tree Educational Enterprises (http://www.mangotreeuganda.org/) – that specializes in simple and inexpensive educational materials for Ugandan schools.

Another Barbara Kimenye title

Wow! "Pretty Boy" by force of circumstances leaves his parents when their shanty home is demolished, makes his way to Mombasa , the sex trade, and AIDS... and his mother dies too, from the shame. Brutally frank, nicely written. Want an insight into the real Africa? Pick up some Kimenye.

Do African community libraries have to be justified?

From a report Libraries, literacy and poverty reduction: a key to African development by Professor Kingo Mchombu, University of Namibia and Nicola Cadbury, Book Aid International

One justification: Stop adults who have gone to school from relapsing to functional illiteracy...

In sub Saharan Africa adult literacy levels are now 61% (UNDP 2005). But without regular use literacy skills can be lost within a few years. A large percentage of participants in adult literacy programmes lapse into illiteracy within just a few years if they don’t have access to follow up support and appropriate reading materials (Abadzi 2004). The Association for Literacy in Zimbabwe finds that most of their adult illiterates are lapsed literates rather than people with no educational background. Unless literate environments are created which can sustain literacy for life, then education investments will not deliver the lasting benefits required to change lives and reduce poverty.

And there is more interesting stuff:

One of the most significant challenges facing library services in reaching the poor comes from the very limited coverage of most of the library services surveyed. Because of lack of government investment they are unable to achieve anything like full coverage of the population. For instance, Kenya, with its population of 32 million and large literate population of over 15 million, has only 36 public libraries. Malawi has 10, and Uganda 30. Most library service points are located in urban areas where population is highly concentrated and there are few branches in rural areas where a greater proportion of the population live in dispersed settlements.

The Uganda survey response noted that four libraries (Buikwe, Kyabutaika, Nakaseke and Katengesa) have established collaborative arrangements with NGOs and groups to provide economic empowerment information and other community-led information-sharing activities using the library as their platform. Such initiatives are important first steps towards optimising partnership between libraries and their beneficiary communities. Really effective partnerships will happen when all sections of society are able to request and receive the information they need, while at the same time libraries are equipped to record and disseminate communities’ local knowledge.

That's right, our very own Kitengesa...

Mark your calendars- we will be at CIES in New York March 18, 2008

Kate and I will be presenting in a panel at CIES meetings... more info is here.

Complementing Formal Education: Village Libraries in Africa
March 18, 1:30-3:30
Group Number: 125
Session Time Block: 2.4
Session Type: Panel
Chair(s) Kim Parry, City University of New York

Presenter 1 A. B. K. Kasozi, National Council for Higher Education
The Uganda Higher Education System and the Lack of a Reading Culture
Presenter 2 Kate Parry, City University of New York
The Promotion of Reading in Rural African Populations
Presenter 3 Valeda Dent, Rutgers University
One Book at a Time: Libraries in Village Communities
Presenter 4 Michael Kevane, Santa Clara University
Rural Students are Doing Fine: Reading and Schooling Attitudes in Burkina Faso
Discussant 1 John Paige, Congregation of the Holy Cross

Summer reading... how much does it help?

FAVL is looking for funding to run some reading programs this coming summer, and be able to get a good idea of the effects of various summer reading programs compared with a low-cost alternative of simply giving children some books for summer reading. How much would it matter if the kids participated in a book discussion program, or some out-loud reading, in a community library, versus simply have the books? The programs gets kids to the library, where books are shareable, the book distribution gets books into kids homes, but the books are less shareable.

Turns out there is no evidence that I have been able to find of studies like this in the rural African villages that we at FAVL care about. The closest study I can find is by James Kim, an education specialist now at Harvard. Here's the abstract for one of his papers:

The Effects of a Voluntary Summer Reading Intervention on Reading Achievement: Results from a Randomized Field Trial

The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention were assessed in a randomized field trial involving 552 students in 10 schools. In this study, fourth-grade children received 8 books to read during summer vacation, and were encouraged by their teachers to practice oral reading at home with a family member and to use comprehension strategies during independent, silent reading. Reading lessons occurred during the last month of school in June, and 8 books were mailed to students on a biweekly basis during July and August. The estimated treatment effects on a standardized test of reading achievement (Iowa Test of Basic Skills) were largest for students who reported owning fewer books at home, less fluent readers, and minority students. These findings suggest that a voluntary summer reading intervention may represent a scaleable and cost-effective policy for improving reading achievement among lower-performing students.

See also: Literature Review on the Impact of Summer Reading Clubs

Apologies to Chinua Achebe...

I tried to get my 9 year old son to read Chike and the River, Achebe's short novel for children. I read it myself, and found the writing crisp and clear (what else was I expecting) and interesting enough to keep me going. A lovely thought to hold in your mind, of a young boy's dream to cross the river. But apparently to a Goosebumps, Tintin, Harry Potter, Inkheart, Dragon Rider, etc. 9 year old, it didn't seem to cut it! What if Achebe were to write a more fantasy-oriented children's book? Let me think... On the very first page Chike's parents are killed by a nuclear-mutated spider while they are watching Godzilla on their TV set. Chike runs off to his uncle, who turns out to have a dragon stored in a bottle. The miserly trader Mr. Peter Nwana is really a powerful witch who... cuts off people's heads and turns them into gold! Mr Nwana tries to control the spider to his own nefarious ends, and Chike and his uncle save the day, and Chike teaches his uncle that dragons are really just like humans.

Young Fluent (African) Readers

Someday a bright anthropologist, sociologist or littéraire will write the Africa-based equivalent of Margaret Clark's Young Fluent Readers. I think it would be so fascinating. The little girl in our promotional video (on the webpage www.favl.org) seems like she probably would be a great candidate for inclusion in the study.