At StoryWeaver, we believe that all children, everywhere, should have access to a never ending stream of stories in their mother tongue. If you are a language department head or professor at your University, then do consider signing up your class for our new translation campaign.

We are looking for student volunteers to help us translate stories to a language they are learning on StoryWeaver. Students can be assigned stories, which you, their professor reviewing their work before publishing. This can be an excellent project students can sign up to improve their language skills while contributing to a growing pool of openly licensed multilingual stories for children to practice and improve their reading skills.  

This model has been highly successful with some of our other partners like the Ugandan Christian University (UCU). As a part of the UCU Community Service Project: ‘Creative Writing, Translation and Publishing for Children’ in the Department of Languages and Literature, 50 stories have been translated to Ugandan languages to supplement early literacy initiatives.The project seeks to make mother tongue reading material  accessible to children of the local communities in Uganda through the UCU campuses and colleges.

StoryWeaver

StoryWeaver is India’s first open source, digital repository of multilingual children’s books from Pratham Books, a non-profit children’s book publisher. Pratham Books has a mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and was founded to address the lack of high quality, affordable, multilingual books in India. We realised that to even begin satisfying the reading needs of a multilingual country such as India, and create equitable access to books for all children we would need to massively scale the creation and distribution of multilingual content. The answer, we believed lay in technology and the power of open licensing.  

StoryWeaver offers educators, non-profits, language champions and book lovers across the world access to over 5000 stories in 100 languages. All these stories are free to read, download, print and share for free, as they are openly licensed under CC-BY 4.0, one of the most liberal Creative Commons licenses. StoryWeaver is accessed from a 350,000 plus (and growing!) strong community from over 180 countries around the world. Stories on the platform have collectively been read (both online and offline) 2 million times.

To sign up your department click here, and help us create more stories in more languages for more children.    

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Since February 2009, the United Nations has observed the 21st of February as International Mother Language Day to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.

This year’s International Mother Language Day theme has been beautifully summarised on the United Nation's website:

“To foster sustainable development, learners must have access to education in their mother tongue and in other languages. It is through the mastery of the first language or mother tongue that the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy are acquired. Local languages, especially minority and indigenous, transmit cultures, values and traditional knowledge, thus play an important role in promoting sustainable futures.”

Celebrating the Freedom to Read

Last year, we celebrated linguistic diversity with the Freedom to Read campaign, where our amazing community of co-creators helped us add stories in 13 new languages on StoryWeaver, for children to read and enjoy. Many of the languages added represented underserved and endangered linguistic minorities.

“When a language dies, with it a wealth of knowledge is lost forever. It is a death of a culture. Having rigorous discourse on this issue, and implementing mindful efforts to preserve endangered languages and its cultural capital is a requisite of every publisher and language warrior.” shares Suzanne Singh, Chairperson Pratham Books. “Through StoryWeaver, weaving stories of communities in their own languages, and increasing access to quality reading resources for children has been made possible like none other. We are also grateful to collaborate with our passionate partners whose primary mission, just like ours, is to nurture multilingual languages and take it to every child in the country.”     

This year, we carry forward the spirit of our first Freedom to Read campaign, in a more focussed manner by seeding hyperlocal (both print and digital) libraries in three minority languages: Konkani, Bhoti and Haryanvi.

Konkani books for all

The Konkani Bhasha Mandal is Goa’s pioneering non-governmental institution striving for the cause of Konkani in social, educational, literary and cultural spheres. Since the launch of StoryWeaver, The Konkani Bhasha Mandal has been a steadfast supporter and collaborator. Passionate about strengthening the pool of children’s literature in Konkani, the organisation has translated over 100 books to the language on StoryWeaver and shared these stories digitally with children in schools who have enjoyed them tremendously. On the occasion of International Mother Language Day 2018, Pratham Books and the Konkani Bhasha Mandal have further strengthened their partnership and commitment to spreading the joy of reading by printing 25,000 copies of 50 Pratham Books titles in Konkani and distributing them freely to 250 schools in the region, impacting 25,000 primary school students.   

 

50 Pratham Books titles, translated on StoryWeaver, printed and ready for classrooms.

Chetan Acharya, President, Konkani Bhasha Mandal said, “It is our pleasure to join hands with Pratham Books which is working immensely in the field of children's literature. After knowing that there exists a website with a pandora of stories which can be used by teachers and parents for their children, we started translating them to Konkani. Konkani Bhasha Mandal is always in the process of producing delightful reading material in Konkani. We conducted many workshops especially for college going students on how they can translate a story from StoryWeaver. We are extremely delighted and happy that 50 storybooks created by Pratham Books and Konkani Bhasha Mandal are being released now. We will certainly have a long and fruitful partnership.”

Haryanvi Hackathon

In the run up to International Mother Language Day, we conducted our first ever translation hackathon with 25 educators from across 20 districts in Haryana. The two day, residential workshop saw the translation and inbuilt peer-to-peer review of over 60  level 1 picture books for children to Haryanvi.  The workshop was organised with the support of Mr. Pramod Sharma , a senior Education Department official in the Haryana Government.

Amna Singh, Consultant Editor, Pratham Books helped organise the hackathon. "The energy of the educators translating the stories and the excitement of the students peeping in and watching the stories take shape was palpable. These children have never before seen or read a storybook in their mother tongue language,  and neither have their teachers! So yes, in a way, history was created. And hopefully, the first step in the journey of documenting a predominantly oral language to safeguard it for the coming generations has been taken from Gorawar, a village in Rohtak, Haryana. And StoryWeaver is proud to be an enabler in this endeavour." 

Participants are all smiles after the translation hackathon.

The seeds of a digital library in Bhoti

The Ladakhi language also called Bhoti or Bodhi, is a Tibetic language spoken in the Ladakh region of India. 17,000 Ft Foundation, is an organization that works to improve the lives of the people of remote, high altitude mountainous villages of Ladakh. In 2015, the organisation collaborated with Pratham Books to translate Pratham Books titles to Bhoti and distributed printed copies of these books to over 350 schools in the region. 

We have added ten of these Bhoti stories to the StoryWeaver platform, and will add more stories to the platform over the course of the year.

"Six years ago, 17000 ft Foundation bought its first set of titles from Pratham Books for its libraries, an encounter that helped reach story books to children living in the remotest and most inaccessible corners of high altitude Ladakh. A first in a region where the only books available to children were textbooks in English, these books helped fire up the imagination of little children and helped draw them into a world of reading. Things then got even more exciting a couple years later when we translated 10 titles from Pratham Books into the local language, Bhoti, and distributed it across thousands of children in Ladakh. Today, the request for more story books in Bhoti pours into our office every day and StoryWeaver has made that process more easy, accessible and enjoyable. The privilege of making these wishes come true is all ours." shared Sujata Sahu, Founder of 17,000 feet.

How are you celebrating International Mother Language Day in 2018? Will you share a story in your mother tongue with children? Will you give your creativity a space to flourish and write or translate a story your mother tongue? However you decide to celebrate, share it on Social Media and tag us @pbstoryweaver!

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Riddhi Dastidar recently joined Pratham Books as Outreach Manager. Here she writes about our recent workshop in Delhi, with Humana India.

On a scorching summer day in June, we found ourselves in the winding bylanes of Kishangarh in Delhi, looking for the Humana India Office. We entered to wooden floors, quiet reading spaces filled with books in multiple nooks and a massive German Shepherd dog draped languorously across the gate to welcome us in.

Humana People to People India is a part of Humana International's network of 31 organisations in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas working across a range of issues from from health to microfinance. Our overlap in interest comes from their work in Education.

HPPI's educational programmes aim to equip people with knowledge and skills to break the cycle of poverty and fulfill their potential. Their five programmes are Necessary Teacher Training Programme (NeTT), Academy for Working Children, Girls Bridge Education, Step up Centers and Prarambh. NeTT and Prarambh focus on incubating quality teachers.  Humana had invited their NeTT master trainers from different states to spend the day with us to know about StoryWeaver and how can it be used to bring in a reading culture in the classroom, as well as serve as a resource pool for our teachers. We also had trainers from other organizations like Stir Education and Pratham who added to the diversity of the group.

We started by getting to know the workshop participants a little better by discovering their hidden talents. Someone mentioned they were good at working with special needs children  while another teacher found travelling interesting. Stories give way to many emotions and what better way to establish that than to begin the session with a story? The audience giggled and winced and tried to come up with a solution to Bheema’s problem in the process realising  with us how important stories are to classrooms!

How stories help kindle curiosity and develop lateral thinking in children.

After we walked through how StoryWeaver works, our philosophy of reaching as many children in need as possible in their native tongue, and hence our embrace of Creative Commons, it was time for the teachers to get their own hands dirty. They practiced curating lists of stories on specific themes (from Math concepts through biryani making to a Level 1 reading on Traffic lights). They got into groups to take a stab at translating stories into Hindi and finally even creating their own story from our set of open illustrations.

To break down the concept of ‘filters’ on StoryWeaver to help select the desired kind of tale we drew a parallel to online shopping - Amazon and Flipkart being commonly recognized.

An interesting story we explored brought out the critical role illustration can play in a book. We read 'दीदी का रंग बिरंगा खज़ाना', and the teachers pointed out that as Didi became happier, the book bloomed from black and white into colour - hence even a child struggling to read the words would be able to grasp what was happening!

By the end of the workshop we had a couple of first-time story-writers in our midst. The teachers were beginning to share the challenges of balancing something as ‘inessential’ and essential as  the time to read for joy in class with the demands of administrative work and completing the syllabus. Waseem, one of the trainers from Stir mentioned that the main reason we work is actually the children. Very often lost in the pressures of checking very real demands and tasks off the checklist, we forget the heart of it - which is the relationship being built with the child. He pointed out that stories could be a great option to reverse this disinvestment and foster strong relationships.

We came out of the workshop with many of the teachers coming up to us to ask for follow-up training with their organisations, and excited to see how they would go on to integrate stories into making different kinds of academic learning interesting - be it learning about division through biryani or just taking 20 minutes out of the day to Drop Everything And Read!

To see more images from the workshop, click here.

If you would like us to conduct a workshop with your organisation, drop us an email at [email protected]

 

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