Khyati Datt, a member of our outreach team writes about our recent workshop in Nashik with senior teachers of the SNS Foundation.

Our recent StoryWeaver workshop took us to the picturesque town of Nashik. Senior teachers from 6 different states gathered for the annual meet of the SNS Foundation, where they exchanged ideas, celebrated each other’s achievements and discussed the long term goals of the foundation.

A day before the workshop, our team was introduced to the teachers in Mumbai and we were happy to learn that they were as excited to explore the StoryWeaver platform as we were to share it with them. The 3 hour drive to Nashik provided us the opportunity to interact with them in a relaxed space and understand their context better.

After a hearty breakfast the next day, everyone assembled for the workshop. The teachers shared highlights from their last one year and lauded each other on their achievements. We started the workshop with an ice breaking activity and moved on to a storytelling session. They were more than willing to share their experiences and ideas around using books with children. The teachers responded enthusiastically to using StoryWeaver in their classrooms. After a brief exploration of the platform, they went on to the task at hand, which was to search for books on the platform on the given themes. All teachers tried their hand at looking for content that they could possibly use with their students too. The teachers then shared the stories they had found and how they might use them in their classrooms.

A satisfying lunch later, we moved on to discussing how they could use the platform to translate and create stories. They tried their hand at creating stories in their mother tongue and were excited about sharing this with their students back home. We got some really great stories and the teachers loved sharing their thought behind the story and presenting it in front of all of us. What was really impressive about this workshop was that the participants created original stories in 5 different languages- Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, English and Marathi.

The senior teachers gave us a great response and were happy to know that they could use wordless stories, flashcards, spotting books and a lot more resources from StoryWeaver in their classrooms. We discussed what students liked to read and how that could be used to motivate them academically as well.

As we wrapped up the workshop, the participants shared their thoughts with us on how they plan on using the platform and combining stories with curriculum. As Damayanti, who leads the CSR efforts of SNS Foundation, later told us, “there’s so much more we can do in our classrooms through StoryWeaver and we can’t wait to get started.” The participants were patient and interacted with us throughout the session, for which we’re thankful to them!

A big thank you also to the SNS Foundation for giving us the opportunity to interact with the teachers and their consistent support.

If you are interested in hosting a similar workshop for your organisation, drop us an email on [email protected]

 

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When Bijal Vachharajani is not reading Harry Potter, she can be found looking for tigers in the jungles of India. In her spare time, she works to fund the trips and books. She did this by working as the Editor at Time Out Bengaluru. After having studied climate change at the University for Peace, she now writes about education and sustainable development and is a consultant with Fairtrade Asia Pacific. She tweets at @bijal_v. 

When it comes to writings about nature and children, I often find myself returning to Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder. “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement,” wrote the biologist in her book. And it’s up to us, the Grown Ups to accompany children and encourage them to engage with nature. Which is why when Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver asked me to commission and edit a set of environment books for children, I was quite excited.

There was a long list of topics to choose from – should we commission picture books on climate change or food security, biodiversity or water conservation, the joy of being in a forest or seed sovereignty? The wonderful thing was that the good folks at Pratham Books were enthusiastic about all ideas.

Neha Sumitran, the web editor of National Geographic Traveller India, loves everything about food. And so it wasn’t a surprise when she decided to write 'Let’s Go Seed Collecting!', a picture book about these precious tree-babies. There isn’t any text bookish detail about cotyledons and endosperm. Rather, it’s a charming story about three best friends who love to collect seeds and learn about them from a wise old tamarind tree. Neha also offers a handy seed guide at the end of the book, which connects the dots between seeds and the foods we eat and drink. No more Match the Columns and Tiresome Tables, thank you very much. Archana Sreenivasan gave life to Tooka, Poi and Inji the protagonists of the book, painting them with affection and joy.

One of the most exciting things about the project is the translations. The Hindi and Tamil versions of Neha’s story have just been published, opening it to many, many more young readers. And there are more to come. As well as three more environmental books in the pipeline.

One of the stories is by artist and writer Vinayak Varma. His picture book 'Jadav and the Tree-Place' is about Jadav Mulai Payeng and his efforts to green Jorhat. Vinayak’s prose is exuberant – he makes you want to read the story out loud, with expressions, and imagine Mulai as he plants one tree after the other. No tedious memoir this one. 

Of course, there were challenges in the process. For example, how do you talk to really young readers about complex subjects such as climate change? It was a question I explored in my thesis topic when I was pursuing my masters in Environment Security and Peace with a specialisation in Climate Change and Security at the University for Peace. Artist Alison Byrnes used the metaphor of a mountain goat to talk about the complexities of over-consumption, migration, and resource scarcity in her story. How do you strike the balance when it comes to narrating bleak stories but offer that glimmer of hope? That was one of our biggest struggles, but I think Alison’s beautifully textured drawings manage to do just that.  

Content Manager Yamini Vijayan (who I call my partner in prose) and I learnt so much from Padmaparna Ghosh, as we edited her delightful story about the biodiversity of canopy forests 'Up World, Down World'. A girl and a dormouse become tentative friends as they take the reader on a whirlwind journey of the forest’s many denizens. Stories where children and animals intersect often become ethnocentric, and that was something that the three of us were aware of. We didn’t want children to always be the ones to swoop in and save the day or the idea of the forests being “of use” to humans. Instead, Padmaparna’s insightful narrative coupled with Sunaina Coelho’s stunning illustrations spotlight the lushness of the canopy forests.

These stories are all going to be picture books. And one of the compelling reasons for children, parents, and educators to tap to the next page is the images. Archana, Vinayak, Sunaina, and Alison have been working with the wonderful Kaveri Gopalakrishnan to infuse our carefully-written words with images. All of that comes together to hopefully make these stories enduring, compelling, and memorable, which foster that sense of wonder in children and maybe even for the Grown Ups.

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Do you love data? Do you believe algorithms can help decide what to binge watch on Netflix next and drive social change ? DataKind is an organisation that ‘brings together top data scientists with leading social change organisations to collaborate on cutting-edge analytics and advanced algorithms to maximize social impact.’ To describe the mission of DataKind in the words of it's co-founder, Jake Porway: "We are meticulously focused on bringing data science in all its forms to those who share our vision of a sustainable planet in which we all have access to our basic human needs. We envision a world where organizations tackling those problems have the same access to data science resources that Wall St. and Silicon Valley have."

StoryWeaver is one of four projects chosen for DataKind Bangalore’s Sprint 2018. Sprint consists of a series of events where volunteers of DataKind Bangalore use their Data Science skill to solve challenges experienced by their Non-profit partners. If you’d like to volunteer your skills to our project, read on for more details.

Using technology to address the global book drought

Pratham Books is a non-profit children’s book publisher with 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. 

                                              

However, 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: One platform. Many possibilities.

On StoryWeaver, users can access thousands of multilingual stories for children absolutely free. All content on the platform is openly licensed under CC-BY4.0, one of the most liberal Creative Commons Licenses. Users can read, download and print all stories and images on the platform, as well as use the tools embedded on StoryWeaver to create and translate content into more languages and versions. In the 2 years since launch we have grown from a repository of 800 stories in 24 languages to a digital repository of over 8000 stories in 111 diverse languages of the world. The 650,000 member strong StoryWeaver community is spread across 220 countries and have read our stories both online and offline over 2.6 million times.  

Project Scalability and Sustainability

StoryWeaver’s growth and ability to scale lies in the fact that the platform is Unicode compliant. This enables content to be transported to different devices easily, and also allows users to create content in their desired language without needing to download special Indic language keyboards. This is imperative, especially in a country like India where there are so many languages in varied scripts.

In addition, Unicode compliancy  has allowed us to add new languages with relative ease, even those with complex scripts like Khmer. Today, StoryWeaver offers users the chance to read, create and translate stories in a plethora of languages: from mainstream Indian and International languages, to tribal (Kora, Santali, Kurukh) and minority languages (Tibetan, Konkani), and even languages categorised as threatened or endangered (Southern Kurdish).

Impact

StoryWeaver has opened up a stream of collaborations with organizations, both in India and globally.

As a classroom tool, StoryWeaver provides educators access to thousands of stories, across genres, reading levels and in multiple languages, for use in the classroom. Teachers can tailor existing content to suit the needs of their students or create brand new teaching resources. Educators have used the platform to create early reading material in minority languages like Tibetan and endangered languages like Kurdish. Rural schools in Maharashtra have downloaded and projected our stories on to classroom walls with the help of Pragat Shikshan Sanstha. Communities Rising downloads and prints much needed books in Tamil and English for after school resource centres in Villupuram, Tamil Nadu. While organisations and schools like Mantra4Change, Akanksha and Tamarind Tree  create digital libraries for students and teachers using our content. Content from StoryWeaver has also been gamified on affordable learning apps for disadvantaged children to improve their English, while Bookshare uses StoryWeaver to create accessible content for print impaired children.

By harnessing the power of technology and open licenses and adding the creative power of a collaborative and engaged community, StoryWeaver is working towards addressing the scarcity of multilingual reading resources that exists not only in India but across the world.

Focus Area For DataKind Sprint

As content on StoryWeaver continues to exponentially grow, one of the spaces we wish to improve in is the discoverability of our content. Users on our platform should be able to easily find what they are looking for in our vast repository of 8000 books.

This will be possible with better tagging of our content. While there is a basic tagging process in place for all images and stories on platform, if every story published is automatically tagged with 10 - 25 relevant keywords, it would drastically improve the discoverability of content. Additional steps would include incorporating the most searched words in our tags and even incorporate geotags. We strongly believe these steps would greatly improve the user experience.

StoryWeaver would like to collaborate with DataKind Bangalore to build such a tool during Sprint 2018.

For more details about the Project Accelerator (First event of the Sprint) and to sign up, visit their meetup page here. Also, You may like to join DataKind Bangalore’s slack channel  #pratham_books to actively participate in various discussions.

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