The Asia Foundation is an international nonprofit that helps societies work towards a peaceful, just, and thriving region, and currently works to improve the standard of living across Asia, from Sri Lanka to Mongolia. Improving literacy levels is integral to the work the organisation does, and they have spearheaded a number of programmes across the region to this end.

One such initiative is Let’s Read!  which pledges to provide storybooks to children across the continent. “Through technology initiatives and book donations, we help infuse students with a love of reading essential for literacy,” says Melody Zavala, director of the Books for Asia program at The Asia Foundation.

As part their Let’s Read! campaign, The Asia Foundation has created e-libraries that are accessible on any device. "The e-library works in low-bandwidth environments and doesn't require an active internet connection for reading and hence are able to reach children even in areas with poor bandwidth and infrastructure. Books available are in the mother tongue languages of the children. “We know that children learn first and best in their mother tongue. So we want to make local publications available to more children and stimulate their imagination in ways that can only be possible in a local context,” commented Melody.

To provide a wide range of these books, The Asia Foundation used the vast collection of stories available on StoryWeaver. “The translate tool on StoryWeaver attracted us, as once a language (e.g. Thai) is available on the platform, we can get stories translated and provide a large number of quality children’s literature to our partner schools,” shared Melody.

Being able to draw on StoryWeaver titles has been invaluable to the Let’s Read! initiative, shares Melody. The initiative incubates innovative digital, print, and community-based solutions to "improving access to high-quality children’s books in mother tongues and national languages and currently consists of integrated e-book library, translation, and content creation projects.

Stories in Khmer

“So far, we’ve translated 9  titles into Khmer which are all available on StoryWeaver.  The stories are also available on our Cambodia project site, along with new stories created in Khmer by local authors and illustrators during our e-book hackathons." informed Melody. "In Cambodia the  Ministry of Education’s online education portal will also link to these stories, hence making them available to their 1.5 million followers. he stories will also be made to other Khmer educational apps and projects, including Khmer LEARN, which has 38,000 users, and the Library For All app, which is used in 5 rural schools  

Increasing content in ethnic minority languages

In Thailand, StoryWeaver content will be translated as a part of the Let’s Read initiative there that utilizes a suite of integrated smartphone apps – a translation tool and free story reader app  - to increase content in ethnic minority languages.  A Let’s Read! translation workshop  took place in Chiangmai, Thailand where 10 Pratham Books titles from StoryWeaver were translated from Thai into S’gaw Karen. The programme will initially be implemented in 10 villages and positively impact 1,000 children.  S'gaw Karen is spoken by over four million S'gaw Karen people in Burma, and 200,000 in Thailand. The Asia Foundation will be using their own Thai translations on StoryWeaver to create joyful reading material in S'gaw Karen. Content translation for programmes in Bangladesh has also been initiated."

  

Participants at the ChiangMai workshop. Images courtesy Kyle Barker, The Asia Foundation.

You can read the Khmer translations uploaded by The Asia Foundation here. Keep following us on twitter for more updates about our work with them. 

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by Pooja Saxena

   

Pooja Saxena makes and works with typefaces, especially those in Indian scripts. See her work here, or follow her on Instagram.

My interest in designing typefaces in Indian scripts grew out of years of disappointment with the way most Hindi books I came across looked. Apart from a few exceptions, they looked like poor cousins of English books. Whether it was a children’s story book or a novel or magazine, there was usually the same drab typeface. Some letters didn’t look like what we were taught in school, on others the matras (vowel marks) didn’t arch at the right places. Overall, the books and the letters inside them had an air of neglect. They looked old and completely unexciting. When I first learned that designing typefaces was a real job, I thought here was the opportunity to change all that. 

Cambay, Devanagari typeface designed by Pooja Saxena for Google Fonts 

Changing the typographic landscape of a country as diverse as India is not a one-woman job, but every now and then a project comes by that has the potential to make a small difference. Two years ago, as a result of a conversation with Subhashish Panigrahi, the Access to Knowledge programme at the Centre for Internet and Society commissioned a Ol Chiki typeface family. The Ol Chiki script, about which I knew precious little at the time, is used to write the language Santali, which is spoken by over six million people in India and its neighbouring countries. At the time that we started working on this project, there was no Unicode compliant typeface available in the script, making it impossible for it to be used on computers and cellphones, and online in a consistent and future-proof way. We hoped to change that by designing a small, but useful typeface family (it comes in regular, bold and italics) along with input methods and keyboard layouts that would allow a person to type Ol Chiki text easily. 

Guru Gomke, Ol Chiki typeface designed by Pooja Saxena with research inputs from Shubhashish Panigrahi,

for the A2K Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society. 

This project was especially challenging because not only was Ol Chiki a completely unfamiliar script to me and Subhashish, but there was limited material available for us to consult. While designing a typeface in a script one reads and/or writes, or is at least familiar with, one’s experience with those letters can act as a guide. By writing them and seeing them printed in different fonts, in many people’s handwriting — some good, some bad — and on hand painted signs, one develops an instinct for identifying which parts of a letter make it recognisable. That way we know what parts of the letter can be exaggerated, and what others can be played down without compromising legibility. For an unfamiliar script, this visual vocabulary and the traditionally correct way of writing letters must be learned. Manuscripts, printed documents, handwriting manuals and samples, metal type, linguistic information about the script, feedback from native readers — all form parts of a puzzle that needs to be put together to design a competent typeface.

The story of Ol Chiki script is fascinating. The script is less than a century old, and was devised by Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who wanted to create a script that could accommodate all the features of the Santali language — something that the scripts used to write Santali so far had failed to do. Legend has it that he based the design of the letters on objects commonly found in the everyday environment of the Santals. Even though the script was created between 1920 – 1940, the Santal community has many myths about how it was created. One says that the script came to be at the time when the Earth itself was created, another says that the script was given as a divine gift to a learned man, Pandit Raghunath Murmu. It is after Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who is reverentially called Guru Gomke, that the Ol Chiki typeface that I designed was named. You can find out more about the Ol Chiki typeface and input methods project here. 

 

Custom lettering for the Tamil branding of the Coovum Art Festival, designed by Pooja Saxena 

If you’re interested in Indian type design and le ering, consider following the work of these exceptional designers — Noopur Datye, one of the co-founders of type design collective, Ek Type, who has designed custom typefaces TV channels like LifeOK; Kimya Gandhi, who is partner at Mota Italic, and recently designed an inventive Devanagari handwriting font; or Lipi Raval, whose flamboyant Gujarati typeface Mogra is a complete head-turner. 

 

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Nabanita Deshmukh is a teacher, a teacher educator, and a writer of children’s stories and poems. She had been a consultant at Azim Premji Foundation, Pondicherry and has worked with government school teachers on interactive methods of teaching. Nabanita has been instrumental in introducing Stories and Language Games as a means for developing language skills in primary level children. She has also conducted workshops for teachers and students in Odisha, Pondicherry, Kerala and Arunachal Pradesh on creative writing, storytelling and classroom games and other alternate modes of classroom teaching such as the use of magazines for the improvement of English. She conducts teacher interactions on motivation and classroom management.

She contributes stories and articles to magazines and publishing houses like Chandamama, Bal Vihar, Children’s World, Children’s Choice, Children’s Digest, Pratham Books and Matrubhumi.

You can read her books 'Why Do Bees Buzz?' and 'Why Can't We Glow Like Fireflies?' on StoryWeaver.

I am just back from a long teacher training tour in Chattisgarh and western Odisha. The main focus of the workshops was the enhancement of language and literacy skills through interactive modes such as stories, poems, skits and songs. In this context Pratham's Adi Kahani series and the online Storyweaver platform came in handy.

STORYWEAVER
Stories from this portal were shown to a group of primary school teachers and teacher educators from various states of India. Here is an example of how one of the presentations took place. The session went through three stages: pre-viewing, while-viewing and post-viewing. The 'First House' story was chosen for the demo.

In the pre-viewing stage, I first showed the cover page to the participants and they all had to guess what the story was all about and where it was set. This pushed the teachers to observe the illustrations and the printed details carefully. Later they guessed that the story took place in a forest and it was about two tribal men. 

Pre-reading or pre-viewing stages always help break the ice and familiarise readers with unfamiliar settings, characters and vocabulary. If teachers used prediction like I had done with the cover page of the book, students would surely show more interest in reading a story.

In the while-reading stage, I projected the first page of the book and asked the following questions:
    1. In which state of India do you think this story is taking place?
     2. Which creatures do the characters meet when they come out of the cave?
     3. What advice do these creatures give them? (Answers to be given using direct speech)
     4. What kind of house do you think the characters built eventually? (Description)
These questions were asked to help participants use communicative English (Q-3), imaginative skills (Q-2&4), logic (Q-3) and geographical knowledge (Q-1)

After getting the answers from the participants, the entire story was projected on screen and the participants enjoyed reading it. They also loved the colourful illustrations and the different options the story presented. I finally read out the paragraph on the Singpho tribe printed at the end of the book and made the teachers use atlases to locate Arunachal Pradesh and its physical features on the map.

Some teachers even attempted to translate the first few lines of the story in their own mother tongue-Kannada, Tamil, Bengali and Chattisgarhi.

 

ADI KAHANI SERIES
The Adi Kahani stories in the Kui language were used in Odisha with primary school teachers who taught children of the Munda tribe. This tribe speaks the Ho language. Despite not knowing Kui, the tribal and the non-tribal teachers reacted favourably to the stories. For example in the stories of the fox and the pitcher and also in the fox and the chicken, the teachers appreciated the use of local settings, objects and characters. They thought these would help children understand the story better as the surrounding is familiar-rivers, foxes, cowherds, women carrying wood, earthen pots are all so familiar to village children no matter to which tribe they belong to!

The story of how the rabbit got its long ears became an instant favourite among Munda teachers and many felt the folktale could be made into a skit.

It was a great experience using Pratham Books and the Storyweaver platform during my training. More Odia translations of stories and Munda tribe folktales  written in English and then translated into different languages will be most useful. I just came to know that the Ho language has a script. Heartening, isn't it?

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