StoryWeaver has been blown away by the amazing work being shared on Instagram @36daysoftype. 

"36days is a yearly open call inviting designers, illustrators and visual artists to share their view on the letters and numbers from our alphabet."

We noticed that most people were taking part in English till a colleague pointed us to @HindiRinny who was doing fabulous things in the Devanagari script. Check out this awesome video: 

 

ढ #creativesprint #Devanagari "Day 25: Teach us how to do something."

A video posted by HindiRinny (@hindirinny) on Apr 25, 2016 at 8:17am PDT

We thought it would be amazing if we (and that means you too!) could start contributing an alphabet in a language we're fluent in, designed creatively. 

Take a look at what our Content Manager, Yamini Vijayan shared: മ for Manjadikuru.

You could share these from your own Twitter, Instagram or Facebook handles and tag us @PBStoryWeaver or email a picture at [email protected].

Looking forward to some amazing, creative Indic language letters! 

Be the first to comment.

---

The excitement on the day of any StoryWeaver workshop is often mixed with some nervousness. We meet so many new people from different organisations and always want them to share the excitement we feel about books in classrooms! We wonder if the participants would connect with what we have to say and how they will react. This nervousness gets  magnified when the workshop is in an all new city.

Thankfully, our wonderful community never disappoints :) Here’s an account of our last two workshops in the beautiful cities of Jaipur and Hyderabad.

We were in Jaipur during the first week of October to host a StoryWeaver workshop with educators and resource leads of various education organisations. The workshop was our first in the city and was organised with the support of Jawahar Kala Kendra (JKK). They gave us access to their stunning centre and their library -- forming the perfect venue for a workshop on the importance of reading.

We had representatives from 18 organisations across Rajasthan attending the workshop, including UNICEF,  Educate Girls, OELP, Doosa Dashak and GoodWeave India. It was wonderful to host participants who had travelled from as far as Jodhpur and Bikaner. As the session progressed, we deep dived into the intriguing world of stories and explored how stories open a child’s eyes to a world filled with joy and learning.

The participants tried their hand at StoryWeaver and chose themes that they found most interesting and explored the platform for stories around them.

One of the most lively discussions was around how different kinds of books can be used with children across various age groups. One participant raised a pertinent point about the need for books in tough subjects like bullying, migration, and hunger. They also enjoyed putting on their writer’s hats and created some lovely stories on the platform.

At the end of the workshop, one of the teachers, who had come from faraway Jodhpur, told us that this was the first workshop she and her colleagues had ever attended outside their centres. This statement demonstrated the enormous responsibility that rests on us - to ensure our workshops stay relevant and productive for our teachers and educators who travel great distances putting their work and home on hold to attend our workshops. 

After our first StoryWeaver workshop in Jaipur, we organised our next in the familiar city of Hyderabad. With the support of Dr. Reddy’s Foundation, the workshop saw participants from various organisations like AIF, Youth4Jobs and Youngistaan Foundation.

 

To celebrate the diversity of languages we have, we had a resource person, Haripriya, help us conduct some parts of the workshop in Telugu. Haripriya runs a gorgeous children’s library in Hyderabad and was a  participant in our last Hyderabad workshop. Her presence not only encouraged participants to share their thoughts in Telugu, she also helped us showcase our best Telugu books.

“I thoroughly enjoyed facilitating the workshop in my mother tongue, Telugu. I had a memorable time sharing and learning from educators from different organisations who came together to understand how best they can make use of the platform in their classrooms. Together we read, created, translated books in English, Hindi and Telugu,” she remarked after the workshop.

 

Our team and the participants agreed that the lunch organised by Dr. Reddy’s Foundation was one of the most delicious meals we had had in a long time. Maddirala Sai Praveen from Azim Premji Foundation, a participant who has experience working with young children in anganwadi centres, volunteered to conduct an energiser post the hearty meal. That got all of us all laughing! The youngest participant of the workshop was the eight year-old daughter of a teacher in attendance and we have to say she was the most energetic of the lot!

As the year comes to a close, we would like to thank all our wonderful participants who make these workshops an amazing learning experience for us. We are also grateful to our new and potential partners, and friends of Pratham Books like Jawahar Kala Kendra and Dr. Reddy’s Foundation for their constant  support.

Here is wishing our readers a Happy New ‘Reading’ Year for 2019.

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

Be the first to comment.

---

Anil Menon’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books, 2010) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books 2012), an international anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana epic. His most recent work is the novel Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015). He has written 'Manikantan Has Enough' for StoryWeaver. 

Last year, while my friend Emma Dawson-Varughese and I were chatting, we were interrupted by the loud wails of her daughter Mahia, then about two-years-old. Mahia had crawled past her mother’s alert eye, wriggled, flipped, and finally gotten stuck underneath a sofa.  Emma rescued her self-pitying miscreant with a sigh.  I’m sure that sigh has been echoed by every parent since the beginning of time. It is impossible to prevent children from wanting to explore the world.  

Until recently however, parents had one comfort. Children may explore, but parents could guide their exploration because the world stayed the same, more or less. Parents knew what to expect. Alvin Toffler in his “Future Shock” gives a striking description of just how little things have changed for most of human history. We’ve had civilization for about 50,000 years. If we divide this period into generations of 62 years each, then so far, there have been about 800 generations. The first 650 generations lived in caves. We have had writing just for the last 70 generations. It is only in the last six that masses of humans have had access to the printed word. The electric motor has been around for a mere three generations.  The internet is less than one-generation old.

Because the world used to stay mostly the same, parents could child-proof the future. The best way to do this was with stories. So children heard the same stories their parents had heard and took away the same lessons. The same culture. The same standards of beauty, of justice, of right and wrong, of how to treat different groups of people.  There was hardly any need to update these lessons, and children could grow up to be just like their parents. This was considered a good thing.

Things are different now.  Science and technology have unleashed new forces largely beyond anyone’s control. The way we eat, work, mate, raise children, and communicate are all undergoing massive changes.  Our kids are going to get stuck in situations we can hardly conceive.  They’ll live in a world where most objects possess a certain minimal awareness. Subtle AI programs will mediate everything our future adults will see and hear. Privacy  will become harder and harder to achieve. There will be near-sentient robots, cyborgs, and materials almost magical in their ability to manipulate light, heat and sound. They will be able to share each other’s experience, not through conversation as we do, but through more direct means, perhaps by some sort of neural link. At the same time, the complications of global warming will radically constrain all aspects of life.

Too far-fetched? The stuff of science-fiction? Yes. Our children’s futures have indeed become science-fictional. So how do we prepare our children for a rapidly-changing world we’ll (mostly) never experience?

From 'Manikantan has Enough'. Illustrated by Upamanyu Bhattacharyya

We can’t. We cannot child-proof the future anymore. But just as parents help their children explore the real world, they can also enable children to explore possible-worlds. Coming generations of kids need stories that won’t just show them how things are, but will also inspire them to speculate how things could be. We need stories that don’t pretend adults have all the answers. We need stories that’ll help children learn to appreciate difference and ambiguity. We need stories that’ll teach children to question the stories they’re told. Our ancestors could take comfort in the fact things would remain the same. Our children can take comfort in the fact things may always be changed for the better. Then the brave new world will also be a world worth living in.

comments (2)

---