Saturday morning 9 am. In a narrow lane in Banaswadi, Bengaluru. A school. Vibrant, bursting with energy! Hundreds of children, chattering away  in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu. It's a full house. You can almost smell the excitement in the air. Akkas and Annas have come. New faces with new stories. This was the Storytelling Saturday!

One fine day in March, just before the exams started, we decided to give the tiny-tots a break and let them spend a Saturday listening to stories, thanks to volunteers from Oracle Banaglore. A school that our dear friends at Akshara Foundation do commendable work with, was the chosen destination. We gathered children from standard 4 to 8 and set the ball rolling. Our Pratham Books colleague Shruthi, opened the session by introducing the volunteers, the session and playing a little game with the children to wake them up completely!  Once the entire hall was bubbling with excitement, volunteers from Oracle started with Gayathri Tirthapura and Kabini Amin’s 'Dum Dum-a-Dum Biryani' - story about a sibling team, their love for cooking and the power of Maths! The children listened in rapt attention, joining in every now and then to do mental calculations as Basha and Sainabi went about measuring the ingredients.

Once the story finished, we slipped into the activity mode with children dividing themselves in groups and playing a game based on maths and numbers. This was followed up with another lovely tale, 'Up World, Down World' by Padmaparna Ghosh and Sunaina Coelho which took children through the canopy forests and introduced them to its various inhabitants. The session ended with a prize distribution for the winners in the activities and lot of cookies going around.

 

Pranjala P, one of the Oracle Volunteers had this to say about the session-

"Walking into a land of fantasy is always an exciting experience. When you have a room full of enthusiastic kids with you, it is even more fascinating. Such was my experience as I got the opportunity to be a part of the storytelling initiative at the Government Kannada Higher Primary School. One can never match the children’s level of enthusiasm. As all the volunteers from Oracle, introduced themselves to these adorable children, they were more than happy to greet us and often paid us a compliment with 'Nice name!'.

As Bhanu started with our first story, 'Dum Dum-a-Dum Biryani', and Pramodh helped with the translations to Kannada, children got into the mood and we were all transported into the world of Basha and Sainabi as they cooked the world's best Biryani. I know I was drooling with the details of the Biryani! Once the story was done, we engaged the kids with mathematical activities related to the story. They were all divided into groups and each of us took on responsibility for one group. Of course, we had all the support from the teachers & staff of the school.

Manini took over the next story, 'Up World, Down World', and the children seemed engrossed in the story and the vivid pictures of the little girl, Fatima and her animal friends.

The children were playful and naughty and adorable throughout. There was no hint of inhibitions as they surrounded us, asked questions & shook hands. The cookies and the toffees were a hit with them. Their joyous spirit was beautifully captured by Pradeep.

I would like to thank all the volunteers who came with family or by themselves and made the event a success. Vivek & Pradeep came with their families, Manini brought her mom along,  Bhanu's son was present, Pramodh and Shashank, Mohammed Saleemuddin, Prathik and Devey came too. I know I speak on behalf of all of us, when I say that we had the most wonderful time and I can't express enough gratitude to Payoshni and her team from Pratham Books, for giving us this opportunity. Finally, we walked away with happiness and memories of those million dollar smiles filling our hearts & brightening up our day!"

By the time the session ended, the sun was beating down on us with all its might but everyone in the school had a smile on their face, a smile that expressed a day well spent! We thank Oracle volunteers for their time and enthusiasm and the Akshara Foundation and Government Kannada Tamil Higher Primary School for opening up their classrooms for the session.

Click here to see more pictures from the session!  

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written by Anamika Radhakrishnan, Arpit Arora, Pallavi Krishnan

The StoryWeaver team has been attending a number of conferences in the last few months. Here’s a look at the highlights from some of them. 

DataKind Bangalore, DataLearn "Data Matters" (Nov, 2018)
Pratham Books was invited to talk about the advantages of a data-driven approach in developing the StoryWeaver platform and showcase the project with DataKind Bangalore to develop a NLP prototype to auto-tag stories with relevant keywords and themes to enhance content discoverability.

Arpit Arora from StoryWeaver was also a panelist at the event talking about the importance of data-driven strategies at social organisations and how other organisations and volunteers emulate this approach.

International Conference on Technology for Education 2018 (Dec, 2018)
Pratham Books was recently part of the International Conference on Technology for Education (T4E 2018) held at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. This was the ninth in a series of annual events held with the objective to bring together all colleagues interested in promoting learning and teaching through the use of information and communication technology (ICT). 

Anamika Radhakrishnan from the StoryWeaver team talked about “Leveraging technology, collaboration and open content to address the global book drought for children”. The 20 minute presentation was followed by an extremely interesting Q&A on  how AI can help address many of the challenges faced by the StoryWeaver platform

Microsoft Academic Research Summit, IIT Madras (Jan, 2019)
Purvi Shah, Digital Head, StoryWeaver was was invited by Microsoft Research to talk on the topic of AI for Societal Impact and how StoryWeaver plans to leverage AI to move towards its mission of ‘A book in every child’s hand’. The summit was a forum to foster meaningful discussion and discussion among the Indian Computer Science research community and enable collaborations to advance the state of the art and raise the bar on research efforts. The theme for this years summit was Data Science and AI.

This comes shortly after the commencement of our partnership with Microsoft Research to develop Parallel Corpuses for improving the efficacy of crowd sourced Indic language translations.

AXLE 2019 (Jan 2019)
Pratham Books was invited to be part of a panel discussion at AXLE 2019 held by Microsoft Academia Accelerator at Bengaluru. The panel discussion titled Building and Using Technology for Underserved Languages included discussions around how English is currently the aspirational language. Anamika Radhakrishnan from the StoryWeaver team says “It was extremely gratifying to know that preserving our mother tongue languages is given a high priority across sectors including the mainstream technology companies such as Microsoft”

Bodh: EdTech roundtable for social impact: Tata Communications (Feb, 2019)
Under the aegis of Kreeda aur Shiksha, a Tata Communications - VVMVP Initiative, BODH: A Roundtable on EdTech for Social Impact was held in Bengaluru. The idea of the BODH roundtable is to create a space for informed conversations on EdTech and bring together innovators and practitioners who are transforming learning in formal and non-formal spaces using ICTs and new media. There were over 28 speakers who contributed to the roundtable.

Pratham Books was asked to participate in a panel discussion at the session on Creating Impact Using Digital Media on the topic of Bridging the Gaps with Technology. Pallavi Krishnan from the StoryWeaver team was part of the panel discussion along with Smriti Reha from Anaadi Foundation and Vatsala Shrivastava from Social Alpha and was chaired by Supriya Singh from Tata Communications. The session focused on how practices from diverse fields have successfully channelized the potential of digital and new media to create social impact.

 

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Suganya from the StoryWeaver partnerships team, talks to Vandana Shah, COO, Sharana, a Pondicherry-based social and development organisation that works to address the critical educational needs of socio-economically disadvantaged children and communities in urban Pondicherry and its surrounding villages.

This year, Sharana used the StoryWeaver for a reading programme they ran as part of the summer camps at their centres in Pondicherry. 

Q.Tell us about yourself and your association with Sharana. What motivated you to work in children’s education and welfare space?

My name is Vandana Shah and I am the Chief Operating Officer in Sharana- an NGO based out of Pondicherry. Most of what I am today is because of the education in the ashram school at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre for Education till the age of 21 completing my bachelor’s degree.
I was always passionate about people, the villages and communities. I had the opportunity to volunteer in Sharana, a social organization, for six months before my Master's degree. I helped by doing odd jobs, teaching children English, translating French letters in English, and most fun of all- accompanying the children for a one-week long residential camp in Summer. That week of Summer Camp has had a great impact on me; it is probably what made me decide to look back towards Sharana 6 years later. 

After having completed my Master’s degree I worked in several fields; teaching languages as a teacher, coordinator at a Language institute, interpreter. In 2013, Sharana happened to fall into my lap, when I approached Mrs. Rajkala P., founder and president of the organization and since that moment in March 2013- 6 years have flown across, I have not seen the time pass and I am beginning to realize a more meaningful purpose in life. 
In my experience at Sharana, I am convinced that true and lasting change can only be brought through education and this is especially true of children from the streets and slums. If they want to come out of the vicious cycle of poverty and become independent and productive individuals, schooling is essential. We have seen children from the toughest backgrounds come out victorious against all odds, and our dedicated team of social workers has always been present in case any hurdle arises.
 
2. Do you like to read books? If yes, how important is introducing reading culture in children from their young age?
I love reading books, although I confess, I have not been able to read as much as I would have liked to in the past few years.
In today’s age, where there are screens everywhere, it is essential to introduce reading to the children. It’s a dying habit, it’s so rare to see children pick up a book and read, most of them read on screens, watch videos - it's indeed the digital age everywhere.
I owe too much to my teachers and friends who pushed me to read, without their push I would’ve never done it. And now it’s our turn, more than ever, to encourage the children to read and to live the joy of reading, of coming back home and running to finish a book, or eating while reading, or reading through the night because we can’t just close the book! And that moment when you finish a book, and just hold it for a brief moment in your hands. That feeling is priceless.

3. Tell us about your experience with the StoryWeaver Reading Programme and what kind of impact it had on your children.

The children come to Sharana every day of the summer camps and plan several activities for them during this time, ranging from free games, to art, dance, etc. This year we had thought of introducing a reading practice and free-reading activities, where children can pick any books they would like to from the library and read.

The reading programme fell into our laps at the correct time- we had a series of stories, specially designed for Indian children in the context of the summer holidays. The images were real and local, the names were Indian, in short, the scenarios were palpable and imaginable by our children. This was a huge change from other books which may not cater specifically to Indian children. We used to project the stories and often do a read-along followed by some simple interactions and activities.
 
4. What change do you want to see in children’s education space? What do you wish for the children that you work with at Sharana? 
Sharana works with over 1000 children in total, of these over 400 are from the streets and slums in and around Pondicherry.  Most of the children who access our rural as well as urban centres are first generation school goers, most of which attend government schools. In this schooling system, where most exams are passed depending on your “by-hearting” and not necessarily on your understanding skills- it is important here to note that our children’s levels of English vary from basic to almost nil. The challenge, therefore, is huge, but the effects of this reading practice are real- today after just a few weeks of using these stories, the children are more confident when they read and they try to understand the meaning of the words and sentences without simply repeating -this was clearly lacking before.

We encourage children to read books. When they are in Sharana, books and art material is always at their disposal- they should be able to choose what they would like to do in their free time and have the means available to do it. 
To our immense pleasure some children have started picking up books and running to the shelves and fighting over who gets which book- sometimes it’s to go through the pictures, and sometimes it’s to read aloud- sometimes it may be too tough and they just try to read aloud a few words- whatever the reason we see that the seeds have been planted!
 
Reading is essential for the learning of any language, and especially reading aloud and reading regularly- we will continue to provide these to the children in the centre of Sharana. Even when other programs start and may finish- access to reading in Sharana will remain a constant. I want the children at Sharana to make friends with books and learn to escape into the world of the written word.
 

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