Creating Cultural Masterpieces One Island at a Time

Project responds to deeply felt need for resources in the vernacular

by Robin Peirce

The temperature approaches the upper 30s Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), and every fan in the room is whirring at hurricane force. Through the open windows of the school classroom come the sounds of the sea, birds, and rustling palms; the scent of frangipani fills the air.

Around long tables sit teachers, senior education officials, language experts, and illustrators. There’s a hum of talk, bursts of laughter and song. The tables are cluttered with paper, pens, paints, crayons, and artifacts brought to share with the group.

On the center table are reference books and textbooks being used as examples. Little by little, this table fills with completed scripts and drafts of texts written and illustrated by the participants in this Information Text Awareness Project (ITAP) Writing Workshop. Facilitators move around, helping where necessary. The group is silent from time to time as an expert holds a tutorial on an aspect of publishing such as genre, content, design, or layout.

This is the third day of the workshop on Niue Island in the South Pacific. This island is about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) northeast of New Zealand and has a population of about 2,300.

Participants in the project, developed by the International Reading Association’s International Development in Oceania Committee (IDOC), have already completed introductory sessions on the nature and features of information text, various genres, and writing for children at different levels of achievement. The participants also have brought culturally specific items to the sessions, such as finely woven fans and baskets, carved weapons, household utensils handed down through generations, jewelry, containers, and musical instruments made of wood and shells, and shared their meanings with the group before writing about the objects.

What makes these workshops so different and so vital is that the participants are writing in their vernacular about the artifacts and the cultural experiences that surround their daily lives.

The idea for the workshops came after the very successful Elley/Mangubhai Book Flood in Fiji. The “flood” involved introducing interesting literature to classrooms and teaching instructors how to use the reading of fiction as a replacement for the usual English curriculum. Research showed that similar teaching was not happening with nonfiction. Pacific Island teachers asked for help, and the IDOC responded. Commercial nonfiction was surveyed to see what was available for use in the Islands, and a comprehensive list was developed. It was tested first in multicultural classrooms in Australia and New Zealand, then in Kiribati in 2000.

It was discovered that the lack of nonfiction material in the vernacular was a major reason why teachers had diffculty teaching and children learning. This was particularly true for grades 1–3, before children start learning English. The workshop was extended to include 2–3 days of writing in the vernacular. Participants write texts for grades 1–8. Niue, where workshops have continued each year since 2002, is now branching into secondary level texts.

This scene has been repeated throughout the South Pacific since 2000. In addition to the workshop on Niue, facilitators from the IDOC committee have taken the workshops to other island nations in Oceania, including the Republic of Kiribati, Fiji, and Rarotonga.

In order to have each education community own and maintain its part of the project, which is supported by IRA, a local educator “shadows” the committee facilitator and runs follow-up workshops with the initial group. The goal is then to take it to other communities and islands.

Schools in many island nations are very short on resources for teaching children to read and write. Commercial publishers and printers are not interested in short runs of books in a dialect that perhaps only 350 people speak. It would be much too expensive. The books islanders do have often are imported, outdated, and have no relation to their lives. Elders in the islands are desperate to keep their languages alive; the ITAP workshop is responding to a deeply felt need for resources in the vernacular.

The ITAP experience itself is richly rewarding to those who participate and offers an opportunity to grow in insight and awareness of island cultures. Initially, facilitators from Australia and New Zealand discover that working and going on holiday to a South Pacific island are two quite different things. They often find themselves outside their comfort zones. The second jolt comes in finding out how many islanders think they have nothing to write about, so accustomed are they to imported books in English. Thirdly, the knowledge that “outsiders” value the unique nature of their culture and environment gives workshop participants an enthusiasm that’s both moving and humbling for the facilitators.

It seems obvious, but it’s a message that bears much repetition: Everyday life may not seem interesting to those living it, but it is full of unique detail that has grown from a history, culture, and environment unlike any other. Young children should be reading about their own lives and backgrounds in their own languages; if they don’t, it is difficult for them to understand how important literacy is to the survival of a culture.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency in the islands to treasure books and to keep them shut up in cupboards and bring them out only for special occasions. This project aims to make reprinting easy so that the books are always accessible by children.

By the end of each workshop, there are approximately three dozen information texts, most of them ready for publication, some still in draft form. Many have been created using computers and graphics programs, while others are handwritten, with beautiful illustrations.

There is a downside to the whole process: When the facilitators have left, often the local education ministries don’t release the funds provided for printing the first lot of books. Rarotonga has since used their funds to print books written in Aitutaki, but the funding was not used to print the first workshop books. Niue has overcome this obstacle by buying a commercial photocopier, paid for with a generous donation. The copier is housed in the primary school and has been used to produce hundreds more of the books from subsequent workshops. This seems to be the most cost-effective approach.

The Oceania Committee also has produced handbooks for facilitators and participants of the workshops so locally trained educators can repeat the weeklong sessions in their own countries and committee facilitators can take the program to other islands.

ITAP is one of several projects developed by the Oceania Committee. Other projects include Book Clubs for Teachers, sponsoring classroom teachers to attend national conferences, collecting donated books for school libraries, and working with other agencies to help pay for equipment used to publish books in the vernacular. ITAP is the longest running project and has proved successful and very rewarding in every setting.

For more information on this and similar projects, visit IRA’s International Project Partnerships weblink on the IRA website at www.reading.org/association/outreach/partners.html or contact the International Development Committee at IRA or visit www.reading.org/association/outreach/index.html.

Robin Peirce is the chair of the International Development in Oceania Committee of IRA.

Creating cultural masterpieces one island at a time. (June 2007). Reading Today, 24(6), 8.