By Barbara J. Walker
After returning from the World Congress on Reading in Costa Rica, I reflected on the wonderful conversations that occurred. For me, the congress was truly an international experience, and I want to thank the IRA members from Costa Rica, especially Local Committee cochairs Marta Eugenia Sánchez González and Enriqueta Zúñiga Chaves, for their tireless efforts. They went beyond the norm when they offered professional development workshops in Panama and Nicaragua and encouraged attendance at the congress.
During the past two years, I have also had the pleasure of attending other IRA conferences in the Philippines, Africa, and Mexico. IRA has national affiliates in 62 different countries, and many of these affiliates hold their own literacy conferences. Along with IRA, other groups such as Rotary International, UNESCO affiliates, International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) affiliates, and private foundations also help support these conferences.
I was fortunate to attend a large education fair in Puebla, Mexico, which was sponsored by the Puebla Reading Council and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica. The four-day program integrated literacy, science, and health activities for families. More than 4,000 adults and children attended. There were science and literacy sessions for children and adolescents, a library for students staffed by local IRA members, and book displays from international publishers. In addition, there were professional development sessions for teachers featuring speakers from IBBY, special programs in Mexico, and myself representing the International Reading Association.
At night there were parent programs, family programs, group singing, and science experiences such as viewing the universe using a large telescope. What a tremendous way to develop literacy, health, and science!
This made me think about the international perspective within IRA. Is promoting these conferences part of our conceptualization of our global literacy goals? What other roles does the Association have in regard to global literacy?
Today, more than ever, the world is committed to ensuring global literacy, as evidenced by the international Education for All initiative and the fact that we are in the midst of the United Nations Literacy Decade. Literacy has become a key indicator for education in a world where illiteracy remains high. Many findings show that education, particularly literacy learning, is positively correlated to a number of sustainable development measures, such as better health, gender equity, and reduced poverty. Many of the world's poorest people are stuck in poverty in part because they lack basic literacy skills.
IRA promotes literacy learning and believes that everyone in the world needs to be able to read and write. Today, however, there are 771 million adults worldwide—one in five—who can neither read nor write. Of these, two-thirds are women. In addition, more than 70 million children do not attend primary school, which is highly related to literacy learning in developing countries.
In fact, literacy development is crucial for a country's economic growth. Most of the world's poor and uneducated are farmers in rural areas. Providing basic literacy education for these farmers is a powerful way to reduce poverty and to increase agricultural productivity. This, in turn, promotes economic development.
On September 8, International Literacy Day was celebrated at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura noted that literacy learning, particularly for women, improves health both within the family and in the community.
IRA has special projects that provide professional development regarding literacy instruction in developing countries. This, in turn, helps teachers develop basic literacy skills among adults and children.
In some cases, individual IRA members have volunteered to work on these special projects. For instance, IRA volunteers have participated in a series of UNESCO-sponsored professional development workshops on Diagnostic Teaching Techniques for schools and literacy sites to provide training in everyday informal assessment that improves literacy instruction.
So, does IRA's role in relationship to global literacy involve providing direct literacy services, professional development, or organization expertise in developing countries?
As we celebrated International Literacy Day in Washington, DC, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, there were speeches, award presentations, and an experience with the "Reading Across Continents" pilot project. In this project, blogs and e-mail will be used by secondary students from Washington, Nigeria, and Ghana to discuss the cultures described in Copper Sun (a penetrating story about the slave trade written by former U.S. National Teacher of the Year Sharon Draper) and Purple Hibiscus (a heartfelt story of growing up in Nigeria's political tumult written by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie).
As the project progresses, author-led book talks will be broadcast to classrooms throughout the District of Columbia Public Schools and simulcast live to the students in Africa. This is a tremendous approach to raise cultural awareness among secondary students.
Becoming aware of the larger global community is a lifelong undertaking. However, the students from the United States, Ghana, and Nigeria are beginning that journey early in their lives. In fact, hundreds of students in over a dozen countries around the world are sharing their cultures in technologically interactive ways.
These students are learning to think of themselves as global citizens. Thus, they see their place in the world very differently than their teachers or parents. Internet communication, blogs, and websites have brought all our cultures closer together. So, is IRA's international goal to provide international cultural awareness within the context of literacy activities?
IRA members work every day as individuals and as councils to promote international projects. I would like to highlight just a few. Through Project Love, Canadian IRA members provide school supplies and books to students in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania. Meanwhile, the Santa Clara Reading Council in California supplies writing tools and books in Spanish for students in Nicaragua in partnership with the Sisters of Notre Dame Schools.
The "Book$ and a Buck" program of the Kansas Reading Association sends books to Ethiopia. The United Kingdom Literacy Association has a "Books for Africa" project that raises money to purchase books in African countries in order to ensure the books are culturally appropriate. So, is IRA's global literacy goal to provide literacy resources and books to developing countries?
Through all these international literacy endeavors, we begin to understand that the world is growing increasingly smaller, and literacy is growing increasingly more powerful. By building literacy communities around the world, we broaden our perspectives of cultural expectations and hopes. Yet we learn another perspective in these international exchanges as well—the more you learn about another country and its culture, the more you learn about yourself. Perhaps this is the true international goal.
IRA President Barbara J. Walker is a reading education professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Emphasizing the "I" in IRA (October/November 2008). Reading Today 26(2), 20.
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