Issue 12 – February 2020

Image courtesy: www.kobo.com Matilda, the protagonist and narrator of Lloyd Jones’ novel Mister Pip[i]  confides to the reader at the conclusion of the story, “Pip was my story, even if I was once a girl and my face black as the shining night”. She is referring to Pip, the hero of Charles Dickens’ classic, Great Expectations and also to the context when she first heard the story as a 13 year old pupil in a village school in a remote Pacific island off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the 1990s. The island which forms the historical backdrop of the fictional story of Mister Pip is torn apart by a brutal civil war and is under siege from the ruthless Government forces of the nearby mainland following a dispute over mining rights. There is a certain irony that the children of the island of ...

From the start, the library at Centre for Learning was visualised as a space of freedom, autonomy, relationship and responsibility. This approach is in harmony with the overall philosophy of the school but it seemed important to demonstrate this in multiple ways through the library space. The library is a space where ownership is equally shared by the students, the library educators and the teachers. Once that is clearly internalised, the consequent action is effortless and happens seamlessly. But channels of communication, listening, and relating play a crucial role in sustaining this spirit of an open library. An important experience for every child is the library project. This is usually in the last term which ensures there has been ongoing immersion in reading and library practices o...

Recently a group of us- Tibetan Librarians from across India- wanted to explore how the library looks and feels to our students, using art as the medium. The idea was to make collaborative images that represented their emotions towards the school library space, and to reading there. Presented below are some pictures of the emotional maps from different groups of students who came together to do this activity, in response to the same common instructions. This is a detail from the map of the junior school library drawn by class VI and V students of TCV (Tibetan Children's Village) Bylakuppe,  where I am the Junior school librarian. I gave them the instructions and observed through the activity that the children's minds were full of imagination.     This piece was created b...