Teachers as Readers and its Ripple Effect!

“When I started taking books into my classes, I realised my students made a note of it, went to the librarian and pestered her to give them the same book,” says Kaynat, a Primary English and Math teacher at Akshara High School.“I saw the effect it had on my students who wanted to be well-read and join conversations on whether they have read a certain book or not.”

This article focuses on the impact books and a thoughtful school library programme can have on teachers, developing a teacher’s professional and personal capacities, and how it also deeply impacts the students of the school bringing about a reading culture for all.

The Akshara context

Akshara is a not-for-profit school, following the ICSE board. English, in most cases, is the third (if not fourth) language for our children and learning a language so alien, is a struggle for most. As educators we were keen to expose our children to English as much as we could and this is what took us to the library. Reading books will help’ – we’ve all heard that. But I was convinced our children were not reading. They were issuing books, keeping them for a week and then returning them. I was sure of this because they would not converse with me about the books while returning it. I realised that our librarian was not reading either. The children never saw their teachers read anything but textbooks and their homes had let the television replace any written word that ever existed. I knew we had a mammoth task ahead of us. The task to build a culture of reading – in school and at home. All from ground zero.

How It All Began

We started the library program by reading to children, talking to them about books and introducing them to the crazy world of literature and we began doing the same with teachers. Teachers got homework! They were given children’s books to read. Simple chapter books, with central child protagonists in each of them, set in an Indian context. We began with a bunch of Duckbill Hole Books, where child characters faced problems of bullying, under confidence, playground and lunchtime politics, family complexities etc. Teachers had to write character sketches about these child characters, understanding child behaviour better and from a fresh perspective. This exercise had multiple outcomes. Children were reading similar books, so teachers and students exchanged notes and conversations between them opened up. This allowed a space for breaking the default hierarchy that is set between teachers and students and opinions were exchanged with mutual respect. What was more interesting to notice was that teachers warmed up much more to simple problems that children faced and displayed higher levels of sensitivity towards them.

Gradually, we began The Weekly Reading Circle where teachers were given an article or essay from popular journals and magazines and after reading it, there was discussion and debate encouraging teachers to analyze, present opinions and draw conclusions. We talked about ‘consent’ before Holi celebrations, ‘the MeToo campaign’, ‘Demonetization’ and had heated debates on ideas on ‘home-schooling in an urban setup.’ These conversations were important as teachers needed to develop wider perspectives in order to ensure their conversations within the classrooms were not restricted to information in the textbooks.

Teacher Homework continues…

On weekends teachers were expected to visit places around the city which included museums, nature walks, heritage walks as well as bookstores. Two Library periods were added to every teacher’s weekly school timetable during which they read for leisure. They had so much to read that they were carrying books with them everywhere they went. The best part was that children were watching them read! It was made compulsory for teachers to take in at least one fiction and one non-fiction book into the class for every topic they taught. Continuous in-house training helped teachers build their capacities to browse library collections regularly and empowered them to curate book lists for their lessons.

“When I take a book on history to class, my students look at the book with big wide curious eyes. Books like ‘A Flag, A Song and A Pinch of Salt’ and ‘A Children’s History of India’ written by Subhadra Sengupta have become hot favourites,” says Heena, a passionate History teacher at Akshara, who is either seen with a thick History book in her hand or seen dressed in costume walking into class like a character from the past.“At Akshara, my methodology of teaching has changed drastically, I no longer teach with textbooks as support, but I take my collection of books on History to class.”

Science teachers take in ‘Inside Your Outside’ by Dr. Seuss while teaching ‘The Human Body’, Geography teachers take in books like ‘A Night in the Sunderbans’ by Tannaz Daver, ‘Walk the Rainforest with Niwupah’ and even Art books by Tara publications to cover folk art and urban-rural landscapes. English teachers are happy to teach grammar through books like ‘The Alphabet of Animals and Birds’ by Prabha Mallya while teaching collective nouns. “I started beginning every unit in my English classes with a story,” says Kaynat.“We were learning about a character named Ella who was a forgetful elephant. Before beginning the lesson, I started off by reading‘Elephants Never Forget’ by Anushka Ravishankar to let the children identify the contradiction in both the stories.” It was the perfect environment for Math teachers to take in Tulika publication’s ‘Mathematwist’ and even the Sports teachers found a number of titles to take into their classes.

It was magical to see children making a beeline to the library to borrow these books they saw their teachers carry. We had to buy double and triple copies of these reference books so students could borrow them as well. We were proud to see that our children had understood that information lay beyond their textbooks – a colossal shift in the understanding of what learning can be.

Book Week at Akshara

The book buzz was catching on when we introduced Book Week at school. This was planned as a well-designed week full of book readings, storytelling sessions and author studies. Each grade had a theme to hook them further into the world of literature.We even invited author and illustrator friends from our network to come visit and they happily obliged. The catch was that teachers were introducing these books in their respective classes, so they had to read a long list of books and plan innovative activities around them. Children were seen issuing copies of booksthat were being read to them.This is when I knew they were reading. They were reading because they wanted to read, not because they were being asked to read.

Unfortunately, the Book Sale at the end of Book Week bombed. Parents were not convinced. For families with little spare change, buying books seemed like a waste of resource. “What happens after they read it once?” many honestly asked. Teachers didn’t buy books either. We knew we were swimming against the tide.

We put a lot of energy and time to continue our work with children and teachers in a steady, consistent manner. We put mini-class libraries in every class so children could access them between periods or when they completed their work before time.We had to push our children to move from picture books to chapter books and chapter books to novels. We added parent workshops around books and language to make them understand the power that lay within these pages. By the time we had our third Book Week, we saw both children and teachers walking out of the Book Sale with at least one book in their hand.

However, the topic for our fifth year of Book Week shifted something very deep in all of us at Akshara. The topic was ‘Talking about Equality’ and this theme ran across all grades of our school and took our effort to create a reading culture to a complete high. At the time, the market was buzzing with titles that talked about breaking social stereotypes, talked about disability, gender inequalities, socio-economic disparities, marginalized lives, abuse and even violence. There was a wonderful mix of international as well as Indian titles, ranging across reading levels. We put together a long list and as always, teachers had to read these books before Book Week began as they were to conduct sessions with their students. “A book named ‘George’ caught my attention. I was no reader,” says Rujuta, a Math and Chemistry teacher. “I didn’t have any interest in reading, but this story turned out to be so interesting that I read it in one go.”

Children were heard pointing out stereotypes when they heard statements that didn’t fit right. “Stop crying like a girl”, “Boys don’t cry” were addressed with serious passion by students. Teachers were very cautious not to let any such statement slip by, even by mistake.

Books about gender discrimination ranging from ‘Soda and Bonda’ and ‘Pink and Blue’ all the way to David Walliam’s ‘The Boy in the Dress’ and Ranjit Lal’s ‘Faces in the Dark’ were being read and discussed from Std 1 to Std 10. Books like ‘Kittu’s Very Mad Day’, ‘Wonder’, ‘Against All Odds’ helped us understand our role in society to be more inclusive to those different from us. Being an inclusive school, it was interesting to observe a change in attitude in teachers as well as students on how to deal with differences and different abilities without being awkward. What gripped the senior school students most were the young adult books by Paro Anand, Harsh Mander, Himanjali Sanker that talked about relationships, broken families, ideas of class, caste and religious discrimination and violence against minorities – topics that no one ever bothered to talk to 14-year-olds about.

The Book Sale, in the fifth year, saw teachers, children and even parents walk out with bags full of books. The sales baffled us! 

By the end of the fifth year, our teachers began reading regularly and most of our children were hooked. They had been inducted young, they grew up surrounded by positive reading influences and, most importantly, they had realised that books contained within them new ways of thinking, new ideas and had the ability to show us the same world through a different lens. In an age where information is presented to us in quick capsules with an objective to consume rather than cherish, where attention spans are rapidly reducing and time is an element that is always running short of itself, a reading culture may seem impossible to thrive. However, we know that it can be cultivated. Teachers, who had never read books before, are now creating little reading shelves in their homes.

The People Who Run the Programme and the Place

Last year, Akshara was awarded one of the top 30 school libraries as part of the Bandana Sen Library Awards. I am reminded of a very interesting panel discussion topic from the event titled – ‘The Library: A Place, A Programme or Its People’. For us, at Akshara, we are lucky to have the largest, most well-lit space in our school dedicated to the library and we’ve infected the school with reading programmes over the years. But to ensure these programmes sustain and the space thrives with excitement, we rely completely on the people who run it!

As the Executive Director of the school, my identity as a children’s author and a picture-book addict is evident in every facet of my presence in the school. I resolve conflicts through picture books, find solutions to problems by browsing through library shelves and take over free periods with storytelling sessions whenever I get the chance. Children and teachers have free access to books kept in my room, while some of the non-readers get personal gifts from me, so they are forced to read just to keep me delighted.

We are also most grateful and indebted to the entire children’s literature community including authors, poets, illustrators, publishers and the wonderful Kahani Tree bookstore who have all been so generously sharing their love for reading with our children and inspiring them year after year. Authors like Sampurna Chattarji, Shabnam Minwala and Natasha Sharma trek across the length and breadth of the city, year after year, to visit us. Others who overcome the relentless traffic, winding routes and disheveled roads to get to us every year, with beaming smiles and bags full of goodies are Nalini Sorenson, Lavanya Karthik, Vaishali Shroff, Neha Singh, Shals Mahajan, Deepa Balsavar, Lovleen Mishra, Tanvi Bhatt, Sonal Gupta, storyteller Priyanka Babbar to name just a few. Others like Paro Anand, Anushka Ravishankar and BijalVachharajani who live in other cities talk to our children via Video calls and are sure to make a special visit when they hit the city. It is overwhelming to see the love we receive, and it only adds to wanting to read more and enter deeper into the world of literature.

Just last week, 10-year-old Anjali stood in our library and said, “I wish I could make this library my home. Then I could read any book at any time and I would never have to issue a book ever again!”We hope and we dream that our teachers and our children become the ‘people’ who take the love for reading with them wherever they go.