Rana Dajani, We Love Reading
Reading is essential to development of children’s personality, imagination, and cognitive skills. Arabia News estimated # of pages read for pleasure in the Middle East 0.5/year, while for the USA it’s 11 books/year, negatively impacting education systems and economic outputs of the region.
Children must learn to love and enjoy reading to reap its benefits. Many programs attempted to increase reading levels by providing books have failed. Research has shown that reading aloud is key in fostering the love of reading. In the West, this task is fulfilled by parents, teachers or librarians. Although these individuals are present in developing countries, the culture hasn’t embedded a sense of enthusiasm for reading aloud, and many are illiterate or lack reading skills and habits.
Therefore, I have developed an innovative model that provides a practical, cost efficient, sustainable, grassroots approach that involves women and the community to increase reading levels among children 4-10 by focusing on the readaloud experience to plant the love of reading. The We Love Reading (WLR) program constitutes training local women to hold readaloud sessions in public spaces in their neighbourhoods where books are routinely read aloud to children. This is our “library”. WLR chooses books that are age-appropriate, attractive, neutral in content, in the native language of the child. In addition to promoting the experience of reading, WLR empowers women readers to become leaders in their communities, builds ownership in the children and community members and serves as a platform for raising awareness on issues such as health and environment.
The model can be replicated anywhere. It uses an existing common public space e.g. the mosque or community center. It doesn’t need a bookshelf since all books are given out, requiring only a collection of books that are read again and again. The woman who reads aloud doesn’t have to be highly educated and trained. The women receiving training are required to “pay it forward”, by sharing newly acquired knowledge and training another woman to become a reader creating a domino effect. The trained reader is welcomed because she is from the neighborhood. The community starts to respect women and supports their roles as leaders and future change agents even within mosques. The community also starts to invest in the collection, building ownership and responsibility of the library. Reading has traditionally been considered boring or a waste of time outside of academic or religious contexts. WLR is changing attitudes and letting people know that reading is fun.
WLR is achieving impact at scale because WLR is a simple effective product that appeals to its market of mothers and children. WLR depends on networks of women who already resemble a movement to bring about social change through reading. WLR aims to develop long term cultural change. WLR isn’t delivering services which need support systems, it’s creating capabilities in hundreds of local women enabling them to be creative for themselves. Organizations need hierarchs but movements need causes, shared values, common goals to pull them together and give them a purpose, reading is the means but the cause is to get young children to realize they can and should think for themselves. The model is formulated in a way that each person can tailor the model to fit their culture, their needs while maintaining the essence of the model, aiding in building ownership to the project and sustainability.
WLR has trained 700 women, created 300 libraries, directly impacted 10,000 children (60% girls) and indirectly impacted 50,000 individuals in Jordan, worked across sectors-business local and private, government and civil society-to forge multi-stakeholder relationships to advance the WLR model. WLR has spread to Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Thailand, Mexico, Malaysia, Uganda, Germany and Azerbaijan. We have been contacted to implement WLR in NY City in marginalized neighbourhoods.
We have developed 10 books for children that focus on energy and water conservation and littering.
Neighborhood men from refugee camps encourage women library leaders. Mosque clerics proudly open their doors to women to administer read-aloud sessions and donate funds to buy books. Children have developed a culture of literacy discussing and recommending books and authors to their friends. Older children continue to be readers. Parents inform us that children exhibit higher self confidence and academics and they are likely to buy and read books rather than toys.
WLR has tangible outcomes to transform, in a short period of time, a whole generation of children into readers who love, enjoy, and respect books through the establishment of a library in every neighborhood in the world, whose impact on development of society is immeasurable.
Achievements
1. Awarded the 2009-2010 Arab world Social innovator from Synergos for the project "we love reading"
2. One of the finalist for the Ahel Al- himmeh award. An initiative by Queen Rania of Jordan to recognize individuals from the Jordan community who do volunteer work for the community and have made a difference
3. Complimentary membership to the Clinton Global Initiative 2010 where we pledged a commitment to open another 100 libraries in the next 5 years
4. We love reading has been chosen along with MIT open courseware to be a case in the book Innovation in education commissioned by WISE Qatar foundation by Charles Leadbeater. It was published in 2012
5. We have developed 10 children’s books on the theme of energy and water conservation and antilittering.
6. Finalist for the WISE award 2014
Online resources:
www.welovereading.org
https://www.facebook.com/WLReading
Movies
Euronews
http://www.wise-qatar.org/content/rediscovering-love-reading-0
AlJazeera
http://www.welovereading.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83%3Adr-rana-dajani-al-jazeera&catid=20%3Avideo&Itemid=132&lang=en
Ahel Himmeh
http://www.himmeh.jo/?q=node/2478
http://www.himmeh.jo/?q=node/2528
Talks
TEDxDeadSea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arLp-9nHcQQ
Clase Education 2012
http://clase.org.mx/2012/?perfil=rana-dajani
Articles
http://www.synergos.org/bios/ranadajani.htm
http://www.voanews.com/content/grassroots-libraries-promote-love-of-reading-104096053/169494.html
http://www.gulftoday.ae/portal/56bed1b5-1d53-4f99-bcdf-a11902057d2a.aspx