Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal April 2008 Volume 6(2)

International networking

House of reading

Librarians and other literature professionals from Scotland visited ‘LesArt’, the Berlin Centre for Children’s and Youth Literature, on a Study Trip in November, exchanging work experience with fellow professionals from throughout Europe they describe their visit.

Supported by the Goethe-Institut Glasgow and their own employers, Mary Conway from Glasgow City Council, Frances MacArthur from East Dunbartonshire Council, Jasmine Fassl from Scottish Book Trust and Francesca Brennan from Edinburgh Council, were given a warm welcome to ‘LesArt’ in Berlin (literal translation: the art of reading). In LesArt’s own words, the house “develops creative models for literary-aesthetic education using all the arts and media. These models are based on the experiences that children and young people make in their own lives and when reading or looking at pictures”. LesArt’s success lies in the skilful way it leads young readers into new fiction through an imaginative range of activities. We had the chance to take part in these activities, to witness children benefiting from the LesArt experience, and to meet Berlin professionals working in partnership with the organisation.

It was particularly interesting to hear Berlin-based librarians and teachers discussing their current work practices and ways in which LesArt’s work related to their own. They described joint programmes which libraries delivered with LesArt expertise and school groups visiting the LesArt house to enjoy creative activities, summer reading programmes which echoed the British experience and which were enriched by the Centre’s input.

However the group did think that some of the LesArt methods might not travel so easily back to Britain. For example, LesArt’s regular book-based pyjama parties for teenagers struck fear in many of the study tour’s participants due to risk assessment concerns. Requests for quantitative evidence of LesArt’s (undoubtedly high level of) outcomes and successes met with a sketchy response which suggested that regular reporting was not an essential requirement for sustained public funding. The strong social inclusion agenda which the Scottish representatives work within did not seem to be an institutionalised strand of LesArt’s approach.

We saw a member of LesArt staff working with a group of young boys struggling with reading. The boys’ confidence in reading aloud to a large group of strangers was both impressive and affecting and this simple evidence of the power of books and reading was a convincing credit to the work of LesArt. This experience of watching emergent readers grow in confidence and visibly enjoying the process was a true highlight of the visit.

Academy for Reading Promotion
Anke Maerk-Buermann, from the Academy for Reading Promotion, is responsible for cooperation with, and interaction between, schools, libraries and kindergarten, the training of voluntary storytellers, pre-school reading promotion, and reading promotion in families.
The objective of the project, which is supported by the federal state of Lower Saxony and the Foundation for Reading. is to improve the regional conditions for the promotion of reading competence and reading pleasure of children and young adults. The main task of the academy is providing information to, and education and further training of facilitators/disseminators, the organisation and support of a regional communication network for reading promotion and reading culture, and the setting-up of an internet portal. Target groups for these activities are parents, teachers, education professionals, librarians and other committed reading promoters.

Main focuses were creating and support of local reading networks, training professionals - providing 400 different activities. Other projects are programmes like Bookstart (or Lesestart), the Book Buddy Project (primary children read to pre-school children) and Antolin, a web-based programme for teachers for classroom use. All the delegates found the presentation incredibly interesting.

Another presentation was given by Professor Kristin Wardetzky, a lecturer at the Institute of Theatre Paedagogics at the University of the Arts, on her special areas of research including storytelling as an art form, the theory of fairy tales, and theatre for children and young adults. Some questions were posed – what happens to children from homes where education and reading are not valued, who only encounter books at school? How do they discover the desire to read? One way to get them interested in books is through storytelling which can arouse a hunger for new stories.

A recent two-year project brought children to literature through the telling of fairy-tales. The aim of the project was to foster immigrant children’s skills in the German language through the creative art of storytelling. In the first months of the project there were doubts about its success. Problems with concentration crept in and the team became aware that for a large proportion of the children, their imagination was blocked. Then children began to make up their own fairy tales that they told to their classmates, using and combining fairy tale structures and images with everyday life and media experiences. The children’s concentration, creativity, language and expressive abilities had increased. Professor Wardetzky would like to see professional storytellers integrated into schools throughout Germany.

Over three days we found out more about how reading and literature was promoted to children and young people not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden and Norway, and to compare these approaches with that of Scotland. The importance of reading was generally recognised, but in other countries there is perhaps more emphasis on its cultural significance; the role it can play in helping develop minds and imaginations as well its importance in education.

Interesting approaches included the ‘House of Culture’ in Stockholm. There are three rooms especially designed for children of different ages, where they can read and borrow books, paint, listen to a story or sing. In the Netherlands the promotion of books and the creation of imaginative spaces to support reading is the responsibility of regional agencies. And in Norway there is a locally-based programme whose mission is solely to encourage reading among young people, using creative and modern means such as texting.

All the participants felt that there was a lack of funding to support their work, but it certainly seemed to those from the UK that there was more of a financial commitment in these countries to creating reading cultures, and less of an expectation that this should be evidenced directly.

However, one point we think all the participants agreed, and that was that reading is fun and that element needs to be at the forefront to successfully engage children and young people.

Many thanks to Gisela Moohan, at the Goethe-Institut Glasgow, for drawing this report together for Information Scotland.

Information Scotland Vol. 6(2) April 2008

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