Expanding access to high quality learning materials: Creating storybooks offline with Saide’s new African Storybook Maker

• In Event: Increasing equitable opportunities for learning: Technology and the provision of learning materials

Proposal

How can you learn to read for enjoyment unless you have enough books in a familiar language to choose from? (Gambrell, 2011). How can you develop a desire to read if books and publishing are alien to you or don’t capture your culture and reality? (Welch & Glennie, 2016). The African Storybook initiative addresses these questions for the marginalised 80% of African children for whom there is a severe shortage of books for early reading in their own languages (RTI International, 2016).

Since its launch in 2014, the African Storybook has used an innovative open license digital publishing model which enables free access to over 1000 titles, nearly 6000 translations and more than 180 of the languages of Africa. The books are accessible in multiple delivery formats and through a free Reading App. Communities, educators, and their children can create and translate their own picture storybooks on the website.

But there are two challenges to digital story creation in most African contexts. Typical users are proficient with mobile phones but struggle with computers; and connectivity in most main centres is weak or intermittent (Welch & Glennie, 2016).

African Storybook is using its prize money from the Google Impact Challenge South Africa to develop an offline story creation App for tablets and mobile phones and a theory-based guide with a tested collection of methods of story creation with children for children, using not only typical classroom pedagogy, but also psycho-social methods (Clacherty, 2016). When users are online, the storybook can be published directly from the App onto the African Storybook website.

In 2020, the App and guide will be piloted in six Kenyan libraries and associated schools. We will test whether the opportunity for digital publishing will motivate children and their teachers to regularly write stories (Stranger-Johannessen & Norton, 2017); and whether the technology will be sufficiently intuitive for use of the App to become a regular part of children’s literacy sessions.

Author

• Dorcas Wepukhulu, Saide