The people who lead Born to Read training sessions are leaders in Maine’s early childhood field. The size of this trainer cohort has grown from eight—in Born to Read’s pilot year of delivering the Many Eyes, Many Voices diversity program—to 30. In addition to coordinating these training sessions, trainers play an important advisory role in training development and refinement.
Since Born to Read trainers live all over the state, from Fort Fairfield to Mibridge to Starks, its difficult for them to stay in touch. They meet once or twice a year to exchange ideas and discuss changes in materials, but they rarely have a chance to hear about trainings other than their own. To remedy these communication challenges, Born to Read has started a blog for its trainers. The blog includes excerpts from training reports, updates on training procedures, noteworthy current events, and even some humor. While the content is geared toward trainers, anyone can access the blog and comment on the discussions in progress. Please visit the blog and leave your comments: borntoread.edublogs.org.
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“Modernity in America: New York City as Case Study, 1880-1930” was the theme for the fourth summer of the MHC’s Teaching American History program on American biography. This is a program for Maine teachers intended to help with research methods that will strengthen the classroom experience, both for teachers and students. The biographical focus for this summer program came from a range of significant New Yorkers, from Andrew Carnegie and Boss Tweed to George Gershwin and W.E.B. Du Bois. The program situating their individual stories in the larger narrative of immigration, urbanization, and social reform (or its failure). Half of the last week of July was spent at Bowdoin College’s campus in Brunswick doing preliminary research, and then the teachers went to New York City itself for on-site exploration.
Ed O’Donnell, a history professor at Holy Cross, expert on New York City, and seasoned veteran of urban walking tours, led the outings. The teachers had a busy series of days. They walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, hearing O’Donnell tell the tragic story of the Roeblings, the father and son who built the bridge, and themselves read from Hart Crane and Walt Whitman (who crossed Brooklyn Ferry right where they were standing). They also visited New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center, a major scholarly resource for the study of African American history, on Malcolm X Boulevard. One of O’Donnell’s major “lessons” during the tour was the layering of generation after generation of immigrants in Lower Manhattan; a now-Chinese church, for example, had a list of the neighborhood’s WWI dead, all the names Irish or Italian.
Sixteen Maine teachers were part of this tour.
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Borders bookstores throughout the state are running a special book drive this month to benefit Born to Read. Customers can buy one of 15 books from the new Peaceable Stories initiative to be donated to the program, along with 5% of the proceeds from those book purchases. Please spread the word to friends and family about this easy way to support one of the Council’s newest initiatives. Borders stores are located in Bangor, South Portland, and Brunswick.
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The August booklist from Born to Read captures the excitement over the release of the final Harry Potter book by suggesting some titles for younger children on similar themes.
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Last summer, Born to Read received a grant of $5,400 from the Massachusetts-based Frances R. Dewing Foundation to create an Activity & Resource Guide for its new Peaceable Stories initiative.
This new guide significantly strengthens the ability of training participants to put training content into their teaching practice with children. The guide is specially designed and formatted for those working in child care facilities. It features tips for discussions, activities, and environmental enhancements to help child care providers bring the books distributed in the training to life. Resources include poems, songs, supplemental book titles, related curricula, organizations, and websites. Blank space throughout the guide encourages reflective practice as well as hands-on use of the guide contents.
It took a full year to write, design, edit, and field-test this publication. Born to Read used funding from the Frances R. Dewing Foundation to pay the guide’s writer, Audrey Maynard, and illustrator, Lisa Jahn-Clough, as well as consultants with expertise on the many topics addressed within the guide—from early literacy, to its thematic focus on peace and conflict resolution, to the important inclusion of its theoretic foundation in scientific research regarding healthy cognitive, social, and emotional development.
The guide will be distributed free of charge to child care providers and other early childhood educators who participate in Peaceable Stories trainings.
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New Books, New Readers is commonly called the MHC’s adult literacy program when in fact it does a great deal more than improve reading skills. It is a reading and discussion program designed for adults who have difficulty reading or who are not in the habit of reading. Its goal is simple: inspiring an interest in reading in all participants. Or, as put by the program’s director Julia Walkling, “We want people to read, to love reading, and to think about what they read.”
Books and reading, New Books, New Readers believes, are not pleasures that should be limited to those who read well. People who struggle to read are capable of gaining much from a reading experience. The discussions that are part of this program, facilitated by scholars who truly care about participants’ thoughts and opinions, are exchanges of ideas that, for many participants, are unlike other experiences they have. The discussions are one reason that people come back over and over again. The free books are another.
People who encounter New Books, New Readers for the first time are surprised to find children’s books as the core curriculum. Yet in many cases, these are the best books to use to introduce people who have trouble reading to the joys of the experience; the words are simple but the emotions powerful. New Books, New Readers puts together themed groups of texts (Courage, Community, and Freedom being a few of those themes) that help link discussions. But using children’s books as serious humanities resources is nothing that anyone should be ashamed of. Philip Pullman, author of The Amber Spyglass, the first children’s novel to be nominated for Great Britain’s Booker Prize, said, “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” It is with that thought that the program texts are used.
In recent years, New Books, New Readers has developed programs specifically for members of the immigrant community who are just learning English (see the last newsletter’s Focus on Funding section). The program is also in Maine’s prisons and jails. During the next year, New Books, New Readers plans to do more for incarcerated adults.
Prison inmates generally have basic literacy skills but rarely have the experience of talking about what they have read. Their discussions are among the most advanced in the program. Low-literacy inmates and literate inmates read and discuss books together. Conversations often involve conflict resolution and matters of aggression as participants reflect on the actions of characters in the stories and discuss how conversation and understanding might be used to resolve difficult situations. These participants tell the MHC that they leave the program with a new, thoughtful perspective on their lives.
For more information about New Books, New Readers or to see a list of the series and books used by the program, click here.
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Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to The Woods is a classic memoir of life in a remote outpost near Lower Richardson Lake in the 1930’s. Rich, her companion Ralph, and a cast that includes various dogs and cats, their young son Rufus, and sometimes Ralph’s daughter Sally, occupy Forest Lodge, where they sustain themselves by fishing, maple sugaring, gathering berries, hauling tourists’ canoes and gear, and doing other odd jobs. This book epitomizes much of the Maine experience as seen by both locals and people from away and is a key text in Let’s Talk About It’s Defining Wilderness, Defining Maine series. Questions used in this series include how different people have experience and written about the Maine wilderness and how these accounts have shaped Maine’s cultural identity.
New Books, New Readers
An old house remains vacant for years until Henry, a stranger to the community, moves in. His neighbors are at first delighted, thinking that the eyesore will become a habitable place more in keeping with the other properties. But Henry likes things as they are, refuses their demands and overtures of help, and insists on keeping his house ramshackle, his lawn weedy, and his driveway full of snow. Old Henry, by Joan Blos, illustrated by Stephen Gammell, is from the New Books, New Readers “Justice” series. Questions used for this book include:
- Are humans “naturally” good or bad?
- Who decides what’s “wrong”?
- Which is more important in allocating justice, the individual or the community? How do you decide?
- Who is in charge of justice? Whose responsibility is it?
- Is revenge a kind of justice or not?
This book and others help participants have powerful discussions about the nature of justice and community.
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In celebration of the literature and medicine movement (and in anticipation of the MHC’s national Literature & Medicine conference on November 9 through 10, 2007), Notes from an Open Book is presenting a glimpse of the keynote speakers from this conference and showing how their work supports the ever-important field of literature and medicine. This is the third and final installment in this series.
For seven years, Anne Fadiman edited the venerable literary quarterly The American Scholar. Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She has won National Magazine Awards for both reporting and essays. Fadiman is the editor of both the 2003 edition of Best American Essays and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005). Her newest book, entitled At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, was published in June.
Anne Fadiman’s first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, chronicles the trials of an epileptic Hmong child and her family living in Merced, California. Fadiman’s sensitive, incisive treatment of the unbreachable gulf between the Hmong and American medical systems won her numerous accolades, including a National Book Critics Circle Award. The Washington Post called the book “an intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration.” The book continues to be taught at universities both as literary journalism and as a casebook for cross cultural sensitivity in general; it is also widely read by medical practitioners who wish to offer more effective care to patients from other cultures.
Back to the TopAlthough summer is winding down, the MHC continues to fund events across Maine. Those of you who like to explore the smaller museums and historical societies in the state might want to visit a new exhibit about the development of the herring industry in Washington County, or “Off the Grid: Maine Vernacular Environments,” the first and only survey of contemporary self-taught art in Maine, sponsored by the USM galleries. Another exhibit funded by the MHC, entitled “Island Schools: Sustaining our Community from the 1750s into the Future,” is only open for a few more weeks. Here are the details:
This summer’s exhibit at the Museum of Chebeague History is entitled “Island Schools: Sustaining our Community from the 1750s into the Future.” Through teacher grade books, textbooks, class photographs, town records, teaching certificates, transportation information, graduate lists, newspaper articles, report cards, and oral histories, the exhibit will reveal how town schools have contributed to Chebeague Island’s vitality and-most recently-independence. The museum is located in the District 9 Schoolhouse and is open Tuesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. To learn more, please call (207) 846-5237.
Click here for the full list of grant-funded events.
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Dutch writer and Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum.
Many of the events listed above were grants funded in the most recent round. For a complete list, click here. Here is one project of note:
$1,000 to the Rockland Public Library, Rockland, for The Thinking Heart
A performance piece in two voices, with cello, based on the journal and letters of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation and died in Auschwitz in 1943. The performance is an original arrangement of her journal and letters in the form of poems written by Martin Steingesser.
“As an human resources professional and an hospital administrator, I am constantly reminded of the impact that the Lit & Med project has had on strengthening our interpersonal relationships in and out of work and has served as a foundation for connectivity between participants of a rich personal memory & tradition and is a source of future anticipated hope.”
—Maine participant, Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health CareŽ
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Thank you to our current members. Your support helps to make Maine Humanities Council programs like the ones detailed in this newsletter possible. If you are not a member but would like to make a gift you may do so online or contact me, Diane Magras, for more information.
Notes from an Open Book welcomes feedback from its readers. Please contact Diane Magras by email at diane@mainehumanities.org or by phone at (207)773-5051 ext. 208 (toll-free 1-866-637-3233, ext. 208) to respond.