Written by Amna Majeed
Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988) is a canonical book that is read widely across the world by all age groups. The book follows the story of a young girl who is born with supernatural powers but is neglected and misunderstood by her family. In the initial years of her life, she yearns for friends and companionship but remains forlorn. It is during this time that Matilda finds solace, comfort and extreme intellectual stimulation in books. She reads widely and exhaustively, reading scholars such as Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, and even as a toddler travels to the library daily to issue books and magazines.
What do books mean to children? What purpose do they serve? How is that purpose different from the reason that adults read books? What is the significance of reading during childhood? The eminent American poet and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou said, “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his needs, is good for him”. Reading is truly an irreplaceable habit for children and becomes a turning point in one’s life. It inculcates the practice of introspection, individual thinking and of understanding and grasping the world personally, slowly and intimately.
Mana Nestham: A Mobile Library
During the pandemic and the recurrent lockdowns, Agastya devised several ways to tackle the sudden loss in learning opportunities. We launched the WeLearn application on Google Playstore in seven languages and also launched the ActiLearn book in order to encourage self-reliance and learning in students. As things moved towards digital education and distance learning, we tried to keep up with the times. We also preserved and re-instituted the more organic forms of learning and erudition. We invested in the initiative “Mana Nestham” (a Telugu word that translates to “Our Friend”)with an aim to provide free access to books. Mana Nestham operated outside of the Kuppam campus in Andhra Pradesh, and functioned as an outreach program. It conducted a 45-day extensive pilot study that reached 67 different schools, of which 56 were primary schools.
Through concerted and dedicated efforts of our instructors, we could reach 6115 exposures¹. Mana Nestham focused on reading practices, story writing, origami, and kirigami, Word games, Read and Share and many more engaging activities. With the ubiquity of digital technology, the form, content, and style of reading books have changed drastically in the past decade. Through initiatives such as Mana Nestham, Agastya is attempting to preserve more focused and established practices of reading, writing, and collective thinking. The astrophysicist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said, “one of the greatest gifts adults can give, to their offspring and to their society, is to read to children”. The companionship one finds in a book is rare and irreplaceable and allows for contemplation and self-analysis. These are values that Agastya constantly attempts to inculcate as well. Our broader aim, that of instilling the ethic of “Aah! Aha! Haha!” in our students, is reflected in Mana Nestham as well. Through a mobile library, as we introduced children to books in their routine, we develop novel pedagogical styles and modes of rumination.
Preserving Reading
As children are now learning and growing up in an environment where digital modes of education are becoming increasingly prevalent, we must introspect on what practices we may have left behind and how and in what ways they applied to our lives and our education. The diverse and heterogeneous purposes that books serve, the solace they provide in tough times, and the unimaginable source of introspective thought that they are- all these form critical reasons to preserve both individual and collective reading practices. Through mobile libraries and constant efforts to read for our students and also with our students, we are trying to conserve reading as a holistic and central practice in our pedagogical endeavors.
Exposure is used to measure Agastya’s reach. It can be defined as the number of times Agastya has face-to-face interactions with an individual (child/teacher/community member). Each exposure is 2–3 hours in duration.
