Your sponsorship benefits learners around the world by allowing us to travel to their communities and help them find their own voice, take pride in their imaginative and expressive powers, and using an inquiry-based, real-world and creative learning style, produce their own original stories.
After each workshop, we choose an exemplary story and prepare and deliver a child-authored storybook to each sponsor. These books are both great entertainment and windows of cultural understanding for children, but are also fascinating for readers of all ages looking to understand community issues and outlooks in different parts of the developing world.
By increasing their cross-cultural empathy and love for expression.
Whether you're a teacher or a parent, bringing one of these storybooks into your home or classroom is an opportunity for you to show your young learners (of all ages!) a vibrant sampling of the human experience. Each takes on a different culture's tastes, sights, smells, mores, preoccupations, and pleasures. Readers get to inhabit this enchanting world, and build an intuition for this similar but subtly different life. Each one, also, centers on some local motif – a challenge or subject of great importance to that community, but that carries global significance. They get to toy with plots that dredge up tough moral questions, and gradually come to understand the "why," the forces that drive this foreign world and make it tick. Or clack. Or hum.
Further, in representing that culture via the imagination of other young learners, Rakonto storybooks are relatable to other students, and inspire them to express themselves. This is not just because they are told by other short people. This is because students see a reflection of themselves in the author that they lack when they normally read. Rather than see creative expression as something distant and unaccessible, they imagine themselves trying on the authors’ shoes to see how they fit. With young voices, the shoes always fit.
If your goal is to strengthen your students’ sense of what it means to live as empathetic and moral citizens in the 21st-century, a Rakonto storybook is essential reading! Whereas other learners will grow up hearing simplistic stories told about other cultures, these students will know better: They’ll have heard the stories that its actual members wanted to tell.
