Zohreh Ghaeni in conversation with iRead

My father loved books. He had a rather big library at home. I could never imagine him without books. His passion was not only confined to reading books, but he always encouraged us to read literature and poems. He always bought us many story books and read to us every night. My youngest sister and I had a collection of wonderful picture books, folktales and classic literature at home and we read them with great enthusiasm. I still remember the smell of paper and the colors of those books. During the hot summer afternoons, we lay in the basement and traveled to the world of fairy tales through those books.

I have always loved children. In the last years of my high school, I was fascinated by social activities, and that was when Samad Behrangi, a children's book writer who was a village teacher as well, became popular among the young intellectual people because of his critical stories against injustice and oppression. Samad Behrangi was a social activist and critic, folklorist and story writer from the Azerbaijan province. Like many other young people, I was influenced and very impressed by his books, which portrayed the lives of the disadvantaged children of deprived villages and cities.  I loved particularly The Little Black Fish story, when the little black fish says: "I want to go see where the stream ends. … I didn't sleep a wink all night…I want to know what's happening in other places." This part of the story moved me and encouraged me to leave university when I was 19 and move to a small village in north of Iran to become a teacher of the children who lived in poverty near the forests of northern Iran. In that village I started to read stories to children who had never had any books in their lives. 

Read with Me
iRead: Could you briefly tell us what is Read with Me? 

Zohreh: Read with Me is a project designed and implemented by the Institute for Research on the History of Children’s Literature (IRHCL), to promote literacy and reading for/with disadvantaged children who are generally at risk, the deprived children and children in crisis.

The Read with Me project was developed over nearly twenty years from the vast research on children's literature and creative education by the Institute for Research on the History of Children’s Literature in Iran. The project has been implemented for more than twelve years in wide areas of Iran (mostly deprived parts of the country), among children at risk, refugee children from Afghanistan, Pakistan immigrant families, and also in some Farsi speaking regions of Afghanistan.

iRead: Read with Me was established in 2010. Against what background was the project established? What problems were you seeing in Iran?

Zohreh: Reading literature with the aim of intellectual, emotional and social development of children is not an integral part of the Iranian education system. This problem is deeper in deprived communities, where children live in poverty, have to work and often their rights are violated.

It has reached to several hundred thousands at risk and unprivileged children and their families. More than 10,000 teachers, librarians and volunteers are trained. Hundreds of mothers with their babies and toddlers have participated in Read with Me workshops in marginal neighborhoods of large cities. Almost 100 libraries have been set up with rich literacy environments, defending
children's rights especially the right to read and learn. Many girls in small villages without a chance to study after the elementary school, have been working as librarians in their village libraries. It has worked in a wide range of fields: schools, nurseries, hospitals, factories, in natural and social crisis, in Iran or Afghanistan, for newborn children to young adults.

iRead: The project has three main features: expandable, flexible and sustainable. What do you mean by this? Can you give us some examples on how you make sure the project is expandable, flexible and sustainable? 

Zohreh:It is expandable: The project has realistic, clear and simple principles that are designed within a user-friendly model. When the people understand the principles and are trained through workshops, it is easily adapted and implemented by every interested local organizations and individuals. 

It is flexible: The structure is designed in a flexible way so that it can be adjusted to different social and cultural needs, whether urban or rural environments, or different setting such as preschools, schools, orphanages, and hospitals or even in factories. By now, the preschools and schools from different regions with different language and cultures, all around Iran and even in Afghanistan have joined to this program. 

It is sustainable: The constant supervision and evaluation of the project along with establishing child-centered libraries near schools which involve families specifically mothers in the project, ensure the sustainability of the project. 

iRead: Read with Me now covers 25 provinces in Iran and several 100,000 children and young adults. How does Read with Me choose the location and people to work with? From establishing connection with an area to building and managing a library, is there a standard procedure? 

Zohreh: During the first years of the project’s implementation, centers were assessed and chosen by Read with Me team, considering the requirements and necessity of the project in each region. Since the project was mostly implemented in schools, a cooperative Education Office in the region was also another important criteria in choosing a region. But in recent years, due to recognition of the project in most parts of the country, requests from different centers are received at Read with Me office. Choosing the locations and people depends on several factors or criteria: 
    The locations should be deprived areas and families should be from the low-income ones. 
    The people, whether from schools or kindergartens or any kind of centers, should be interested and cooperative.
    In some cases, the sponsors determine the deprived areas where they are interested to support.

Also, unfortunately there have been many natural catastrophes in Iran in recent years, and as children in crisis are an important focus of the project, regions affected by earthquake or flood have been chosen for the project’s implementation.

iRead: Read with Me makes quality books accessible to children in many different ways, such as providing cloth pocket libraries, building classroom libraries, school libraries and later on local libraries. How do you decide which kind of library to build? Could you tell us about each type of library Read with Me builds?

Zohreh: The most important objective of the project is to provide quality books for children. According to this objective, libraries have an important role to make books accessible to children. The kind of the library is decided based on the project’s features in each region or center. At best, classroom libraries are expected to work along with school or local libraries. Classrooms, schools and local libraries work in cooperation with each other to provide quality books to children and their families.

iRead: When we build school libraries in China, we often encounter the problem of the school locking up the library and not actually using the books donated. Do you have the same issue in Iran? If yes, how do you prevent this problem? How do you make sure the libraries stay open and are well managed?

Zohreh: This is a most important problem and those people who want to set libraries in schools should consider it. Most of the school principles are OK to have library at their school without paying money, but they actually have no insight into this issue.

iRead: Read with Me works with different kinds of vulnerable children such as working children, orphans, refugees, children in hospitals and earthquake affected areas and so on. Do you use different approaches when working with children in different situations?

Zohreh: There are several common principles that are followed in every single project. Such as: sharing quality books with children; making the books accessible to them; reading the books aloud; doing art-related activities with the children after reading; promoting dialogue-based reading among children and adults; empowering parents, teachers and librarians by enriching their knowledge on children’s literature; and sharing books with children through various workshops.

But of course the list of books, methods of sharing books with children with different problems and the type of activities would be somehow different. The books are selected for each center based on the needs and interests, and also the regional conditions. 

Also we focus on some specific parts of the project depending on the circumstances. In bilingual provinces where the illiteracy is the main issue, Read with Me focuses on basic literacy and reading and writing skills through literature. 

In marginal parts of the big cities like Tehran, where some empowering women centers (NGOs) are located, we have the “Reading with babies and toddlers” program for mothers and their babies. 

For children working in the brick kilns, we have trained volunteers who go to kilns with book bags and read aloud books to the children in their leisure time.
For earthquake-affected children, it is important to have short-term and long-term plans. As a short term plan, we dispatch trained volunteers with book packs and book packages with the purpose of bibliotherapy through reading aloud quality books and having dialogue with children in order to help them cope better with the emotional pressures of the crisis. For long-term, we train the volunteers and set up libraries wherever we can, even in containers. These libraries would be a relaxing place for children and their families amongst the chaos.

In hospitals, we train volunteers and send them to read books for sick children. 
 
iRead: What trainings does Read with Me do? Who does Read with Me train?

Zohreh: There is a group of Read with Me trainers who run different workshops for parents, teachers and librarians. The topics include:
•    Introduction to children’s literature and quality books
•    Illustration and picture books
•    Introduction to story elements
•    Reading aloud techniques and how to organize reading aloud sessions
•    Basic Literacy creative education workshops
•    Learning phonological and phonemic awareness skills
•    Reading with babies and toddlers
•    Dramatic art workshops
•    Emergent Literacy workshop
•    Rich-Literacy and child-centered environment

iRead: In what ways are volunteers involved in the running of Read with Me?

Zohreh: People, specifically young and educated ones, are encouraged and trained to join the projects in deprived areas. The volunteers are organized in different parts of the project according to their abilities and they are trained based on the projects’ needs. 

iRead: How does Read with Me raise money? 

Zohreh: Most projects are supported by private companies that are interested in such cultural activities. 

In addition to big supports, since March 2019, Read with Me started the campaign “one teacher, one classroom, one library” to collect small amounts for establishing small class libraries. 

Every individual can adopt a classroom library and support it financially. The campaign has been designed to collect donations to cover a larger group of teachers and classrooms with the Read with Me program. In addition to providing quality books for every classroom, the teachers are trained to share those books with children.

iRead: How do you monitor and evaluate the project? 

Zohreh: It is not easy to overcome these problems. During the years we have learned how to cope with these big issues. In some areas, we could negotiate with authorities to ease part of the problems. Recently, Read with Me has focused on families and designed some workshops for mothers. Step by step, we are trying to convince the parents to acknowledge the benefits of reading with their children. By sending books and handbooks, as well we clips and videos to them, we are trying to motivate them and also create rich literacy environment at their houses. 

iRead: Read with Me not only operates in Iran, but also in Afghanistan. Is it difficult to run programs in another country? What are some of your experiences that you could share? 

Zohreh: Reaching out to other Persian-speaking countries and sharing experiences with active promotion programs has been a dream for the Read with Me program and of course, Afghanistan has always been a special place for us. 
In Autumn 2016, Read with Me ran its activities in Afghanistan with the cooperation of the Future for Afghanistan Children Organization. This project covers almost 400 children studying in the first and second grade of elementary School in Mazar-e-Sharif and nearby villages.

In summer 2018, we held online workshops on “Learning Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Skills” for tutors in Herat.  August 2019 was one of the most violent months of Afghanistan in the past few years. Yet, in the midst of explosions and desperation and in cooperation with the Aschiana Foundation (IBBY Afghanistan), one of Read with Me experts travelled to Kabul to hold workshops for interested and volunteer young people.

In a 3-day workshop on the three topics of Children’s Literature, Reading Aloud and Child-centered Libraries, 28 volunteer reading promoters, representatives from different child-related institutions and organizations including Aschiana Foundation, Book Cottage, Charmaghz , Gahwara and Johanniter International from Kabul and Mahboba’s Promise’s orphanage, from Panjshir enthusiastically attended. (for more information see here: khanak.org/en/2019/content/read-with-me-travels-to-afghanistan/) 

Those workshops made us hopeful of continuing our cooperation for improving the conditions of children and young adults in the region. One of the consequences of this workshop was the establishment of a children's section of the Parande (Bird) Library in Panjshir – there was no children’s library in that region beforehand. Building the library started in 2019 and was very well-received by the locals from the beginning. It was finished within a year. In October 2020, with local cooperation the books were put on bookshelves. I am afraid after the rise of Taliban, we could not follow our dreams there, but we will never lose hope. 

Fortunately, Read with Me has long experience of working in Afghan refugee and immigrant communities and since that date, Read with Me has increasingly focused on the Afghan refugee families who have recently settled in the outskirts of big cities, such as Tehran. 

iRead: What are the most valuable things you’ve learned from running Read with Me?

Zohreh: We have learned that if we want to promote the culture of books effectively and develop life-long reading habits we have to start from babies, toddlers and families specifically living in deprived areas. Families have the most significant role in changing the destiny of their children. 

Work Before Read with Me
iRead: You have researched and studied various subjects in the field of children’s literature. One of the first is titled: “The responses of 4- to 6-year-olds to picture books.” Could you tell us a little bit about this research?

The extensive research on the history has proved that although there are a lot of similarities between the historical patterns in the west and the east, during the Middle Ages, children's literature in Iran was different in certain aspects. It referred to the very progressive views of the Iranian philosophers toward children and the concept of childhood. However, modern Iranian children's literature is very influenced by western children’s literature. In 1930, several pioneer writers and poets, who were mostly impressed by French, English and in some cases Russian children’s books, started to write stories and poems for children; simultaneously a considerable number of children’s books from western countries were translated and published. 

iRead: What impact did the publication of the 10-volume book The History of Children’s Literature in Iran have in Iran? 

Zohreh: The impact of the 10-volume book of The History of Children’s Literature in Iran can be evaluated from several perspectives. 

First of all, it was proved that the history of Iranian children's literature dates back to many years ago, and in fact it has an ancient past. Even the academic community and educators were very skeptical about how the history of Iranian children's literature could be so long and old!

However, with the publication of this collection of books, it gradually became clear that the children’s literature in Iran is not a modern phenomenon. The impact of publishing these books did not end there. Since this work covers the history of education, children's libraries and in general, the history of children's culture, many experts in various fields of children's culture were able to get acquainted with their work background. This was a great help to warrant plans for the future based on historical data. 

We are happy during these years that most of the research libraries related somehow to this field have these volumes in their collection. 

Also, most of the university art and literature departments or faculties, have placed these volumes in their research libraries, and many professors advise students to study these books as the very basic and necessary sources and references. And of course, a large number of interested families also bought these books for their home or local libraries. 

Based on the 25 years of research done for The History of Children’s Literature, and the unpublished muti-volume project called The Iranian Childhood History, the Iranak Museum of Childhood has been set up temporarily in Tehran. This museum has a narrative-interactive design. In the Iranak museum, artifacts are not objects of display. In fact, the narrative behind the artifacts is what binds everything together. The museum is interactive because children and adults become engaged with these narratives. They act and react, feel and think, learn and benefit.

iRead: You said, “researching the history of children’s literature changed my life completely.” Could you talk a bit more on this? How and in what way did it change your life? 

Zohreh: We all have prejudices about the history and culture of our country or other countries, which in many cases are incorrect. A large part of these prejudices is due to the lack of awareness of historical events. By studying documents and books related to this field, I gained a better understanding of the historical development of education, reading promotion, the establishment of children’s libraries and even children's rights in Iran. I can say that researching the history was a kind of school for me that changed my attitudes toward many topics.

Thank you Zohreh for a fascinating insight into your work!