Product Details

Author Information

Corresponding Author
Beth Lewis Samuelson
Indiana University Bloomington
School of Education
201 N. Rose #3022
Bloomington, IN 47405
United States
p: 8128568256
blsamuel@indiana.edu

Authors (listed in order of authorship):
Saudia Baskerville
TEAM Schools

Tamonica Braswell
TEAM Schools

Melissa Bullinger
IU Bloomington

Maya Dendy
TEAM Schools

Atiya Drayton
TEAM Schools

Denia Edwin
TEAM Schools

Emma Engelhardt
IU Bloomington

Sarah Hayden
IU Bloomington

Hilary Gaiser
IU Bloomington

Michelle Garrett
IU Bloomington

Andrea Hynes
TEAM Schools

Kendra Golson
TEAM Schools

Megan Hammersley
IU Bloomington

Shania Jackson
TEAM Schools

Bethanie Johnson
TEAM Schools

Edressa Kamal
TEAM Schools

Madelyn Kissel
IU Bloomington

Jenny McDougal
IU Bloomington

Dusty Miller
IU Bloomington

Leah Myhre
IU Bloomington

Emily Neitzel
IU Bloomington

Adrianna Pappas
IU Bloomington

Alyssa Rosch
IU Bloomington

Nayyirah Sabir
TEAM Schools

Rachel Schend
IU Bloomington

Brian Smith
TEAM Schools

Sarah Travis
IU Bloomington

Bridget Trent
IU Bloomington

Kim Trippi
IU Bloomington

Britney Wade
TEAM Schools

Kareem Walker
TEAM Schools

Brandon Wright
TEAM Schools

Faith Blaisi
TEAM Schools

Lauren Caldarera
IU Bloomington

Jeff Holdeman
IU Bloomington

James Kigamwa
IU Bloomington

Ali Nagle
TEAM Schools

Beth Lewis Samuelson
IU Bloomington

Alexander Weinstein

Addy Bryan
IU Bloomington

Abby Borman
IU Bloomington

Emma Munchel
IU Bloomington

Chris Purvis
IU Bloomington

Caitlin Ryan
IU Bloomington

Andrea Schuba
IU Bloomington

Eleanor Stevenson
IU Bloomington

Kim Trippi
IU Bloomington

Product Description and Application Narrative Submitted by Corresponding Author

What general topics does your product address?

Humanities, Liberal Arts, Global Studies

What specific topics does your product address?

Community engagement, Cultural competency , Curriculum development, Education, Interdisciplinary collaboration, storytelling, literacy

Does your product focus on a specific population(s)?

Adolescents, Children

What methodological approaches were used in the development of your product, or are discussed in your product?

Community-academic partnership, Participatory evaluation, Service-learning

What resource type(s) best describe(s) your product?

Open access textbook

Application Narrative

1. Please provide a 1600 character abstract describing your product, its intended use and the audiences for which it would be appropriate.*

Books & Beyond was launched in 2008 as a collaborative service project between three partners: TEAM Charter Schools (Newark, NJ), the Global Village Living-Learning Center (Indiana University Bloomington), and Kabwende Primary School (Kinigi, Rwanda). As of 2014, the project has printed six collections of stories.

The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was written and illustrated in 2009 by the students of TEAM Charter Schools, with mentorship and project support from undergraduate students at the Global Village Living-Learning Center (IU Bloomington). Middle or high school students at TEAM Schools authored and illustrated the stories. Each student author received mentoring and support from Indiana University undergraduates. The IU Bloomington students compiled and printed the collection. The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was submitted as an exemplar of Books & Beyond’s work. Subsequent volumes are currently embargoed.

The theme of The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was “home and places of safety” and addressed the collective desire for family, home, tradition, and security. Subsequent volumes have focused on other themes, such as taking care of the earth and dreams for the future.

The first audience for this collection was the student population of Kabwende Primary School in Kinigi, Rwanda and TEAM Schools; each child received a copy of the book in 2009. The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was released online in 2013 to make it freely available to a wider international audience of readers and to serve as a model for academic-community partnerships that may wish to launch similar initiatives.

2. What are the goals of the product?

According to the mission statement of Books & Beyond:
Books & Beyond is a cross-cultural literacy exchange for students and teachers from the United States and Rwanda. Books & Beyond seeks to develop globally minded students who are prepared for life in the 21st century by increasing critical literacy skills, addressing the Rwandan book famine, and developing models for cross cultural teaching and learning.
Each partner has additional goals that are specific to its context, yet are mutually supported by the other members of the project. TEAM Charter Schools seeks to provide middle and secondary schools with mentorship from university students. Kabwende Primary School seeks to provide students with English-medium reading materials and access to improved instruction in English. And the Global Village seeks to increase students’ civic engagement, promote retention in the living-learning community and at the university, and develop practical skills through leadership opportunities, cross-cultural communication, project management, and public speaking. The undergraduate students provide the leadership for the project, helping with the production of the stories, as well as publishing, marketing, fundraising, public relations, and documentary work. The World is Our Home, Vol. 1 has fourteen stories written by US students, but Volumes 2-5 have approximately thirty stories each: fifteen written by TEAM students and fifteen by Rwandan students.
The project was conceived of and developed by middle and high school students and their teachers at TEAM Schools in Newark, NJ, in collaboration with undergraduate residents and staff of the Global Village Living-Learning Center at Indiana University, and students and teachers at Kabwende Primary School in Rwanda. Over 60 TEAM and 193 Global Village students participated in the project during the first four years. At Kabwende, over 45 students contributed stories to the books, and 400 students participated in the summer English camp in 2012 and 2013.

3. Who are the intended audiences or expected users of the product?

The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was created for the students who contributed the stories and for the students of Kabwende Primary School. The first volume is unique in that it served as an invitation to the Rwandan students to contribute their stories in the future. Additional copies of the book were sold to help raise funds to support Books & Beyond. In addition to reaching this primary audience, the project hopes that releasing this collection online will provide a model for academic-community partnerships that may wish to launch similar collaborative literacy initiatives. School and community-based initiatives in student-led service learning will find the model helpful for designing school-community storytelling partnerships.

4. Please provide any special instructions for successful use of the product, if necessary. If your product has been previously published, please provide the appropriate citation below.

For the students who received a copy of the book, there were no special instructions other than that they would take it home and read it. The books’ design required an organized team of undergraduates, middle school and primary students, who devised their process for brainstorming, writing, illustrating and editing the stories. This process is documented in (1), (2), and (3) and in Q. 8.

The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was printed in 2009 for distribution in Rwanda. No ISBN number was assigned. Approximately 2500 copies were printed. Remainder copies of the book were sold to supporters in the United States to raise funds for the project.

Books & Beyond. The world is our home: A collection of short stories (Vol. 1). Bloomington, IN and Newark, NJ: Indiana University & TEAM Charter Schools.

5. Please describe how your product or the project that resulted in the product builds on a relevant field, discipline or prior work. You may cite the literature and provide a bibliography in the next question if appropriate.

The theoretical foundation for Books & Beyond’s activities appropriates aspects of community and collaborative literacy, as well as community engagement. Community literacy encompasses the study of the production, uses, and impacts of texts in community settings. The term “community” here is broadly understood to encompass the kinds of intentional communities that form around solving problems (4) or studying issues, as well as the traditional bricks-and-mortar neighborhood communities (5). Collaborative literacy foregrounds learning as lived experience and literacy as community participation (6) and incorporates situated informal learning within a larger activity system that gives the activities performed by the partners broader meaning and consequence (7). Community engagement is a learning outcome valued by all Books & Beyond partners (8).

Higgins, Long & Flower (9) have identified four practices that are central to community literacy and that provide a theoretical lens for understanding the practices of Books & Beyond. First, members assess the situation and identify rhetorical needs, then develop the capacities of “local publics” (p.11) to meet their needs. Finally, they support personal and public change through the circulation of texts and practices that they have fostered. For instance, Kabwende identified a need for freely available, high interest reading materials to support English learners (10). TEAM valued mentorship for at-risk minority students, to encourage them to consider going to college (11). And the Global Village valued a service project that would help students to develop intercultural and civic engagement skills (12).

By taking the needs and aspirations of its “local public” as its starting point, Books & Beyond furthers the goals of Freire (13) in his call for informal education that emphasizes community engagement, in which people actively shape their own learning as they work on real problems in their communities. All volunteers bring essential knowledge and skills, and the project builds their capacity to serve. As a result, the project accomplishes different goals for different participants. However, the project is very pragmatic in its orientation and does not take an explicitly activist or critical stance in its activities (14).

6. Please provide a bibliography for work cited above or in other parts of this application. Provide full references, in the order sited in the text (i.e. according to number order). .

1. Samuelson BL, Smith RT, Stevenson E, Ryan C. A case study of youth participatory evaluation in co-curricular service learning. J Schol Teach Learn 2013;13(3):63-81.
2. Amakuru!: A newsletter for the participants and supporters of the Books & Beyond project.
3. Books & Beyond Member Handbook. Bloomington, IN and Newark, NJ: Indiana University & TEAM Charter Schools; 2009.
4. Bruce BC, Bishop AP. New literacies and community inquiry. In: Coiro J, Knobel M, Lankshear C, Leu DJ, editors. The handbook of research in new literacies. New York: Routledge; 2008. p. 699-742.
5. Flower L, Heath SB. Drawing on the local: Collaboration and community expertise. Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 2000; 43.
6. Flower L. Talking across difference: Intercultural rhetoric and the search for situated knowledge. CCC 2003;55(1):38-68.
7. Gutiérrez KD, Baquedano-López P, Alvarez HH, Chiu MM. Building a culture of collaboration through hybrid language practices. Theory into Practice 1999;38(2):87-93.
8. Bringle RG, Steinberg K. Educating for informed community involvement. Am J Comm Psych 1999;46:428-441.
9. Higgins L, Long E, Flower L. Community literacy: A rhetorical model for personal and public inquiry. Comm Literacy J 2006;1(1):9-43.
10. Elley WB. The potential of book floods for raising literacy levels. Int Review Educ 2000;46(3/4):233-255.
11. Rhodes JE, DuBois DL. Mentoring relationships and programs for youth. Curr Dir Psych Sci 2008;17(4):254-258.
12. Rowan-Kenyon H, Soldner M, Inkelas KK. The contributions of living-learning programs on developing a sense of civic engagement in undergraduate students. NASPA J 2007; 44(4):750-778.
13. Freire P. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum; 1993.
14. Remley D. Re-considering the range of reciprocity in community-based research and service learning: You don't have to be an activist to give back. Comm Lit J 2012;6(2):115-132.
15. Samuelson BL, Holdeman J, Jacobs D, Caldarera L, Kissel M, Uslan N. All the world’s a page. Talking Stick 2013;Jan: 38-45, 51.
16. Samuelson BL, Caldarera L, Nagle A. Syllabus for literacy leadership service learning trip. Boston, MA: Campus Compact; 2013. Available from http://www.compact.org/syllabi/literacy-leadership-service-learning-trip/24308/
17. Kuh GD, Schneider CG. High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Assoc Am Coll Univ; 2008.

7. Please describe the project or body of work from which the submitted product developed. Describe the ways that community and academic/institutional expertise contributed to the project. Pay particular attention to demonstrating the quality or rigor of the work:

• For research-related work, describe (if relevant) study aims, design, sample, measurement instruments, and analysis and interpretation. Discuss how you verified the accuracy of your data.
• For education-related work, describe (if relevant) any needs assessment conducted, learning objectives, educational strategies incorporated, and evaluation of learning.
• For other types of work, discuss how the project was developed and reasons for the methodological choices made.

TEAM Charter Schools, located in Newark, New Jersey, is part of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Network. The student population is 96% African American and 4% Hispanic. The students who volunteer to work with the project spend out-of-school hours, often on weekends, working on their stories. They are mainly involved in the authoring and illustrating of the stories. Ali Nagle, 5th grade teacher and TEAM in Africa director, recognized that working with university mentors would give their students a chance to envision pursuing a college education. In a community where 9% of the population has a Bachelor’s degree, this contact with IU students is an important factor in helping the students to see university studies as a real possibility for their futures. The students write stories that share their lives in Newark, their dreams for the future, and their concern for taking care of the urban environment in which they live. Each year, several of the students are selected to visit Kabwende School and get to know their counterparts there.

Kabwende Primary School is a primary school located in the community of Kinigi, in northwestern Rwanda. The school is located near the gates of the Volcanoes National Park, where international tourists come to visit the mountain gorillas that make their home there. The school serves approximately 2,000 students. About thirty teachers work two shifts per day, teaching one group of students in the morning and the second in the afternoon. The Rwandan Ministry of Education has asked schools like Kabwende to shift from using French as the medium of instruction to using English medium instruction. Clement Nkuriyingoma, the headmaster of Kabwende, recognized the need to assist teachers and students with the shift to English and has sought a partnership that would allow the stakeholders in the school to receive as well as contribute. The Rwandan students received copies of Vol. 1 for their personal use, and have authored stories for inclusion in Volumes 2-5 of The World is Our Home.

The Global Village Living-Learning Center at Indiana University Bloomington is the university partner in the project. 40% of the center’s 170 residents are involved in the project; many are involved for multiple years. The project helps the Global Village to fulfill it mission to prepare students with a broad range of international interests, regardless of major, for life beyond the United States. Dr. Jeff Holdeman, director of the center, and Lauren Caldarera, assistant director, understood that creating a multi-year international service project to engage students in collaborative literacy activities with younger students in the US and Rwanda would support the learning objectives of the living-learning program. The university students take major leadership roles in the project and provide logistical support for the project, in addition to mentoring the young writers. A Global Village recruiting call-out poster reads: “This is not a national program or a chapter of a larger organization. This is a student-led effort led by you and your friends.”

Early needs assessment was done informally through conversations and relationship-building among leaders of the project at each of the institutions. During the second year of the project, a student-led Evaluation Team, composed of Global Village undergraduates, conducted a participatory evaluation of the project from 2010-2013. The results of the first year of evaluation, together with reflections by the team on their experiences as evaluators, appeared in (1). (15) documents the impact of the project on the Global Village’s retention goals and learning outcomes.

8. Please describe the process of developing the product, including the ways that community and academic/institutional expertise were integrated in the development of this product.

The following timeline describes the process for compiling and printing The World is Our Home, Vol. 1. This collection represents the first stage in the multi-year project.

Fall semester:
• October: U.S. participants met to work on stories. Mentoring relationships were developed as well.
• Nov-Dec: Skype meetings were held between mentoring pairs. Work on stories continued.
Spring semester:
• January: U.S. participants met again to complete stories to complete their stories.
• Feb-Apr: Collaborator team edited the stories for publishing.
• May: The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, printed in the US for shipping to Rwanda.
Summer semester:
• June: Curriculum for The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, prepared.
• July: U.S. students visited Kabwende. Rwandan students received their copies of the books.
•
During the first year, the project focused on skill building in multiple areas. The organizational process and communication procedures have been documented in (1), (2), and (3). The structure of the project required skill building in multiple areas. This orchestration of activities required that students remain engaged throughout the course of the project (at least for the academic year) as a commitment to their partners and team members. Global Village residents developed skills by volunteering with Books & Beyond in teams: Writing Partners, Collaborators, Pen Pals, Fundraisers, Documenters, and Leadership. They received training in mentoring from the IU Office of Mentoring. Undergraduates who elected to be Writing Partners were paired up with TEAM Schools students to brainstorm, write and illustrate their stories, with special attention to audience issues such as language and cultural differences. The Collaborators helped to ensure that the stories were linguistically and culturally relevant; for instance, students needed to learn to avoid mentioning aspects of their lives that might be unfamiliar to Rwandan students, such as playing video games or going to a fast-food restaurant. The Collaborators edited the stories for publishing. The Pen Pal team maintained relationships with teachers at the Rwandan school. The Documenters created short promotional videos that shared the project’s challenges and successes. And the Leadership Team took an active role in organizing all of the teams.

9. Please discuss the significance and impact of your product. In your response, discuss ways your product has added to existing knowledge and benefited the community; ways others may have utilized your product; and any relevant evaluation data about impact, if available. If the impact of the product is not yet known, discuss its potential significance.

The following facts help to establish the impact of the project over five years. The students of Books & Beyond have raised over $100,000 to support the project in five years. By 2013, the project has distributed 12,500 books (2,500 each of Vols. 1-5) to students at Kabwende Primary School in Rwanda and at TEAM Schools in the United States. Over 60 students from TEAM have participated in the project. In 2012 and 2013, 400 Rwandan students participated in the three-week Kabwende Holiday Camp. Each student entered their story in the writing contest—the teachers judged the stories and chose the best to publish in this year’s anthology. And approximately 193 Global Village students have participated in the project.

Books & Beyond was awarded the 2012 François Manchuelle Award from Association of African Studies Programs. This award recognizes programs that have made significant contributions to the study of Africa cultures in K-12 schools.

10. Please describe why you chose the presentation format you did.

The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was originally printed in a book format to provide schoolchildren in rural Rwanda with an opportunity to own a book of their own. The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was the first book that many of these children had ever personally owned. The first volume was published in a limited quantity and is no longer available in print. Publishing the book online in pdf format makes the material available to a wider international audience and supports the values and goals of Books & Beyond. Publishing the book via Indiana University Scholarworks ensures that the book will be searchable on the Internet and will remain in a permanent online library collection. Publishing in CES4Health will increase the project’s exposure to organizations, researchers, and schools interested in the process for the production of the materials and for organizing a successful international school-community partnership. CES4Health’s platform will also ensure that similar organizations that want to engage in similar projects will learn about Books & Beyond and its products.

11. Please reflect on the strengths and limitations of your product. In what ways did community and academic/institutional collaborators provide feedback and how was such feedback used? Include relevant evaluation data about strengths and limitations if available.

Interviews with Rwandan children in October 2009 helped to establish that the children were using the books for personal reading at home. Several favorite stories were identified (e.g. “Home is…” and “Home for the Holidays”). The children and their teachers offered suggestions for improving the next volume of stories. Each year, feedback sessions and roundtables have provided space for student at each of the partner schools to voice their suggestions for improving the project.

The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, was the product of intensive collaboration between student volunteers at TEAM Schools and IU Bloomington. Staff and faculty played a considerable role in helping to organize and launch the initiative, but have helped the students to take leadership roles. Student leadership and collaboration are two of the main strengths of the project, particularly of this first example of their work.

The project has demonstrated that it contributes toward retention for Global Village residents. Participants in the project are more likely to stay in the living-learning residence hall for consecutive years than their non-participating counterparts. By 2012–13, 33% of the residents of the Global Village were involved in the project (n=55); 40% were repeaters who had chosen to participate in the project for a second or third year. Furthermore, former residents frequently remain involved in the project throughout their undergraduate studies.
Books & Beyond supports several high-impact active-learning practices that have been shown to support undergraduate student retention and engagement. These practices are included in (17).

Several limitations of this first volume have been addressed in the subsequent volumes. This volume contains only stories written by the US partners; The World is Our Home, Volumes 2-5, contain stories written by students in both the US and Rwanda. The photography and illustrations do not contain enough representations of children of African descent, even though most of the student writers were African American. The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, contains one alphabet story, but doesn’t contain enough stories that will appeal to very young readers. In The World is Our Home, Volumes 2-5, the editorial team planned for inclusion of beginner, intermediate and high intermediate stories. All writers and project support volunteers received annual training on writing stories that were culturally and linguistically appropriate; after the second year of the project, the experienced volunteers were able to pass along this training to their peers.

Because of the timeline for the project, the first volume does not contain stories written by Rwandan students. The writing for Volume 1 began in late fall 2008, and the books were sent to press in spring 2009. The Rwandan students wrote their first stories in fall 2009, after they had received their copies of Volume 1. All subsequent volumes of The World is Our Home have 50% of their content from the Rwandan contributors. Another limitation of The World is Our Home, Vol. 1, is the quality of some of the stories and their usefulness in the Rwandan context. The project’s commitment to supporting student work meant that the process for mentoring and editing the stories was a work-in-progress during the first year. In subsequent years, students have deepened the training that they received about writing for a Rwandan audience, and the quality of the stories has improved. Volumes 2-5 are embargoed by the project and will be released individually in future years.

12. Please describe ways that the project resulting in the product involved collaboration that embodied principles of mutual respect, shared work and shared credit. If different, describe ways that the product itself involved collaboration that embodied principles of mutual respect, shared work and shared credit. Have all collaborators on the product been notified of and approved submission of the product to CES4Health.info? If not, why not? Please indicate whether the project resulting in the product was approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) and/or community-based review mechanism, if applicable, and provide the name(s) of the IRB/mechanism.

The Books & Beyond student leadership team has issued the following principles and has attempted to put them into practice:
1. Books & Beyond is founded on the principle that every partnership should be reciprocal.
2. No one partner is solely giving or taking, but that all partners have an investment in the project and that all partners’ needs are met.
3. Books & Beyond is founded on the belief that service-learning and experiential learning are effective methods for engaging students in cross-cultural collaboration.
4. Students play an integral role in all aspects of the project and must be given the skills, tools, and resources necessary to be productive leaders in Books & Beyond.
5. And each partner brings to the collaboration prior knowledge, life experiences, and a wealth of skills that serve to enhance the project.

Books & Beyond holds copyright to the book, and has given approval for submission to CES4Health. No IRB approval was required for the printing of the book. IRB approval was granted by the Indiana University Institutional Review Board for the evaluation project conducted by the Evaluation Team (Protocol # 0903000167. Principal Investigator: Dr. Beth Lewis Samuelson). IU Legal Consul has advised the project on copyright issues.