2003 BORN TO READ Conference Highlights

We were very lucky to have David J. Smith as a keynote speaker at our Born to Read Conference in May 2003.

Smith is an author and educational consultant with over 25 years of experience in the classroom. His award-winning book If the World Were a Village: A Book about the World's People, illustrated by Shelagh Armstrong, was published in 2002 by Kids Can Press. By having each person in an imaginary global village represent 62 million people from the real world, Smith presents enlightening-and sometimes startling-facts about the world around us. The book was named Book of the Year by the International Reading Association in 2003 and was added to the Children's Choices list by the Children's Book Council. For more information and other resources, including a list of recommended books and videos, please visit Smith's website, www.mapping.com.

If the world were a village of 100 people, 78 would know how to read: 37 of the women, 41 of the men. - David J. Smith, If the World Were A Village

You can also contact him using the e-mail address provided on that site.

The following is excerpted from his keynote address. "In the broadest sense, my topic today is not Maine, but the world-and teaching children to be globally literate. Why? I consider there to be eight concrete values of a globally-aware, culturally literate education.

1. Cultural literacy promotes world-mindedness. If our maps and education are ethno-centric and blindered, we miss opportunities to learn from other cultures and countries.

2. Cultural literacy promotes open-mindedness, a sense of tolerance for differences.

3. Cultural literacy promotes a sense of global inter-dependence. We need to understand and cherish our dependence on our neighbors, and theirs on us. Global warming, acid rain, etc., know no boundaries.

4. Cultural literacy promotes a sense of individual and cultural self-esteem. If we know who we are, we can more fully appreciate ourselves and our neighbors.

5. Cultural literacy promotes commitment to peace and the growth of structures for peace.

6. Cultural literacy promotes a relishing for the withering of prejudice and injustice.

7. Cultural literacy helps students develop a passion for both process and product, for the map and the territory.

8. Cultural literacy leads to respect for, and tolerance of, other cultures, and of cultural diversity, leading not to 'multi'-cultural, nor 'trans'-cultural, but truly 'inter'-cultural schools, communities, lives."

"Geographic literacy encompasses dozens of kinds of knowledge-about people, about boundaries and borders, about land use and misuse, about languages and cultures, and about history and about the future. What we can do to help our earliest learners grow into geographically literate children and adults…

1. Read with children, especially about other places and other people. There are a vast number of books available at a pre-school level, everything from Goodnight Moon to Nine O'Clock Lullaby teaches something important about the world or about geography.

2. Keep maps and globes around the house or the classroom, and use them with your children-and let your children use them by themselves. Every time a new place is mentioned in family conversations, or on the news, or in a reading book, look it up, locate it.

3. Look and explore. Walk outside and look closely at the surroundings, and think about humans and their surroundings. It's easier to grasp the complexities of geography and culture if you can see how things came to be the way they are.

4. Ask questions. Ask about what you read, ask about what you hear, ask about what you see. Ask why things are located in particular places, and ask about why things are the shape and color that they are, and ask about where things came from. We are local people, who must know and appreciate our neighbors, but we are also global people, and on that level, our neighborhood is huge, and our ability to cope and to survive will depend on our knowing and appreciating those neighbors as well.

5. As you listen to music, watch films, and read books with your children, talk about what you can see and hear and learn. Our understanding of modern and popular culture is improved by a knowledge of geography, and our understanding of geography is improved by paying attention to modern and popular culture. This is true of film, books, and music.

6. Celebrate and enjoy everything that can teach us at all about our world. For example, even though we know that water flows downhill, and that cars roll downhill, you can drive to locations in Vermont and New Brunswick (this is Magnetic Hill in New Brunswick), drive down the hill, put your car in neutral, and watch as it appears to coast uphill, along with the water flowing uphill alongside the road. What an interesting conversation.

7. Do everything you can to help children understand that the Earth, and things on the Earth, move. Help your children notice the oncoming day or night, the changing lengths of the day, or how their shadows point in different directions at different times of day. And help children notice that things on the Earth do a lot of moving. Where do the ideas, products, and people in our neighborhood come from?

8. Talk about the weather. Where does our weather come from, how does it cause us to change what we wear, how does it affect our lives?

9. Travel, or talk about traveling, in different ways. Walking, running, car, bus, bicycle, train, airplane. How does each method differ from the others - what can you see, or not see, with each one? How long would the same trip take?

10. Celebrate your own cultural heritage, and talk about it. But also notice, and talk about, the other celebrations going on around you during the year. And don't just take children out into their communities-include people from the community in your program and your home, actively and deliberately. Look for how cultures and communities overlap. Make connections."

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