en
espaņol
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Reading
program is heard
Monday,
August 30, 2004
By
Mirta D'Amato
Staff Writer
Hoping to enrich people's lives through
literature, a nonprofit group brings the reading experience into
communities of nonreaders.
People
& Stories/Gente y Cuentos creates new audiences for literature by
bridging the reading gap for young adults at or below a fifth-grade
reading level in nontraditional class settings.
"Our
program brings literature and the joy of reading to groups that are not
reading," said Patricia Andres, executive director. "We read
college level literature aloud to groups who would otherwise not have the
experience."
The
program targets high school dropouts, the economically disadvantaged or
young adults at risk. They include people in outreach programs, prisons,
homeless shelters and senior centers.
Armed
with a bibliography comprising 134 multi-cultural literary pieces that
include short stories and poems, from Langston Hughes' "Early
Autumn" to Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean Well Lighted Place"
to Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club," trained coordinators follow a
structured seminar-style reading format.
"They
read enduring literature, something that has a very deeply poetic quality
to it, something that appeals to people and resonates with them,"
said Andres. "We want something powerful that will grip people, that
will invite them to see that literature has meaning."
The
90-minute sessions that last eight weeks comprise oral readings in English
and Spanish, followed by questions that link the literature to life
experiences.
As
participants analyze the images and conflicts, participants get to think
about the qualities of their own lives and the choices they've made.
"That
creates a deeper motivation to read because it gives them pleasure,"
Andres explained. "It's a joyful thing to know yourself and others
more deeply and to be more aware of your world."
Doretha
Riley, coordinator for youth programs and development consultant who has
worked with young adults, said she has seen how the program encourages
reading.
"The
youth can actually relate to what is going on in the story," Riley
said. "They have told some heartbreaking stories. They get involved
with the reading and have come up with some great insights."
The
program was founded in 1971 in Cambridge, Mass., by Sara Hirschman.
Hirschman introduced the program to Trenton in 1986.
The
program expanded to Philadelphia in 1999 with support from the
Pennsylvania Humanities Council. Earlier this year, the National Endowment
for the Humanities provided a $288,000 grant for the group to expand to
seven states. Five states will run the program in Spanish - California,
Connecticut, Florida, Nevada and New York. Two others, Kansas and Texas,
will have English reading programs.
"Under
the NEH grant, we now have an additional 24 programs, found mostly in
libraries," Andres added.
In
January, the program will expand to Oregon, Washington, North Carolina,
South Carolina and West Virginia.
Teaching
how to read is one thing. Teaching why to read is another.
A
Trenton nonprofit group whose classes are designed to inspire people to
read - by exposing them to literature far beyond the see-spot-run variety
- recently received a $288,000 grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities to help bring its program to 24 libraries in 14 states over the
next two years.
People
& Stories/Gente y Cuentos has English and Spanish language versions of
its program.
It
plans to start teaching its method this month to librarians from as far
away as California and Florida.
The
program entails reading works of literature aloud then asking listeners to
discuss them.
Though
their reading skills might not be far enough advanced to get through such
works on their own, the students have proven to able to understand,
appreciate and discuss the stories in great detail, said Patricia Andres,
People & Stories executive director.
"Beginning
readers are not beginning thinkers," she said.
Students
in the program have discussed works by authors such as James Joyce, Alice
Walker, Ernest Hemmingway and Eudora Welty, Andres said.
In
New Jersey, People & Stories has run classes in prisons and at
locations in Trenton, Princeton, Newark and elsewhere, she said.
One
of the national endowment's main reasons for giving the grant was to
encourage new populations to use libraries.
Andres
said her organization had seemed to help accomplish that in Princeton,
where some Latinos, who once gathered outside the library without going
inside it, took part in the program and now patronize the library.
"The
beauty and power of literature is what we are offering a population that
has not yet tasted this for themselves," she said. People &
Stories was started in Cambridge, Mass., in 1972 by Sarah Hirschman, who
soon moved to Princeton and began running the program in Trenton in 1974.
It
was a one-woman operation until 1986, when Hirschman started recruiting
others to help.
"I've always liked to read very much," Hirschman said, "and I just felt that literature was opening up all kinds of possibilities, all kinds of worlds and all kinds of things about oneself. I felt that there was perhaps no reason why people with less academic preparation couldn't enjoy that."
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