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Reading
ABCs include a why
Saturday,
January 10, 2004
By
ALBERT RABOTEAU
Staff Writer
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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