In her latest blog for the Huffington Post, LitWorld Founder and Executive Director, Pam Allyn, explains why personal narrative is the key ingredient for building literacy skills and the most compelling tool that we can use to effect social change.
"There is a photo I carry with me everywhere I go.
It is a photo of a little girl. She is nine years old. She is wearing a post-it on her lapel, held in place with a pen. While I was conducting a teacher training in her school in Liberia, she was carefully watching everything I did. When I came outside, I realized she was teaching her entire school of 400 children how to do all the things I was just teaching her teachers. I thought: "She is going to make a difference. She will be a great and wonderful teacher someday."
When I returned months later, she was gone. At that young age, she disappeared from school, staying home to help her mother with the housework, home to take her place with her many sisters who had not finished school. I tried to find her again, but never could. I wonder: what would she have written on her post-it? What are the stories she would have told? This work I do is a tribute to her. I cannot find her (although I always look) but I do my work in her honor and in her spirit. There are too, too many lost girls."