As a community of Library Educators our growing responsibility is to facilitate the exchange and engagement of books with readers. For this we need to be deeply and intimately involve with the Collection in the library which will enable us to have conversations with readers to provoke thinking and feeling. This as we know is the crux of reading engagement and the heart of library practice. In order to strengthen our understanding and keep abreast of books emerging in the Children’s book space, Educators need to huddle, cross share and renew their own understandings and positionalities.
Bookworm steers for itself and interested alumni and participants a full range of professional sessions that center and circle critical conversations – largely arising out of the English dominated space in publishing for Children. As we move forward with growing alumni across regions in a multilingual, diverse country like ours, we need to initiate these conversations in regional specific literature as well.
“Critical Conversations: Looking at Children’s Literature in Marathi” held by Bookworm Alumni, hosted by Belief, Nasik was a step forward in this direction.
We are delighted to share the proceedings from this gathering at the link below. Our hope is that this document reaches library educators, authors, illustrators, publishers, parents and anyone who has a stake in children’s literature in India today. We invite you to read, reflect and disseminate it widely.