The Evolution of Children’s Literature as Learning Materials – A Personal Journey

Subir Shukla

In the beginning

In 1986, I began working in Eklavya to develop and field test a primary stage curriculum appropriate for children in government schools. It naturally led to exploring the children’s literature that existed at the time (in English and Hindi) and looking for ways in which it could be used best with children. It soon became clear that:

• Despite having a very rich collection, there was very little material (other than books from NBT, CBT and a few ‘classic’ publishers) that could be considered child-friendly – that is, created and designed keeping in mind children’s ages, developmental stages and context. Many had very poor print quality too, with the ink rubbing off on to your hands (and hence actually toxic for children). 

• There was a plethora of myth and religious stories, or ‘moral’ literature whose purpose was to edify and ‘mould’ children into desired moral beings. Often stories would begin with what they were going to teach: ‘Children, greed is a really bad quality, and to explain that I’m going to tell you this story of….’

• There were plenty of ABCD type of books or garishly produced fairy tales, ripped off from some source that was never mentioned.

• Other than NBT and CBT books, none of the other publishers paid much attention to illustration and design. Font sizes were desperately small, with little relief for the eye.

• The few children’s magazines that existed were mainly full of stereotypes, anthropomorphic versions of animal tales, again with the morality that was often acquired through some violent consequence of giving in to one’s desires.

Overall, it was a grim and depressing scenario. What was missing in much of the literature was to see the world from the child’s perspective, or the effort to enable her to see things differently by engaging her in a process that encouraged reflection. Certain forms were generally absent or much less in evidence – whimsy, fantasy, nonsense or sound-based texts, and drama. Creative non-fiction, too, was comparatively rare. The situation was better in Bengali and Marathi (in which some of the great writers of literature for adults also wrote for children) but as I needed to work mainly with Hindi (and to some extent English), it was disheartening.

One aspect that seemed to be completely missing was that of trying out draft material with children. That is, field testing or getting children’s feedback in order to re-work and refine emerging material for children, including stories, poems or other forms. It thus fell to me to test the literature that existed, for suitability for its use in the textbooks we would create. Within the first few weeks it was apparent that there was a very limited number of works that could be effectively used with children. An overwhelming amount of dull and didactic material dominated the few that made and effort to connect with children.

While the NBT and CBT books were useful in generating oracy, they did pose a problem in that children from the poorest sections of society, including those in the tribal area where I was located, could not always connect with the visuals or the contexts presented. When it came to introducing literacy, it was worse – most available literature did not lend itself to use in our emerging curriculum and textbooks that would be field tested. Texts that tried to be ‘simple and easy’, usually by not using ‘matras’ ended up sounding distorted or extraordinarily insipid and off-putting, making it more difficult to teach children. E.g. – अमर उठ, घर चल, पानी पी, मत रो....  One of the keys to generating literacy is that if the material you struggle with is promising – that is, it arouses curiosity or holds relevance or feels like it is going to be interesting, fun or worthwhile – then the effort is worth it. Instead, we had material that was actually deterring children by being boring, disconnected and irrelevant, thus defeating the very purpose of trying to introduce literacy.

Creating the new

This then led to the situation where, over the next six years, I ended up creating or adapting – and field-testing – hundreds of texts across various genres for different age groups. Of these, around 200 emerged as ‘successful’ with children – that is, they loved (and demanded) listening to these again and again, or would happily engage with their written form or try to extend their own efforts into the exercises included and, most satisfyingly, even be heard singing or narrating these on their own, after school hours. A great deal of such material found its way into our textbook, Khushi-Khushi, for classes 1-5.  Despite the fact that it was printed in black and white and had only line drawings as illustration, children loved to carry these books around with them, in the fields or sitting on a buffalo’s back.

Some lessons I learnt from these years of creating and field-testing material are as follows.

• Children love sound based materials or pieces that involve word play, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm. (For instance, the poem एक था खटखट, बहुत ही नटखट, or the rhyming story छोटा सा मोटा सा लोटा, now in its 20th edition as an NBT publication. Surprisingly, there was not enough of this, and much of it needed to be created.

• While adults may not be able to relate with ‘nonsense’, children do. They seem to understand it intuitively and connect with it quite well. 

• Children love it if they are able to participate in a story by responding or adding something. In poems that they can easily extend, their excitement and participation is really high. For example, the poem क्या है काला, क्या है सफेद or पांव अगर पंखे के होते.

• It is important that children and their lives are represented in the literature. Tribal children or children who ‘don’t wear shoes’ – their world and their perspectives must find place. Thus a story about a child who’s gone with a bullock cart across a forest to buy fodder, or about looking for root vegetables in the hot period after the monsoon (when the earlier crop has been consumed and the next one is not yet available), or not having clothes to wear to school because there’s only one dress and it’s not yet dried – would foreground the world children knew, but would also prepare them with the literacy skills to unpack other worlds that were less familiar.

• Action matters, in poems and stories. It was incredible how much literature spent far too much space on description and not enough on action. Thus a poem about a हरे रंग का तोता would focus on what the parrot was like, instead of what it did. This made it difficult to visualise or communicate through actions and gestures in a class full of children whose first language was not Hindi. And it was also difficult for illustrators to show!

• Children can think and debate on what stories contain. Grey works better to generate moral-ethical understanding than black and white, especially when children themselves have to figure out which options are the right ones to take. For instance, in a story on बन्नो का चांद, about a little girl who laughs at the moon, hurting it so much that he goes away to the night (and is still there!), children were able to argue that it’s OK for friends to tease each other and the moon need not have run off in a huff.

• Coincidences are unsatisfactory ways of characters attaining their goals, and make the lessons learnt seem even more random. This tends to communicate a fatalist perspective, wherein you wait for your kismet to rescue you from whatever dire straits you find yourself in.

• Fiction and poetry work very well in subjects other than languages too. Stories involving aspects of science or maths or social science are quite successful, as long as they respect the requirement of being good children’s literature first and not message-dominant.

• Non-fiction is where children’s own fund of experience, environmental knowledge,  and the community’s knowledge heritage is best tapped. This works well if there are openings in the material where children can add from their own environment.

At the National Centre for Children’s Literature, NBT-India

This experience was of great help as I joined the National Centre for Children’s Literature (NCCL) at the National Book Trust, India in 1993, as Editor (Training and Promotion), under the amazing Mala Dayal. The Nehru Bal Pustakalaya series flourished and we were able to make significant improvements in what was published. The NCCL brought out a magazine for its Readers’ Clubs, with a country-wide appeal, deceptively called the Readers’ Club Bulletin – but actually containing high quality children’s literature in a variety of genres, again illustrated in black and white. The basic tenet was that it would speak with children rather than at them. Some of India’s biggest writers wrote for this, including Mahasweta Devi, Arup Dutta, Khushwant Singh, Pushpesh Pant and many others. However, even they were asked to revise or refine what they had written in keeping with guidelines for what made for age-appropriate, context-appropriate and child-friendly literature. A new benchmark was set for the kind of non-fiction made available to children. With some of India’s best illustrators chipping in, the black and white format was again very popular with children, as the large number of post-cards received from them showed. These learnings also carried through into writers’ workshops we organised in Odisha or the North-East or Punjab.

On the largest possible scale, across states

During this time (1994), when DPEP was being conceptualised, the MHRD would occasionally ask me to review research designs developed by the NCERT, e.g. for examining the readability of Indian textbooks. I was also asked to do a gender analysis of textbook contents (which showed appalling discrimination against girls, in the texts, exercises and illustrations). By this time, we had also put together in the NCCL’s library a collection of award-winning children’s books from across the world, many of which included material designed specifically for learning. This served to set the framework against which the textbooks could be seen, especially the children’s literature they contained.

What these exercises brought out was that:

• In a way, the ‘real’ children’s literature could be considered to be that which existed in textbooks. The stories, poems and non-fiction that these contained were the only children’s literature that an overwhelming majority of our children accessed, especially in rural areas. In fact, the largest print runs of children’s literature was (and still is) actually in the form of textbooks – often in lakhs of copies over several years whereas ‘best-selling’ children’s literature remains in thousands.

• The material that textbooks contained then was uniformly disappointing – age inappropriate, didactic, usually information dense, focused more on the needs of the subject than children, and representing only a middle-class universe.

• Stereotypes and prejudices abounded. Not only against girls but also the poor (e.g., ‘he was poor but honest’).

By the time I got the opportunity to work as Chief Consultant (Curriculum, Pedagogy and Textbook Development) in DPEP, it was clear that those creating materials for children needed not only inputs towards understanding the craft and the subject, but required an understanding of children and their world view, how they engaged with their environment and with learning, and the role of material in the process of their overall development. It was for this reason that textbook writers, who would also be creating or collating stories, poems and non-fiction texts were required to go through:

• A Visioning Workshop where they understood how children learnt, their contexts, and envisioned the qualities they would generate in them.

• Discussions on the beliefs and assumptions that inform our understanding of children and learning, and the implications of these for the materials we create.

• Exposure to some of the best children’s literature from across the world (here we got help from the embassies of many countries) and draw from these the kind of benchmarks they would set themselves.

• And finally, agree on and implement a process of testing what they created by spending time with children, narrating or reading out or giving the drafts to children to observe their responses and getting feedback from them.

This process would yield detailed guidelines and specifications for different kinds of texts for various age groups. Combined with inputs on the actual writing process, these efforts led to a dramatic impact on the kinds of texts that the textbooks developed in DPEP contained.

Implemented across more than 10 states, this process led to the development of some of the most interesting, child-friendly, best illustrated and well-designed textbooks. The field-testing experience provided authors a deep understanding of what was needed. For instance, after a number of stories were tried out with Class 1 and 2 children, it emerged that ‘high emotional content’ of relevance to children led to them asking to hear the story again and again, which then acted as a trigger to engage them in making drawings, doing role play, trying to read the text or identify words/letters, and even use ‘pretend writing’ to create their own stories emerging from this input.

Very often, it turned out that the ‘classic’ children’s literature of a state tended to contain stereotypes or discrimination, and violated other key principles. In comparison, ‘folk’ material, especially with its repetitive elements, was liked more by children and generated greater learning. Some states found that ‘tweaking’ existing (non-copyrighted) material was a good option, considering that writing new texts at the desired level of quality was not always easy. At the same time, for specific purposes such as generating literacy or an environmental understanding, it was better to create new material.

An important theme across states was to develop ‘contextualisable’ or ‘localisable’ material. Thus, Kerala’s EVS textbooks (1998-99) had exercises leading children to record information such that by the end of the year, each child developed a book about her own environment. In UP (2001-02), the class 3 Hindi textbook used a blank page as a lesson, where children could fill in any song they like and answer the questions on this ‘text’ given in the facing page (e.g. which are the rhyming words or verbs, when/where is this song sung, etc.). Gujarat (2012-13) made 'shell' books that could be completed only with district-specific material developed by local DIETs. All this was not always without its controversy. In Kerala, the introduction of a single line containing words from a tribal language led to an uproar in the state assembly. 

An aspect that often gets missed out is that these processes had an enormous impact on production. In many states local illustrators were selected and trained over months – and many of them still continue to contribute to material for children and have even won awards. The work with production personnel, including the staff of the state textbook presses (where they had them) created not only the ground for timely supply of material but also laid the grounds for India to be able to provide free textbooks. 

However, the best feedback came from Haryana after its new, integrated textbook Hanste-Gaatey had been implemented for a year in DPEP schools. Teachers working with the poorest children in reported: 'Earlier, when it rained, children would cover their heads with textbooks, but since these have come in, now they hug them instead.'