BiebBus, The Expanding Mobile Library

BiebBus is a truck-container that travels from school to school, offering 7,000 books and a reading room.

Mobile libraries date back to 1905, when in Washington County, Maryland the first bookmobile offered its service to those American readers who would otherwise have no access to books, mostly the young and the elderly. The Netherlands also knows this tradition and has a wide network of regionally organized mobile libraries. On a personal note: I grew up in the rural northern part of the country and I remember feeling excitement for Tuesday afternoons when the 'bibliobus' would be in the village. It was the pre-internet era and the bus was a place of discovery.

The Zaan region is part of the Amsterdam metropolitan area and consists of a series of smaller villages. On their own they can't finance a full-time library but the 'bibliobus' is a viable alternative. Contrary to the more rural areas in the Netherlands, this region is densely populated and has narrow streets. As such the conventional mobile library with a trailer providing for 50 m2 of library surface was not an option; the vehicle would simply take too much parking space. Architect Jord den Hollander designed a smart solution. Possibly inspired by his youth memory of Gerry Anderson's TV series Thunderbirds he developed the 'Uitschuif Biebbus' or the expanding mobile library. 

Solving the Literacy Gender Gap in Morocco

Morocco has long been touted as a beacon for progress in the Middle East and North Africa, especially since 1999, when King Mohammed VI ascended to the throne. Over the last 15 years, the developing country has seen the advancement of women’s domestic rights via the Moroccan Family Code, the ratification of the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and a variety of innovative educational reforms. In fact, the first 10 years of Mohammed’s reign were dubbed the “Education Decade,” resulting in impressive increases in literacy. UNESCO estimates that just 41.6 percent of the Moroccan population was literate in 1990; by 2010, that figure had spiked to 56 percent.

But despite this long-term commitment to education and human rights, there remains a startling division in literacy rates between Morocco’s urban and rural populations—with an even more significant gap between men and women. In many ways, the urban/rural achievement gap may not be so surprising: Rural villages can be many miles away from schools; temperatures are sweltering in summer and can be freezing in winter; main roads are often crowded and in poor shape; and alternative transportation is out of reach for many poverty-stricken families.

But the unique obstacles faced by many rural women and girls—who enroll in lower secondary education at a rate of 26 percent compared to 79 percent for rural boys—are considerable. For traditional Moroccan families, it’s simply not acceptable for young girls to walk to and from school alone, or to live away from home to attend school if a daily commute proves taxing. While illegal, underage marriage remains a reality for many Moroccan girls, and often eliminates any potential for a secondary education. Some estimates claim that even five years post-“Education Decade,” illiteracy rates for rural women and girls in Morocco remain as high as 90 percent (though official sources put the figure at 54.4 percent).

Still, a pragmatic optimism lingers in Morocco, as a variety of policies and programs actively target illiteracy to this day. The nation’s longest-established literacy program—mahou al omiya (Erasing Illiteracy)—directly tackles the rural gender gap each night in the classroom. This free program, held in the evenings at nearly every public school in the country, is geared toward adults who never had the opportunity to attend or complete school. Open to attendance by both men and women, it’s women who are most in need of literacy support—so it’s women who most often attend.

Alarming gender gap in school science sets women up to fail

Only 14% of young women who enter university for the first time chose science-related fields of study such as engineering, manufacturing and construction. This is one of the headline findings of a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that examines gender equality in education across 64 countries and jurisdictions. In comparison, 39% of young men who entered university chose to pursue one of those fields of study.

Gender has always been important in education. What the report – based on the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests – reveals is the extent of the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Let down in science

The university statistics won’t come as a complete surprise to many – though the magnitude of the gender difference is worryingly large. But the school-age data, drawn from 15-year-olds who take the PISA tests every three years, contains an even more alarming message: the UK’s gender gap visible in school results for science subjects is among the largest.

British 15-year-old girls are reported as doing 13% worse than 15-year-old boys. In Finland, girls do 16% better than boys. Of the 64 countries that took the tests, the UK takes 61st place.

Reviving the Library in Greece: The Future Is Now for the Future Library Network and the INELI-Balkans Project

One of the milestones of childhood is when a child learns to read. It starts out simply; the mere act of spelling out his/her own name and then reading it off a piece of paper is met with much fanfare by the child's parents and teachers. Single words soon turn into whole books. Suddenly, the world as described on the written page, is opened up to them and, well... nothing is the same again.

Nobody can argue the significance of reading in the life of any human. As a wise person once said, "The more you read the more things you'll know. The more that you learn the more places you'll go." By the way, I just quoted Dr. Seuss, the writer and illustrator who, through his 46 published children's books, has played a critical role in teaching millions of children worldwide how to read--including yours truly who is still expecting to run into a black and white cat wearing an extra tall, top hat. Maybe someday.

People will read; they want to. But to do so, not only do they need the skills but they need to have material to read. This is where public libraries come in.

In the U.S., going to the library is a commonplace practice. Every town has at least one easily accessible library on offer. But what about other countries around the world which don't, or can't, offer this service? And today's libraries have to keep up with the times, too. That means not only must they provide "old fashioned," printed hardcopies of tomes but they must also be fully equipped, technological hubs of knowledge and entertainment.

To that extent the past 15 years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put strong actions behind their belief that libraries are critically important for all people, with their Access to Learning Award and their Global Libraries program.

In 2010, the Veria Central Public Library in the province of Macedonia in northern Greece was one of the last libraries to be awarded this coveted prize. According to the Foundation, the Veria library made, "creative use of information and technology services," and offered, "a range of programs that meet the economic, educational and cultural needs of more than 180,000 people." Since the award, the Veria library has expanded its reach and in 2011 established the Future Library, a nonprofit directly derived from the ATLA award.

Dollard teen discovers pothole solution

There is a delicious irony in knowing that a 14-year-old from Dollard-des-Ormeaux may have found an amazingly simple remedy to Canada’s perennial pothole problem.

While governments spend millions annually in largely futile attempts to repair our rotting roadways, David Ballas, a Grade 9 student at West Island College, believes he may have come up with a cost-effective solution by mixing chicken feathers with asphalt to form a nearly impermeable surface.

Don’t laugh: The French term for potholes is nids-de-poule, or chicken nests.

Ballas’s discovery took the form of a science project, which recently garnered first prize at his school’s science fair. That honour will allow him to represent WIC next month at the Montreal Regional Science Fair at Concordia University.

Ballas came up with the idea after his mother, Joy Struzer, blew a car tire after hitting a pothole in Dollard. It wasn’t the first time, either.

So Ballas consulted a few chemists, who encouraged him to look for “hydrophobic” materials, a scientific term for water repellent.

Ballas found his answer during an Internet search for waste materials with hydrophobic surfaces.

“The first thing that I found was chicken feathers. Actually, there are 5 million tonnes of them that are wasted every year, just in Quebec. It was a perfect idea.”

The Sharing Experiment

We wanted to know if sharing is natural. On October 7, 2011 Action Against Hunger conducted an experiment in Madrid, Spain to study human behavior when faced with the injustice of hunger. Of the 20 children under study, all 20 shared their food.

 

 

Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rainforest

In search for legendary “City of the Monkey God,” explorers find the untouched ruins of a vanished culture.

  
An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture’s lost city, never before explored. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied “White City,” also referred to in legend as the “City of the Monkey God.”

Archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago, and then vanished. The team, which returned from the site last Wednesday, also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned.

In contrast to the nearby Maya, this vanished culture has been scarcely studied and it remains virtually unknown. Archaeologists don’t even have a name for it.

Christopher Fisher, a Mesoamerican archaeologist on the team from Colorado State University, said the pristine, unlooted condition of the site was “incredibly rare.” He speculated that the cache, found at the base of the pyramid, may have been an offering.

“The undisturbed context is unique,” Fisher said. “This is a powerful ritual display, to take wealth objects like this out of circulation.”

The tops of 52 artifacts were peeking from the earth. Many more evidently lie below ground, with possible burials. They include stone ceremonial seats (called metates) and finely carved vessels decorated with snakes, zoomorphic figures, and vultures.

The most striking object emerging from the ground is the head of what Fisher speculated might be “a were-jaguar,” possibly depicting a shaman in a transformed, spirit state. Alternatively, the artifact might be related to ritualized ball games that were a feature of pre-Columbian life in Mesoamerica.

Classroom design can boost primary pupils' progress by 16%

 

We all know how important it is that our primary school teachers are highly qualified, but what is less known is what impact the room where children are taught has on their achievement or performance. Results of a three-year research project have shown that the design of a classroom at primary school level can boost learning progress by up to 16% in a single year.

Our team of researchers visited 27 schools in Blackpool, Hampshire and Ealing, carrying out detailed surveys of more than 150 classrooms in varying geographical and socio-economic contexts. Our resulting report analysed the performance of 3,766 pupils between the ages of five and 11 in relation to the design of their classroom, providing clear evidence for the first time that it had a dramatic affect on their attainment levels.

While we were aware that specific elements such as “air quality” have been analysed before, it was the first time researchers had ever gone into real schools and discovered the impact on children’s learning of every aspect of a classroom.

Measuring pupils' progress

For each pupil in the study, we looked at the teacher-assessed grades in reading, writing and mathematics at the start and the end of the year, so that their progress in each subject could be calculated. These subjects are typically taught in the same classroom, which represents a permanent learning space for the children at primary school level, unlike in a secondary school where students often move from room to room for their different subjects.

It was from this data that we could estimate that moving the “average” pupil from the least effective classroom to the most effective classroom accounted for an increase in pupil performance of 1.3 sub-levels of the national curriculum in a single year. The national curriculum is divided into eight levels, each with three sub-levels, used to measure children’s progress. Progress of 1.3 sub-levels based on the classroom environment is a big impact when the Department of Education expects primary school children to progress by two sub-levels in a year.

If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different

We speak so effortlessly that most of us never think about it. But psychologists and neuroscientists are captivated by the human capacity to communicate with language. By the time a child can tie his or her shoes, enough words and rules have been mastered to allow the expression of an unlimited number of utterances. The uniqueness of this behaviour to the human species indicates its centrality to human psychology.

That this behaviour comes naturally and seemingly effortlessly in the first few years of life merely fascinates us further. Untangling the brain’s mechanisms for language has been a pillar of neuroscience since its inception. New research published in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences about the different connections going on in the brains of Mandarin and English speakers, demonstrates just how flexible our ability to learn language really is.

Real-time brain networking

Before functional brain imaging was possible, two areas on the left side of the brain, called Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, had already revealed their importance for language. Victims of stroke or traumatic brain injury to either of these crucial areas on the left side of the brain exhibited profound disabilities for producing and understanding language. Modern theories on connectionism – the idea that knowledge is distributed across different parts of the brain and not tucked into dedicated modules like Broca’s area – have compelled researchers to take a closer look.

For example, language requires real-time mappings between words and their meanings. This requires that the sounds heard in speech – decoded in the auditory cortex – must be integrated with knowledge about what they mean – in the frontal cortex. Modern theories in neuroscience are enamoured with this type of “network” approach. Instead of pinning miracles of cognition to singular brain areas, complex processes are now viewed as distributed across different cortical areas, relying on several parts of the brain interacting dynamically.

Top tips: how can PE and school sport help students stay healthy?

From pedometers to healthy Come Dine With Me clubs, physical education experts share their ideas for improving pupil wellbeing from our recent live chat.

Get pupils to wake and shake in lessons 
 

Brain function decreases after 17 minutes of sitting still. I know of lots of innovative primary schools that make sure children aren’t sitting for more than 15 minutes at a time. I have seen some wonderful literacy lessons delivered through physical activity, such as children acting out the story. With approaches like this, alongside a high quality PE and sport programme, schools can help young people achieve their 60 active minutes a day.

Alison Oliver, chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust.

Take a cross-curricula approach

PE shouldn’t be just within the fabric of the sports hall. For example, in maths and food technology you can compare data on athletic times and calorie count over a six-week period to predict outcomes. Or, to motivate disaffected groups in languages, it’s not uncommon to run a sports days in a different language. History and sport also play a great part in Britain and abroad. Henry VIII was a massive advocate of sport and there are many opportunities for projects between the history and PE department.

Steve Sallis, head of education and player welfare at Millwall Football Club.

Track how students are doing with a scorecard

Every Thursday our entire year 7 cohort arrive at school in their PE kit and take part in a physical activity instead of having their normal form time. They have a “personal best” scorecard, which lists performance measures linked to fitness levels, and work with a health mentor who designs activities around improving their performance over time. We deliver it on a day when the kids already have PE (to help with logistics) and have an all-inclusive “fun club” after school, which has fantastic levels of attendance.

Kevin Byrne, sport and health development leader at Bebington high sports college.

Rethink the layout of the playground 
 

Zoning the playground to ensure ball games don’t dominate and there’s space for a range of activities can inspire and empower a wider variety of pupils to “play” at playtime. Equally, training lunchtime supervisors to organise and lead activity has proven effective. Some of the most innovative and exciting work I have seen is where children are trained to lead and organise peer-led activities. Youth sport leadership not only increases participation, but is a powerful way of developing skills that are important to learning and life, such as communication, organisation and self-reflection.