UC's commitment to school reading – Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

For three years now, the contest for third and sixth grade students from all over Chile, "The pleasure of hearing reading", has had the academic support of the University, through the technical support of the Faculty of Education, and the dedicated evaluation carried out by students of both this career and the Faculty of Letters.

Promoting reading and orality among schoolchildren is the objective of the contest "The pleasure of hearing reading" (EPOL). Contest that was held for the first time at the national level in 2015 -in charge of the foundation I read you and the support of the foundation Ibanez Atkinson– and that it intends to relieve the importance of reading and orality at the school level -third and sixth grade-, through free expression, imagination and creativity.

In 2017, the Universidad Católica signed a collaboration agreement to provide academic support, through the Future School Library, la Faculty of Education and Letters faculty. Alliance that materialized the following year and that has resulted in the participation of part of the academic body, researchers and students, in the process of evaluating the videos of the participants. In the case of the Faculty of Education, the work carried out by the Reading Didactics team.

As the academic of the Faculty of Education, Alexandra Meneses: “The collaboration shows the interest that we have in the language team of the Faculty to be able to have a constant relationship with the medium to reach the boys and girls. It also allows us to analyze evidence of reading by boys and girls, and approach this pleasure of hearing reading and allows us to learn from practice in didactics and disciplinary courses, fostering a passion for reading and for teaching”.

From the academy to the classroom

The contest begins with a call for teachers from all over Chile, and from different establishments, to work on reading aloud with their students. Teachers elect their representatives -third and sixth grade students-. Those who are selected must make a 3-minute video, expressively reading an extract from a book, short story, etc.

In a beginning, the academic team of Education participated advising the evaluation guideline. In addition, it trained the students of Education -first semester- and Letters, to be evaluators, who do it voluntarily. He has also collaborated with the Yo Te Leo Foundation to evaluate, performing double coding, which opted to improve the reliability of the evaluation process.

"The participation of students in this process is very enriching. It helps them to be surprised, arouses a sense of wonder and high expectations. It really gives pleasure to see them read and mobilizes them to get involved with the teaching profession and what it implies to generate learning opportunities for everyone”, affirms Alejandra Meneses.

Due to the pandemic Covid-19, the participation of schoolchildren was delayed, also extending to the second semester, which led to the addition of the participation of Education students from other courses, such as Literature for children in preschool education, Literature for children in basic education, Didactics of reading and Didactics in voice language of the pedagogical training program. In this way, academics from other areas were involved, such as Maili Ow, Guillermo Castillo, Monica Bombal and Felipe Munita.

“Listening to children from our country read is a very beautiful and enriching experience. In addition, being able to do it as an activity in reading and Literature courses makes it even more significant, since various learning associated with these areas can be put into practice,” says Daniela Holman, a 4th-year student of Basic Education Pedagogy. “Specifically, and linked to Didactics of Reading, I was able to put into practice my knowledge about reading fluency and prosody, that is, speed, accentuation, punctuation, intonation, etc. Therefore, in addition to being a magnificent experience, it was an opportunity to consolidate what we had learned”, she adds.

“I really liked participating in this instance, in my case, I am quite excited to see such motivated girls and boys doing their expressive readings. Precisely, I am training as a Language and Literature teacher and the skills that this contest seeks to reward are closely linked to my area. Ideally, hopefully projects like EPOL would multiply and spread with the aim of encouraging reading and the development of oral expression skills in the little ones”, adds Soledad Saavedra, a graduate in Letters and a student at the Pedagogical Training Program.

Participation throughout Chile 

The contest has been growing in these five years. First, a couple of communes participated and, currently, schoolchildren from all over Chile participate. This implies a tremendous effort to evaluate, which is replicated in all the production and evaluation carried out by the Faculty of Education through its academics and students. The evaluation time lasts between 2 to 3 weeks.

As the academic Alejandra Meneses affirms: "This type of activity is aligned with the public commitment of UC, with that look of looking for new ways to contact the country and not only with what happens in Santiago”.

There were 831 videos in total. Each teacher evaluated their students and defined a winner per course. The number of videos evaluated in the second stage corresponds to the number of winning videos per course.

As Javiera Rojas, a student in the process of obtaining a degree in Early Childhood Education Pedagogy, recounted: “The contest acquired a very powerful meaning during the context of the pandemic, so the final was held through Zoom connections with the boys and girls, and it allowed us to connect through the live broadcast to find out the finalists and winners of the contest. . The lessons learned from the process were directly linked to the name of the contest, "The Pleasure of Hearing Children Read," since observing and listening to children's stories is a joy and makes you love children's literature more every day.

In total since 2018, UC has evaluated 1751 videos, thanks to the committed work of its evaluators: 357 students from the Faculty of Education and 52 from the Faculty of Letters.

“One of the challenges ahead is how to promote the teaching of expressive reading, generating proposals to further accompany the teachers of the system, and also gather evidence of how the children's teachers, who reach the final, promote this type of reading in their classes; how these can permeate initial and continuing education, here could be a space for collaboration. I think that this is something that we have not yet worked on and that could be very interesting”, concludes Professor Meneses.

Source: UC's commitment to school reading – Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile