Siljan – a video competition. Lessons learnt from a reading promotion project

Abstract

The video competition Siljan is a creative literacy project developed for 5th–10th grade students by the Centre for Children´s Literature at the University of Akureyri. The project involves students creating a video about a recent book for children or adolescents. The objective is to increase interest in reading among students, promote peer support and focus the attention of school communities on books for children and adolescents. The project was initiated in response to the findings of empirical research on literacy among compulsory school students. Research had shown both declining interest in reading and worse performance in tests of reading skills and comprehension. These findings also revealed a substantial gender difference as girls were generally found to be more interested in reading, to have more positive attitudes towards reading and to perform better on standardised tests of reading and comprehension, while boys were more likely to avoid reading. These findings generated substantial concern among educational experts, policy makers and the general public and resulted in various projects to enhance reading skills and literacy. The Siljan project was built around the notion that increasing interest in reading and supporting better reading habits was crucial to enhancing reading comprehension. The video competition was thus developed as a tool to harness the interests and creativity of children and adolescents in projects where they actively engaged with recent children's literature. The competition also generated data that could be used to enhance the reading culture of children and adolescents. The six waves of the competition have generated a database of 230 videos by almost 800 students. In this paper, the Siljan database is used to analyse the students behind the videos with an emphasis on gender and age. Prior research on reading habits among compulsory school students would suggest that girls and younger students would be more likely to participate in such literacy projects. The results confirm these expectations but with a greater slant against older students than expected. Although boys were generally less likely to participate, the incorporation of the competition into teaching resulted in stronger involvement. This underlines the importance of teachers in creating a supportive atmosphere towards reading. The experiences gained from the Siljan project demonstrate the importance of letting children choose and interpret literature as a strategy to support literacy and the teaching of literature. The participants used music, scene cuts, costumes and other strategies to elicit audience response and demonstrated an understanding of literary concepts and abilities to read between the lines that have frequently proven elusive objectives in the classroom. The collection of videos can be seen as a testament to the creative power, ingenuity and technical proficiency among children and a reminder of the importance of reading motivation. The lower rates of participation in Siljan among boys reflect their lower levels of interest in reading and less participation in school work. The videos produced by boys and girls that did participate, however, indicated equivalent levels of immersion, creativity and conceptual richness, suggesting that creative collaborative projects are equally suitable for both boys and girls. Interestingly, the books chosen by students tend to be more akin to best-seller lists where a handful of authors dominate, rather than the children's literature manifested in statistics on school library lending. Book series are prevalent on both best-seller lists and library lending lists, revealing a level of loyalty towards the book characters. The most popular books on both lists tend to be male dominated, especially on the school library list. It is worth mulling over these findings in the context of a pervasive public discourse attributing worse school performance among boys to the feminine slant of schools and classrooms dominated by female teachers and administrators. In this case, the masculine gender bias of children's literature does not seem to generate greater or even equal interest in reading among boys compared to girls.