LAHORE: To promote learning during the pandemic, the Children's Literature Festival (CLF), a flagship program of civil society organization Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA), will host the first Pakistan Learning Festival (PLF) from February 8 to 10, 2021 with the collaboration of British Council Pakistan, Children Library Complex (CLC), Oxford University Press (OUP) Pakistan, and Room to Read and National History Museum (NHM).
The multi-site, multi-lingual and multi-cultural festival will be held simultaneously at three locations - CLC and NHM in Lahore, and OUP Bookstore in Karachi.
The PLF 2021 will be a hybrid festival of learning with a few students and teachers present on site and mostly attending it online from across Pakistan and beyond. The hybrid approach will provide a rich vicarious experience to the online audience and will create a strong pull for learning from each other in very small groups in physical open spaces. This will make some of the workshops more interactive and engaging. The three locations will have their own online Zoom and Facebook Live links and viewers will have the option of joining any of the exciting fun filled and stimulating sessions for the three days.
The program for PLF 2021 is packed with learning for ALL, including students, teachers, parents and families. Over a 100 sessions have been planned for the three-day learning festival with 76 resource persons from Pakistan, Nepal, UK and USA and 20 partner organizations participating in varied activities aimed at the learning of children, including theatre, skits, puppets, book launches, creative writing, dance, music, STEM, storytelling with music and expression, Daastan Goi, Climate Change & Environment, arts and crafts, open session 'Bol Kay Lab Azaad Hain Teray' with the amazing children's poetry and prose, mobile libraries of Pakistan, multi-lingual Mushaira and conversations on the Single National Curriculum.
CLF holds great promise as a children's learning resource during COVID and beyond with nearly 23 million children out of school and many more likely to drop out due to COVID. To mitigate effects of the current Learning Emergency in Pakistan engulfing millions of children, youth, and educators in its fold, CLF is all set to organize festivals tailored to offset learning losses amidst indigenous context. The idea is to unlock the potential for critical thinking, creativity, reading, social emotional learning, life skills, and much more and to reach out to every corner of the country.
The PLF initiative will thus reach out to wider audiences across Pakistan and the Diaspora across the world, becoming an equalizer, popularizing local languages, ensuring dignity of all in crating content and storytelling and promoting inclusive learning for ALL.
CLF is a social movement founded by Baela Raza Jamil of ITA and co-founded by Ameena Syed of Adab Festival in collaboration with a number of private and public organizations. The CLF has a nationwide footprint, having completed 64 CLFs in all four provincial capitals, Islamabad and over 25 districts of the country, and one digital CLF reaching over 1.4 million children and teachers since its inception in November, 2011.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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