Community Collaborations
Kids’ Own Publishing
Kids’ Own Publishing is a Melbourne-based not-for-profit arts organisation that exists to raise the status of children’s voices in art and storytelling, by co-creating and publishing picture books by children, for children.
The conversation, which started between Dr Julie Choi and Anna Dollard, the Director of Kids’ Own Publishing (KO), was initially around the politics of translating a children’s book from their native Hazaragi language. This led to a fruitful, ongoing collaboration and investigations involving a growing number of researchers. The research is bringing together new understandings of how to partner with schools and communities to collaboratively open up translanguaging spaces in creating multilingual children’s picture books with marginalised language communities. The initiative has worked towards redressing inequalities faced by students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the literacy classroom. While this is an issue of global significance, this work is especially important in the Victorian context given the superdiversity of students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds and the challenges teachers face in harnessing these in the classroom. Failure to do so can result in loss of languages and inter-generational connections as well as undermining children’s language and literacy development. The resulting KO program – Kids’ Own Languages – focused on working alongside multilingual children and their families in local Victorian contexts as they created and published arts-rich books drawing on their linguistic and cultural knowledges, and exploring the complex and dynamic ways they use them.
The initiative challenged the monolingual view of language use, explored how leveraging students’ complex linguistic repertories can foster literacy development, and studied how arts-rich experiences support children to engage in meaning-making. As teacher educators, the researchers are also bringing this knowledge to their own teaching, to help the next generation of teachers adopt a translanguaging approach to language and literacy education.
For more of Kids’ Own Languages books, see https://kidsownpublishing.org.au/kids-own-languages/
ViệtSpeak
ViệtSpeak is a community-based, non-profit organisation situated in Melbourne’s west. In 2023, ViệtSpeak and Kids’ Own Publishing collaborated with Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese background parents and their children at Cherry Crescent Preschool, Braybrook to create a picturebook. The gatherings were an opportunity for the group to talk, listen and draw together. Sitting around a table, the old and new friends shared stories of language pride and shame, identity and transformations, and explored what it means to have, lost, hold-onto, learn and pass-on language and culture.
For more details on the creation and research process of this book and an online book reading of the book by one of the parents, see https://vietspeak.net/cudc/ for details.
For more details on the wonderful book reading event, visit https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/art-pl/storytime/
Join the workshop with artist Viet-My and teacher Thea Ho for an interactive adventure with Crocodile và Unicorn: https://languagesfestival.net/artists/
