Like the kind neighbor in the books about Lotta on Bråkmakargatan. This is how Marlen Eskander describes the person who introduced storytelling to her as a child.
- I think of Aunt Berg when I think of my grandfather, she says.
The grandfather's stories were not written down. He interspersed fables with true stories about his escape from the Ottoman Empire to Syria, while his grandchildren helped him weave fishing nets.
- The story was very central and present. We had access to the adults' attention. It is this quality time that I think is incredibly important, says Marlen Eskander.
The 49-year-old social anthropologist is on site at the Book Fair to give his perspective on children and young people's reading. Marlen Eskander is the founder and operations director of the non-profit association Läsfrämjarinstitutet, which wants to give children and young people, and adults in their vicinity, access to literature and culture.
- Children are smarter than us. But reading is not an innate ability. It is a skill that needs practice and resources and adults who offer it to the children, she says.
The seed for the Reading Promotion Institute was sown just over ten years ago. At the time, Marlen Eskander was on parental leave and started the initiative "Reading for integration" in Södertälje, together with two other mothers. What began with reading aloud to children and parents evolved into a form of storytelling that includes improvisational theater and the opportunity for the listener to influence the story themselves. The method, which Marlen Eskander calls four-dimensional storytelling, is today central to the work of the Reading Promotion Institute.
- Children are active in our reading. They get to help change the story and contribute their perspectives. It's a way to be trained to interpret the text and see yourself in it, she says.
Just like his grandfather, Marlen Eskander has experience of escape. At 14, she left Syria and came to Sweden, a foreign country with a foreign language. Here literature became a saving grace.
- Through the stories, I could, purely metaphysically, move to places that it would have been impossible to move to in physical form.
Today, it is difficult to imagine a life without the magic that books, literature, art and creativity provide, says Marlen Eskander. But the ability to write and read is also a matter of democracy, she continues.
- It's about who is telling the story, whose perspective is missing and what we take for granted. If we are to be able to change the world, we must also be able to imagine that it can be different, she says.
At the Book Fair, Marlen Eskander participates in several conversations about the declining reading comprehension among children and young people, which has become clear in the latest Pisa survey. The test results show that students are better at finding factual information in a text than interpreting context and concentrating on longer stories.
It is serious, she says.
- There is a difference between gathering information and understanding what you read. Reading comprehension is also about perceiving nuances, interpreting context and reading between the lines. We need to cultivate that ability. AI development makes it even more important, she says.
Marlen Eskander hopes that at a book fair in the future she will be able to take her eyes off the importance of reading and focus more on the magic of storytelling.
- I myself am a person who talks about how useful it is to read, to convince people. But I hope that we will talk about the power of literature, about the power of story, and not just about utility.
