Global Storybooks: From Arabic to Zulu, freely available digital tales in 50+ languages

January 20, 2020

Literacy is central to education and plays an important role in development and peace. As such a group of researchers out of the University of British Columbia, including Wall Institute Distinguished Scholar Bonny Norton, have developed an open, multilingual literacy portal called Global Storybooks. The Global Storybooks portal hosts custom sites with multilingual open-licensed books for over 40 countries and has the potential to promote quality education, literacy and multilingualism. 

While at the Institute, Bonny Norton conducted a conference to identify and enhance the many research projects, across diverse UBC faculties, which address the African context; as well as to encourage interdisciplinarity and collaboration amongst established and emerging scholars at UBC; and to promote the application of research to both policy and practice, locally and internationally. Norton also received a grant from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies to aid in the development of Storybooks Canada.