Co-Producing Multilingual Big Books through Service Learning

Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) is the strategic use of the learner's mother tongue and additional languages for literacy and instruction. This study examined the service-learning (SL) experience of a university that involved collaborative production of mother tongue big books (enlarged picture books for shared reading) in four locations in the Philippines. The study found that participatory 'big book' making requires five critical events that begin with the preparation of participants and culminate in the turnover of the big books to the community. The project produced 22 big book titles in 8 languages. Though the big books provided materials for reading exercises, they also told stories about the environment and discussed critical issues like discrimination experienced by indigenous children. The student participants revealed that the service-learning experience uncovered myths about indigenous people that have been normalized through faulty school texts.