Jennifer Albro was teaching third grade at a Title I charter school in Kansas City, Missouri, when the seed of a great endeavor took root. During home visits and after-school meetings, she introduced reading strategies to the parents of three of her struggling students and lent support as they worked with their children. Over the course of the school year, these students made significant gains in reading, and Albro realized that the strong relationships she had established with the families benefited her teaching enormously. Recognizing the potential of these teacher-parent partnerships, she started an organization called Pages & Chapters at a local library in 2011.
Since then, Pages & Chapters has grown into a nonprofit serving six elementary schools in Kansas City and Washington, D.C., working to engage families in their children’s literacy education. In recognition of her efforts, the International Literacy Association has named Albro to its “30 Under 30” list – young trailblazers in global literacy – in the September / October 2015 issue of Literacy Today.
“Today, an astounding 12 percent of the global population is unable to read or write,” says Marcie Craig Post, the International Literacy Association’s executive director. “These thirty young education champions are developing new, creative strategies to close the literacy gap and, in the process, are transforming lives in their communities and around the world.”
In addition to boosting academic performance, Pages & Chapters aims to provide students and their families with books and other literacy resources and to foster environments for literacy and learning in families’ homes. Pivotal to this work is a series of family literacy workshops called Open Books. Teachers implement these workshops in their schools, building on relationships with their students’ families, and Pages & Chapters supports them by providing resources and mentors to work with the teachers and families attending the sessions.
Over the course of a school year, students and parents attend six Open Books sessions, receiving help in 5 essential components of reading: phonics, fluency, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension. Lasting about an hour, a typical workshop focuses on a specific component – for instance, fluency. A teacher from the partnering school facilitates the session while volunteer literacy mentors help parents and students work together on reading strategies centered on that component. At the end of each session, students and parents are invited to choose a book to add to their home libraries.
Pages & Chapters also offers all six sessions of Open Books as a summer program. Albro says she is seeking to grow the organization’s efforts in its current cities, and she points out that the Pages & Chapters website offers the full curriculum and additional resources for teachers to start Open Books in their own schools.
Even as she continues to lead Pages & Chapters, Albro is pursuing advanced study within the Ph.D. program in Language, Literacy, and Social Inquiry in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership. Here, under the tutelage of Dr. Jennifer Turner and other accomplished faculty, she is bridging activism and research, investigating how to support collaborative efforts among teachers and parents for the literacy development of students. Her research closely examines parent and family engagement as it relates specifically to literacy, as well as parents’ role construction around reading development.
“Family engagement is a perennial issue for literacy researchers and literacy educators because we know that children develop foundational reading and writing skills at home,” Dr. Turner says. “If schools and parents work together, then children’s literacy development will be greatly enhanced. Unfortunately, positive home-school connections can be extremely difficult to create and sustain. Jenny’s program, Pages & Chapters, is so important because it helps build productive relationships between schools and families in communities across the nation. We need more of these community-based literacy programs, and additional research on family engagement, if we want to really make a difference in children’s lives.”
Click here to read the cover story in Literacy Today, “The New Generation: Celebrating ILA’s First 30 Under 30 List.”
Click here to visit the Pages & Chapters website.
Jennifer Albro is a Ph.D. student focusing on Literacy Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership’s Language, Literacy, and Social Inquiry program. She is the founder and president of Pages & Chapters, and she also offers education consulting services for schools, nonprofits, and foundations. She taught 2nd and 3rd grades for Pathway Academy in Kansas City and was a reading interventionist for Belton School District in Cass County, Missouri. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education and an M.A. in Holistic Education, both from Johnson University, and an M.A. in Reading Education from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Dr. Jennifer Turner is an associate professor of Reading Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership. Her research focuses on culturally responsive approaches to elementary reading instruction, vision as a conceptual and practical tool for preparing reading teachers for diversity, and racially diverse children’s perspectives on career literacies and identities. Her book Change is Gonna Come: Transforming Literacy Education for African American Students (Teachers College Press, 2010), co-authored with Patricia A. Edwards and Gwendolyn McMillon, won the 2011 Edward Fry Book Award from the Literacy Research Association. Dr. Turner received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Literacy from Michigan State University.
