Unleashing Hidden Potential

Over the course of more than twenty years of working with children and their parents in the Street Libraries, Fourth World Movement volunteers witnessed again and again that many children who succeeded in learning at the Street Libraries were often struggling and failing in school. Many parents who participated in the Street Libraries were viewed by the school as uninterested in their children's education. This led to the Unleashing Hidden Potential (UHP) project: creating a forum for parents, teachers, and volunteers to share ideas with each other and come to understand each other's perspectives better.

The starting point of the UHP project was to recognize that we are all experts and actors in helping children to learn better. This avoided the false and painful division between people seen as experts and people seen as recipients of help and advice. The idea of bringing together parents, classroom teachers, community workers, university professors of education and sociology, and full-time Fourth World volunteers demanded two years of preparation: interviews, workshops, and meetings that led to a three-day seminar.

Preparatory workshops in small groups helped participants to articulate different views and to state points for discussion. One workshop in New York, for example, was staged as a radio talk show in which three people spoke as experts in their role as a mother, a Day Care director, and a Street Library worker.

For the three-day seminar that gathered fifty people, all participants contributed a story documenting a personal experience with a child's learning. They were encouraged to write about successes and positive efforts rather than focus on injustices and problems. A theatrical presentation drawn from one contribution launched the three-day session. Five contributions provided the focal topics for plenary meetings between all the actors in a child's education: parents, teachers, community workers, and teacher trainers. Using the true stories that were shared during the UHP preparations and seminar and responses to those stories from other participants, the UHP CD-ROM provides the forum for a multi-voiced conversation around different themes in education. Click here for a short description.

This CD-ROM can be purchased on our website. View details.