Empowering rural early childhood education through shared book reading and school-family-community partnerships

Abstract

ABSTRACT The YuePu project was a community-based shared book-reading philanthropic project implemented in rural China. It is a literacy project utilized spaces in the rural community and invited parents and teachers to participate in free-of-charge shared book-reading activities with their children on the weekend. The reading activities and instructions were designed by literacy educators. The current qualitative study aimed to investigate, as demonstrated by YuePu, how teachers, parents and other stakeholders connect with each other as partners, creating a community-based project around children aged 3–6 in low-resource areas of China. The results showed that the YuePu implemented a school-family-community partnership to establish a supportive learning environment for children’s education and development. The findings provide implications for promoting community collaboration practices in other low-resource settings.