Not all children can be toppers or achievers. Not all children enjoy going to school, and not all are welcomed in many schools. Children who have faced school refusal, physical or mental limitations and challenges, emotional disturbance, or inability to fit into a school – where do they go?
Tucked into a small building in a suburb of Bangalore city is a Gurukul which insists that it is not a school. Established by highly qualified ladies who, after taking a break in their careers, wanted to do something meaningful for under-served children, they established this centre seven years ago in RT Nagar. The inspiring leader is Sonal Patel, who holds a post-graduate degree in law and is a qualified counselor and assessor. The core team consists of Jayanthi and Priti Chengappa who coordinate all the activities. Amazingly, more than a dozen very competent ladies lend their services unhesitatingly to whatever extent they can, either free or getting nominal honorarium.
It is unbelievable to see how this little unit has progressed, for when it started there was a teacher: student ratio of 10:1, i.e. 10 teachers and one kid! Patiently handling each little one who entered the premises, Gurukul graduated from a little space in the basement to its own airy and very welcoming 2nd floor with a little terrace and roof garden above.
Gurukul welcomes any child who is facing challenges, be they physical, mental or emotional. The loving ladies just sweep the child into their arms and slowly, gently assess his strength and weaknesses. They give unstinted love and affection in an environment where there are no blackboards, textbooks or rows of benches. Each child is lovingly and carefully guided to the right school or vocational training depending on ability, interest and willingness. Dozens of children have passed through the doors of Gurukul and many more keep coming in – whenever they do not or cannot go to a regular school.
Every child is welcomed in Gurukul, the quiet ones who just refuse to open their mouth and talk to anyone, to those who are so hyperactive that before you know it, they have gone on a toppling, tearing and breaking spree. It is amazing to watch how these children are allowed to be themselves when they climb up the stairs of Gurukul and start running around the entire place. Watched over gently but firmly, these children slowly mellow down – and then the assessment begins.
Every child is holistically assessed by more than one counsellor, and parents are interviewed extensively (most often separately). A detailed report is made out – without labelling a child or putting him down, but starting with many of his hidden talents that sometimes even parents may not be aware of. Then the challenges of the child are listed out, and finally a step-by-step action plan of how the child can be made to progress and overcome his hurdles is mapped out.
Gurukulers constantly keep in touch and liaise with a number of mainstream schools, integrated schools, schools that are sensitive to take a child who is a little different, and special schools. The report recommends what type of schooling would be most appropriate to the individual child, and a gentle counselling of the parents takes place to help them accept the limitations that the child may have. At times the child may require continuing at Gurukul for months, or even the entire academic year. The ‘Aunties’ allow them to do so. Even when a child has been put into a school, Gurukul continues to monitor his progress, even allowing the child to take a slow transition by spending some days in the school and some days in Gurukul.
Considering the fact that only children with difficulties come to Gurukul, the success rate is remarkably high. Almost all the children over the past several years have moved on to a better life, and most important – are happy with their growth, learning and what they are doing. Many of them come back in the summer vacation to get a booster dose of life skills and emotional intelligence. From challenged to bright and intelligent children who are restless and bored in classrooms, everyone loves Gurukul, and once they have been there, parents are assured that they will be guided correctly as to how to take the child along further.
There is no admission or any other charge other than a reasonable monthly fee, and often parents are allowed to pay as per the financial capacity of the family. The only condition Gurukulers put is that the parent should be genuinely interested in getting involved, exploring options and adapting to the needs of their child.
Asha with one of the first students of GurukulGroup activity at GurukulJayanthi motivating a childJayanthiPriti at workPriti, Sonal and Jayanthi
When the Bageshwar district magistrate (DM), Mangesh Ghildiyal, was set to get transferred to Rudraprayag in May, hundreds of locals took to the streets to oppose this move. Though they couldn’t stop the transfer, there’s good reason why they didn’t want to lose him. Mangesh has garnered public adulation for connecting people with several government welfare programmes and providing quick solutions every time the district faces a problem.
This time, in an out-of-the-box initiative, he roped his wife, Usha Ghildiyal, to teach in the Science department of the GGIC (Govt Girls Inter College) Rudraprayag High School, when the students faced scarcity of teachers.
On being notified about the school’s science department being understaffed, and in turn affecting the students’ academic performance, the DM assigned his wife to take charge till the school finds a suitable replacement.
“While visiting the school for a routine inspection, I came to know that the students did not have a science teacher. I requested my wife to volunteer there and she immediately agreed. After having a conversation with the school’s principal regarding this, my wife joined the school as a science teacher. Recruitment for teachers at the government level will begin soon. Until then, my wife will continue to volunteer her services there,” he told YourStory.
Usha has started teaching science to Class 9 and 10 students, and dedicates two and a half hours each day to teach these children, reported the publication.
In keeping with her new role, Usha not only took responsibility and attended work punctually, but also became the favourite teacher of the students in a short time. According to the school’s principal, Mamta Nautiyal, Usha’s calm nature along with her sound teaching techniques have made her very popular among students.
Usha holds a doctorate in Plant Pathology from Govind Ballabhpant University.
In an interview with Amar Ujala, she said, “I want girls to excel in fields like arts and science and make their district proud.”
Mangesh is an IAS officer of the 2011 batch, who also secured the fourth position countrywide. He was offered the opportunity to join the IFS, but he chose to serve the home cadre. He is reportedly planning to open a coaching centre for civil services aspirants in the district. He has also been consistently working towards his aim of improving the state of schools in Uttarakhand.
There was a time when Mumbai was the hub of the cotton textile industry in India. Central Mumbai was full of textile mills, surrounded by chawls that housed the mill workers. These mills, which lie on many acres of prime land, have been defunct for decades. In the last few years, many of these mills have been bought by builders, who have razed them and built luxury apartments for private residences.
We now have a cluster of high-rise buildings on a 10-15 acre plot, alongside tightly packed chawls. The mill workers now come to the same address, to work as maids, cooks, and drivers. Inside the apartment complex, it is green, beautiful, with many amenities and luxuries. Outside, it is a different world and there are high walls to keep that world out.
What the Ashok Gardens society has done, however, is bridge the gap between the two worlds. The Social Connect initiative was started to engage with the neighbours.
For over three years now, every Saturday a group of resident volunteers conduct classes for the neighbourhood children.
Children range in the age group of 5-12 years. For some activities, they would all be together. For some, they are broken up into groups based on their age. The batch size is 24 children and there is always a wait-list. While most kids continue, some kids leave if they are moving out of the neighbourhood or if they are studying in higher classes and are busy with academics.
Every class starts with 10 minutes of yoga, followed by art-and-craft, storytelling or music and dance. Over the years, conversational English was also introduced, with the curriculum developed by a group of volunteers.
For some months, learning may be based on a theme. For example, during the flamingo season, they learnt about the wading bird and migration, did a craft activity, and were taken to see the flamingos in the Sewri flatlands. Another month, the theme was Indian Independence. They discussed the freedom struggle, learned patriotic songs, and even performed for the appreciative residents on Independence Day. There was also a module on civic awareness. In groups, they built model cities, which were judged by BMC officials who spoke to the kids about waste management. The kids did a few modules of origami and were taken to an origami exhibition. On one occasion, in keeping with the theme, they also watched a movie in the building’s theatre. These are just examples of the variety of classes and activities. The children get holidays as per the school calendar.
The classes are conducted entirely by the residents. A group of them also take turns providing snacks for the class. A modest corpus, built from donations from the core group and part proceeds from a book sale, takes care of expenses, if any. Spending is prudent and meticulous accounts are maintained.
In addition to these weekly classes, a medical camp and a financial literacy camp were also conducted under the Social Connect umbrella. It was open to the domestic help of the building and their neighbours, so it was another way to engage with the community.
There are challenges. Volunteers need to feel motivated. Another challenge has been to decide on the format. Does one introduce some academics, build a curriculum? Or does one conduct classes and build skills not taught in schools? Every term, the core group meets and discusses learnings and the way forward.
The initiative has always had the full support and backing of the various managing committees.
That has helped in a big way in its continuity. But the biggest reason for the success of this initiative is the dedication of the volunteers. A few senior citizens who are deeply involved say that this interaction with the children brings them a lot of joy. I myself had the opportunity to volunteer for a few sessions, and it was an amazing experience. The children are smart and interested, and working with them is incredibly fulfilling.
We may have started this off to give back to the community, but over the years, we discovered that we get a lot out of it ourselves.
As the cityscape changes, and as such residential buildings increasingly come up in hitherto lower middle class neighbourhoods, I think it would be wonderful if all societies took up activities such as these. As a society, as a country, as the world, we need to build more bridges, and less walls.
A corporation school in Trichy, Tamil Nadu, will now introduce a web-based virtual learning environment to their students, thanks to the institution’s headmistress.
The Corporation Middle School in Beema Nagar inaugurated its first online smart classroom on Monday – a first-of-its-kind initiative in the city.
The headmistress of the school, D Rajarajeswari, had a special role in bringing the facility to the school.
Shelling out the entire cost of ₹1.83 lakh from her own pocket, the headmistress’ dedication towards enabling the kids to have a better learning experience is commendable. “The new facility will kindle curiosity and thinking ability among the children,” she told TOI.
In the academic year 2015-16, the school enrolled just 56 students. However, with the introduction of smart classroom – an application-based learning technique that is prevalent in most urban schools – the school saw a threefold increase in the number of students.
“We realised that parents wanted their children to learn new things. Parents opt for private schools due to the facilities available there. After we introduced the smart classroom, we found the numbers increasing in our school,” said the headmistress.
After the number of students reached 165 this year, the school decided to upgrade the facilities and introduce an online classroom. Equipped with a smart board that comes with a projector and speakers, the facility also has a computer with internet that will enable the teachers to download relevant content. And the facilities under the awesome initiative don’t stop here.
“We have tied up with a government school at K Paramathi in Karur, which has the same facility through which classes are streamed live through Skype. They will now get an opportunity to interact with students in other schools, sitting in their classrooms,” added Rajarajeswari.
With dedicated institution heads like these, who take so much interest in their students’ education, more children will be inclined to participate.
When considering higher studies abroad, financing your education may be one of the first concerns that come to your mind. The cost of an education at a top institute abroad can be a deterrent for students. However, with proper planning and information, hopefully no aspirant will face this predicament and have to compromise on their plans to study aboard. There are multiple types of scholarships available for international students based on different eligibility criteria. They can also be sponsored by a broad range of institutions from universities, the government and private organisations. Here’s a few tips to guide you about scholarships for studying abroad:
Start early: Applying for a scholarship needs a great deal of groundwork starting with researching the broad range of options, identifying the most appropriate choices, preparing a convincing application and much more! The sooner you start, the better you’ll manage the work load and avoid any last-minute panic situations. We recommend you start at least 3-4 years prior to applying.
Do your research: Every institution will have its own set of norms and conditions regarding grants and awards. They could be merit-based, need based, subject based, nationality based etc. Consider where you realistically fit in before finalizing your options. One of the best sources of financial aid can be the college you attend, so make sure you thoroughly explore the options they have available and how you can sign up for it.
Read the fine print: Have a clear understanding of what the scholarship guidelines entail. For example, if I win the scholarship do I need to maintain a minimum GPA. Or does the scholarship only fund tuition or will it cover all expenses associated with study abroad. Are you expected to return back to India after completing the program? Make sure you read the fine print!
Polish your writing skills: An exceptionally well written essay will convey the calibre of the writer. Aim to make your write-up near perfect so that you become a natural choice of the scholarship committee. Practice writing every day, focus on your content, argument, organization of ideas, structure and above all grammatical accuracy.
Merit-based: Are you exceptionally meritorious in studies or blessed with the voice of a nightingale? In either case, you are a strong competitor for the scholarship of excellence that recognises students with rare talent in academics as well as non-scholastic areas like music, sports, painting, leadership skills etc. A merit based scholarship not only helps you finance your education but also adds an incredible amount of value to your academic and career profile. Some distinguished scholarships under this category are: Fullbright Foreign Student Program (USA): It’s one of the most prestigious scholarships in the field of higher education and research. Only superlative candidates are eligible to apply and enjoy the benefits. The scholarship is awarded to international applicants from various walks of life; you can be a graduate student, a working professional or an artist. The allowance would cover expenses related to tuition, books, travel etc. for the entire tenure of your study. The Fullbright-Nehru Awards are conferred to accomplished academics, professionals and talented students in India to study, research and teach in the US. If you are applying for this award, brace yourself for a rigorous application and interview process. Once you qualify the rounds and get selected, the organisation helps you through and through with visa application, obtaining health insurance and a pre-departure orientation. The Rhodes Scholarship (UK): Under the program of the Rhodes Scholarship of India, the Rhodes authority offer 5 scholarships to high-calibre students from India chosen on the basis of “exceptional intellect, character, leadership, and commitment to service” who would be eligible to pursue further education at the eminent University of Oxford. The grant includes tuition, personal stipend and airfare to Oxford at the beginning of the term and back to your home country at the end of the term.
Need based scholarships: It’s a boon for those in need of financial aid and there are a host of top universities that offer financial help to students, in the league are Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton to list a few. There are also several private organizations in collaboration with multinational companies that are providing financial support to students of any nationality aspiring for international education. To illustrate: Harvard has its financial aid program named the ‘Harvard Financial Aid Initiative’ which caters to the financial deficiency of low and middle income group of students. International students receive the same amount of aid as a US students. You have to apply for financial aid with your demonstrated need and family income details for the committee to review. Harvard assures students of a need blind admission procedure and financial support throughout the year. Davis United World Colleges Scholars Program: All graduates of United World Colleges (UWC) schools who gain admission on their own merits to selected U.S. colleges or universities qualify for need-based scholarship support through the program. The program currently supports over 2,700 scholars at 94 partner colleges and universities throughout the United States. Stanford Graduate School of Business has the Stanford Reliance Dhirubhai Fellowship Program “to support Indian nationals living in India who need financial assistance in obtaining an MBA at Stanford.”
Eminent institutions abroad are taking major initiatives to democratize education by recognizing talented students irrespective of their financial status or nationality. However, students must demonstrate excellence to be considered for need based scholarships.
Government of India facilitated International scholarships: do you know many countries invite Indian students to study in their institutions by offering scholarships? Invitations are sent through the Indian government under Cultural/Educational Exchange programs. The Government advertises the scholarship offers through newspapers, the website of the department of higher education as well as notifies colleges, universities, UGC through circulars. So, keep a tab of the latest updates about the scholarships by checking out the relevant sources.
The Commonwealth Scholarship (UK): You’ll be excited to learn that it is fully government funded. The grant covers tuition, travel, living cost including spouse and children allowances. The scholarship is awarded in the fields of Engineering and Technology, Science, Agriculture, Humanities and Social Science. That covers almost every field!
Other countries that offer scholarships on this platform are Commonwealth scholarship by New Zealand, China, Japan, Italy, Mexico and the Presidential Scholarship offered by Sri Lanka.
Program/Subject specific scholarships: Students can also probe into options for their specific subject or degree of interest. For instance, if you are eying international law for study abroad, good news for you. The AVVO Scholarship program offers scholarships for JD Law students as well as pre-Law and undergraduate students. Science students be amped up about participating in the Global Science Course (GSC) Undergraduate Transfer Program. The School of Science Scholarship sponsored by Tokyo University is an attempt to bring young science lovers on one platform to harbour great interactions and exchange of ideas. Likewise, many more subject/program specific scholarships are available that help students to advance their education in the subject field.
The number of scholarships today for international students is baffling. Approach your selection process keeping in mind what your strengths are, which subject is your forte, and what goals you want to achieve. Review every detail from eligibility to the fund amount, and only after you’ve done your due diligence, apply for the scholarship.
Empowered by The Asha Trust in Powai, a group of IIT-Bombay graduates is making a difference to the lives of over 130 students from government schools.
Breaking away from the traditional practice of ‘mugging up’ books, these IIT-Bombay students are helping children breakdown concepts and understanding them better.
The Asha Trust helps such students, who are mainly from municipal schools, in managing studies after school. The IIT grads are helping with this process by making them understand the concepts, theoretically and practically, and also remembering it in a logical manner.
One of the teachers, Abhishek Kumar, an IIT graduate, decided to become a full-time teacher at Asha, instead of pursuing other job opportunities. He teaches math, social studies and Hindi to high school children.
Abhishek is now focussed on helping six students prepare for the National Talent Search Examination (NTSE) to be held in November 2017. “I want to conduct an aptitude test and train students for JEE examination as well. I wish I had more time,” Abhishek told the Hindustan Times.
He attributes his love for teaching to ‘Abhyasika,’ a student initiative at IIT. Another one of Abhishek’s colleagues from IIT, Suranjan Sen, is coaching his students for NEET.
In an age, where coaching classes have become inaccessible to students from government schools and underprivileged backgrounds due to exorbitant fees, the trust charges between ₹100 and ₹500 to coach them.
“Most students who come to us are from municipal schools. Many of them are not able to read and write, even though they are in class 5,” Dr Smita Puniyani, chapter co-ordinator, Asha Trust Mumbai, told HT.
Since their parents cannot afford to send them to tuitions and coaching classes, the trust is helping the kids get low-cost, high-quality coaching. “The fees adds to their burden. So, we thought why not ensure everyone gets quality education without paying a bomb?” said Dr. Smitha.
Asha’s approach to learning has resonated with the students and they love it. “In school, we are asked to mug things up. Here, the teachers help us understand every lesson,” said Kajal Kanojia, a student from a Bhandup school.
By the end of this lesson plan, you’d have covered almost all commonly used subject types in English. That’s no small achievement. With the last 2 lesson plans here and here, your students can speak about themselves and people around them using I, your, he, she etc. They can speak about objects and people using their names e.g. Raghav, Anjali, pen, pencil. They can also speak about people and object in relation to them e.g. my friend, her pen, and his teacher. They can point at objects and speak about these objects using words like this, that, these, those, that pen, this water bottle.
And in this lesson plan we’ll empower the students to speak about the most common attributes of the objects that they see around them. These commonly used attributes include shape, size, colour, touch, smell etc. The aim here is to empower the student to describe objects around him through the 5 sensory inputs i.e. sight, touch, smell, sound, and smell.
You can expect your student to be fairly familiar with describing these sensory inputs in their mother tongue. Because after all these senses come into the picture for a child well before he starts speaking any language (including his mother tongue). So you can expect intuition (coming from your student) to play a major role in learning this lesson plan. Of course, some of these attributes (shape, size etc.) would also be applicable to people as well. After all, a flower and an actress, both, can be beautiful. You, the teacher, would have to educate the student about adjectives applicable for people, for objects and for both. There is no grammar rule that can tell your student this. It just comes from practice. For e.g. you would never say ‘He is long’, you’d rather use ‘He is tall’, although both the sentences are grammatically correct and mean the same thing.
What do we call the group of words that describe something? They are nothing but adjectives. We have already dealt with adjectives in the last 2 lesson plans. The words that were used to describe feelings are nothing but adjectives. This lesson plan will use these feeling adjectives and add shape, size, and colour etc. type of adjectives to the adjective list.
This lesson plan is a relatively simple lesson plan. We are just going to use the subjects that we created in the last lesson plan and describe them using new adjectives. These subjects will be seen in the leftmost column of the table (which you’ll just see).
So let’s begin our journey with adjectives. As always, it begins with the vocabulary section.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary for this lesson plan will be a major area of focus. Why? Because almost all the adjectives are good words to add to vocabulary. Hence each of these adjectives in the vocabulary section deserves individual attention. You must translate the adjectives into the local language of your students and help the student understand (and learn) their meaning as comprehensively as possible.
Vocab section:
Words that describe feelings: happy | very happy | sad | scared | good | bad
Taste: Sweet | sour | salty | bitter
Sound: loud | soft
Smell: fragrant | stinky | musky
Colour: White | Black | Red | Blue | Green
Shape & size: circular | oval | square | big | small | large | long | tall | short
Appearance: Cute | beautiful | ugly
Touch: hard | harsh | soft | smooth
And without much ado, let’s directly jump into the table. The table just puts the vocabulary words into the rightmost column. The first column is made of ‘subjects’ that have been created over the last 2 lesson plans.
Table
Now from this table, I will give you a few good sample sentences:
As I have already mentioned in the previous lesson plans, the table encapsulates the main idea of a lesson plan. Everything else, including the exercise and activities and the vocabulary section, is created to help the student understand the table and form sentences from it.
Teach as many adjectives of shape, size, and colour as your student can digest. Keep adding these new adjectives and subjects to the table and keep creating new sentences from the table. Putting things into the table ensure that everything is structured and easy to follow for the student. Teaching about adjectives is fun. Adjectives are one of those topics in English that is very easy to teach and yet quite useful in regular conversations.
After teaching this table, you must teach the ‘Adjective + noun’ words. A lot of nouns are better described when they are preceded by an adjective. E.g. instead of saying ‘the ball is mine’ if you say ‘the green ball is mine’ then it makes much more sense because now you are specifically talking about a green coloured ball which belongs to you rather that simply saying that a ball belongs to you. These adjective-noun combos will be used in later lesson plans. But for now, think about simple sentences that you can create with these combos. If you need a little help getting started, you may refer to the main table in the last lesson plan and pick up words from there.
The negative sentences
For every positive sentence, there is a negative sentence. And if your student has understood the positive sentences so far, then learning the negative of these sentence would be really a cake walk for him. Teaching about negatives does make a lot of sense. Why? Because now for every question, your student has another answer choice – he can say no as well. Let’s pick up a positive sentence – That ball is green. Its negative version – That ball is not green. It’s as easy as that to create negative sentences for the sentences in this table.
You must recognise your power as a teacher
How many sentences to teach? How many new words to introduce? When to stop? – You have to take the call on your own. After all, you are the teacher. You must answer these questions based on one of your biggest asset – intuition. As you gain more experience, as a teacher, the answer to these questions will come more easily (or say intuitively) to you.
You can only make your students learn the sentences that we discussed so far by asking the right questions? Questions whose answers lie in the table. I just cannot stress more on it. You just can’t go into the class, draw the table on the board, and expect your students to learn the table sentences by themselves. You have to ask them. Ask them repeatedly but patiently.
By the way, all the sentences that your student has learned from these tables will become more relatable only when you are able to put a little background to them.
At the end of the day, this content in itself can only make a little impact in your students’ progress. You the teacher have to bring this whole lesson plan to life – by asking the right questions, by creating suitable background situations and by your patience and empathy. That’s how your student will make real progress.
Go slow. Deliver bite-sized. And let your students digest what you just taught. In my experience, that’s the best way to teach English as a volunteer.
Download this lesson plan along with beautifully crafted exercises and activities, and get started on your English teaching journey right away. To learn more about volunteering and teaching English, visit the Volunteer Curriculum website.
About the author: Raghav Nyati is the founder of Volunteercurriculum.com, which provides English teaching content for volunteers
If things go as planned, colleges in Delhi will soon have a new system that will make it easier for its students to avail driving licences at their college premises.
According to Delhi’s transport minister Kailash Gahlot, the system is likely to be launched by September this year, under which the students will be able to both take test and apply for the licence in their colleges.
The state government aims at making the educational institutions empowered through its proposed plan of issuing learners’ licences.
The eligibility criteria includes students being over 18 years of age and scoring at least 6 out of 10 marks in an online test conducted by the institutions.
“The project, which will be reviewed by deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia this week, is being expedited because the demand for learners’ driving licence is highest among the 18-24 age group applicants,” the minister told Hindustan Times.
Gahlot also explained that among the population that took the learners’ licence last year, more than 53% fell under the 18-24 age bracket. “So, primarily students are the ones taking these licences and authorising educational institutes will revolutionise the system,” he added.
The project will reportedly commence its first leg with government polytechnic colleges. Also, seven colleges falling under the state government like the Ambedkar University are being included in the plan.
A total of 88 institutions that fall under DU will subsequently be part of the project.
“Students will be able to take the test either in English or Hindi. The test is just of 10 minutes and will have 10 objective type questions,” officials concerned said. The online test is supposed to be conducted at colleges on a weekly basis.
At present, there are 13 motor licensing offices across the city where a person can apply for a learner’s licence. Following implementation, this will be the first time that the authorisation for issuing driving licences will be partaken by anyone other than the MLOs.
Armed with an MBA from one of India’s premier business schools, Divakar Sankhla joined the corporate workforce like the majority of his fellow students in 2007. A chance encounter with a Teach for India advertisement tickled something in him. He felt that he could manage to balance both – make a difference through his teaching stints, as well as keep his corporate job.
“I felt that it was something that I could do alongside my job and I decided to enrol for it,” he speaks of his first brush with teaching. While Divakar was satisfied with spending time between his corporate avatar and his teaching stint, he knew that he could give teaching more.
“I would teach at an NGO from 8 am to 10 am three days a week and go to office thereafter,” he says.
A class in progress
For some time, it was fulfilling. Inevitably, as Divakar started spending time with the children the urge to do more for them crept in. The time he spent on teaching and thinking about teaching soon outweighed the time he spent on his corporate job. A son of professors, he believes that teaching was something genetic for him. The inevitable happened when he took a sabbatical and jumped into Teach for India fulltime – he hoped it would give him the chance to really understand if teaching was “It” for him.
“It is important to have teachers who are passionate and love their job. It will come through if they have these qualities and it was important for me to figure out for myself whether or not I had it in me to be a good teacher,” he says. He says he took up teaching as a challenge, “The Teach for India tagline said – are you ready for a challenge? That is exactly what I took it up as.”
Teaching the children at the NGO made Divakar realise how difficult teaching really was. “Initially it was a very difficult task. I had always imagined teaching to be an easy job but I was in for a surprise.”
“From walking into class unprepared and improvising, to spending days over my teaching material, I have grown with the children,” he says.
‘I have grown with these children – Divakar’
When asked about what kept him motivated and focussed on teaching, he says, “The urge to ensure that the children get the best is what keeps me going. This profession has taught me a lot over the years.” Despite working longer hours and putting in double the work that the corporate sector demanded, Divakar felt energised and content teaching the children.
The idea behind Alohomora began soon after our Teach for India fellowship ended. “After all the highs from our students’ farewell notes and cards had subsided, we started to analyse the impact we had made on our students over the two years. While there was progress they had made, it was nowhere close to where a class 4 child must be academically.”
Co-founded by Divakar and Parinita, Alomohora, like the name suggests, wishes to unlock the minds of children and give them a safe space where they can explore and learn. “We wanted to move away from rote learning to a system where these children, while learning, also grow as individuals. It is important for us to be able to groom these children as future leaders of our country.”
At Alomohora, the founders lay a lot of emphasis on ensuring that the children become the stakeholders of their learning process.
Doing so makes them much more accountable to learning. Of course, this involves the teachers to buy-in as well. “We have seen that working with children is a much easier when you are flexible. It is teachers who come with rigid ideas and take far more time to adapt to change. Most teachers in government schools look at their job as a part time thing and do not like it when we request them to stay back for discussions and training,’ Divakar says.
At Alomohora, the team designs and develops project-based programmes to be implemented in various government schools and NGO’s. This year, the team will also be working with class 11 and 12 students across schools. “These kids don’t have the luxury of time to explore and see what works for them. It is critical that they find the right support after school and before college.”
Sharing a story of transformation, he says, “We had a student called Manisha in our school in Aya Nagar in Delhi, in class 8. She was extremely creative and often made various dress designs in her notebook. Once she started working with us under the digital learning programme she saw her designs come alive and that motivated her to make more.”
“In fact, on the day that we were showcasing the works of these children, she actually wore one of her own creations. That was such a powerful thing for us.”
Vocational training
In the coming year, Alomohora plans to incorporate technology into their teachings and are also looking to expand to other cities. “I am from Udaipur and would certainly love to go back and do something for the children there,” he says. Divakar feels thrilled to be able to give these children the ability to dream and make things happen.
If you wish to contact Team Alomohora,e-mail them at – hello@alohomora.org
We live in a world that is governed by visual signs and symbols.
From the incorporation of infographics in office presentations to the simple emojis that we send our loved ones, we are progressing towards a visually fueled society.
Then why should education for children remain far behind?
One educational non-profit organisation based in Bengaluru is working towards making the learning process for children enriching, at the same time sparking curiosity and creativity.
And how do they do that?
Through the medium of visual art and design.
ArtSparks Foundation was established in 2015 to fill the gaps in the curriculum-driven education system — through art and creativity.
“At present, schools lay its focus on the end-of-year exams that continue to remain the main criterion for children to inch to the next grade. In order to foster growth and development in children, we learnt that this wasn’t enough,” says Nisha Nair, the founder.
Inculcating 21st century learning and life skills in their education models, the foundation works towards supporting the creative, cognitive, social, and emotional growth and development of children through the medium of visual art.
What exactly do 21st century learning and life skills mean?
“While the former includes creative thinking, problem posing & solving, investigating, flexible & independent thinking, decision-making, reasoning, reflecting and most importantly, communication, the latter skills consist of self-awareness, perseverance, tolerating ambiguity, managing emotions, empathy, adaptability, initiative, accountability and responsibility,” she explains.
Children aren’t the only benefactors of the programme. “We support the professional development of classroom teachers and encourage them to reflect on their teaching practice. This prompts them towards exploring new ways to enrich their students’ learning,” Nisha says.
The organization actively vouches for the vital role that visual art & design can and should play in children’s education.
Under the Model School Initiative, which is one of their flagship programmes, ArtSparks works closely with both students and teachers at a core group of schools, mostly in marginal regions.
“Schools receiving our carefully designed school-based programmes, geared towards class 6-10, offer exemplars that we periodically disseminate through various platforms such as public exhibitions, educational conferences, publications, and other forums,” she clarifies.
Another one of their initiatives include partnerships with other community-based educational organisations in order to expand the scope of their work towards helping support children’s growth and development by leveraging resources and mobilising others.
They also help setting up Creative Learning Labs within under-resourced schools.
“Housed within these schools, the labs offer a space to nurture children’s creative potential and foster essential learning and life skills. With carefully designed visual arts-based interventions that contribute to this vibrant space for hands-on, experiential, inquiry-based learning, these labs are designed to serve children from class 1 to 10,” Nisha adds.
Having served around 630 students and 165 teachers in the 2016-17 academic year, currently along the pipeline for the organisation is a new initiative, EdSparks Collective.
A one-of-a-kind professional development platform, the initiative invites educators and education administrators who are interested in exploring the full potential of visual arts and design to transform student learning.
“Through EdSparks Collective, we hope to effectively reach and impact those who are charged with providing meaningful learning opportunities to children,” Nisha says.
If you are currently in the field of education and would like to become a member of EdSparks Collective, you can apply through this online form.
Some time ago I was asked by that pesky breed, ‘A telephone journalist!’ whether I did not think special schools were an anachronism in this age of inclusion. I have faced queries like this on more than one occasion, being a part of Open Door, a special needs school, and for having struggled long and hard, and finally succeeded, in convincing the Rehabilitation Council of India to acknowledge training for teachers of children with autism. I was asked whether by wanting the latter I was not promoting exclusion!
I would have given an arm and a leg to have my son’s, then 13, behaviours under control, learning style typicalised, more ‘ready’ for inclusion than he would ever be, attend a mainstream school. No one would even look at him. One rather nice place that took him in, got alarmed by the ‘violence’ they perceived in his hand flapping and out he went again. And since then he has been steadily falling behind and over the years there is now no question that he will never catch the bus. Instead, he will keep falling inexorably behind as happens in a social disorder like autism.
Interestingly, special needs schools are often seen as the culprits as to why more children with disabilities are not in mainstream schools. One would imagine they were created to actively pull children out of ‘normal’ classrooms in order to segregate them!
In fact, traditionally, persons with special needs were mostly hidden away due to ‘karmic shame’ and other reasons, and education was not even a considered possibility. As a result, as formal education gained precedence in society, persons with disabilities were left out. Special education came about to ensure that those with special needs too had the opportunity of accessing education. With increasing self-advocacy, persons with disabilities and their families have rightfully begun to demand their right to education in mainstream schools.
Source: Action For Autism, National Centre For Autism
In an ideal world, schools would have children of every ability studying together. Exposure breeds awareness which leads to sensitivity. Yet the reality is that either mainstream schools are not equipped for, or more often the atmosphere is not conducive to inclusion. Equipping schools with training and infrastructure will need effort but is the easier of the two. The tougher one is the premise on which mainstream schools appear to be based. The entire premise of the necessity of isolating in order to nurture excellence.
We live in an exclusive society. To understand that we need to be aware of what inclusion truly is. Inclusion is the process whereby individuals with every kind of difference are included in mainstream society: where individuals regardless of their caste, or gender, religion or community, of social or economic status, their physical, mental or medical condition, can participate in society.
Ours is a society where a caste prevents participation in various aspects of civil society; where gender alone can prevent an individual from life, let alone accessing education; and where schools actively practice exclusion. Leading and much sought after schools have exclusive sections. ‘Sections’ are not divided according to your name in the alphabetical order, or whether you were within the first 30 or the second 30 to receive admission. ‘Sections’ are determined by scholastic performance. So there are the sections for the ‘toppers’, the ‘above average’, the ‘mediocre’ ones and the ‘less than mediocre ones’ and so on. So if your scholastic performance is affected because you have a specific learning disability or hearing impairment or autism, or simply because you are a slow learner, chances are that you go straight into the ‘duffers’ section.
Students say things like “Oh he’s with the retards,” not as a statement, because a word on its own has no power, but as a derisive comment on the individual. The ‘smart’ guys have nothing to do with the ‘weirdos’. ‘These children must be kept separate so that all the extra coaching, so crucial to ensure that the largest number of students from the school top the board exams, are not wasted on them. So we bring up an entire generation of young people to look down with derision on those who are different. We bring up our young people to believe that there are some people you need have nothing to do with. That there are some you exclude from your life.
Source: Express Photo by Tashi Tobgyal
These are the same people who will be our future politicians, bureaucrats, corporate heads, the man in the street, the future mothers and fathers. What inclusive society are we talking about?
Children can by nature be cruel – the vast majority of them. They need no help in picking on those who are different or weak. And they don’t need any help from the educational system. No amount of legislation, training of mainstream teachers, and picture ops with politicians and the bureaucracy can bring about inclusion unless we change the values our mainstream schools propagate. Getting rid of special needs schools will not automatically promote inclusion. We will only move from segregation in two different locations to segregation within the mainstream school itself.
Our mainstream schools are, to use a popular term in another context, a ‘hotbed’ of exclusion. It’s when policies in mainstream schools change to make them truly inclusive, only then can we begin to truly talk inclusion.
(The author, Merry Barua, is the Founder & Director of Action For Autism, National Centre For Autism and a mother of a young individual with autism. This current work was first published in the August 2005 issue of the Autism Network Journal.)
You can help Action For Autism reach out and provide services to people with Autism and their families by contributing online.
Revathi and her sister came to Madanapalle town from a village Divitivaripalle in the neighbouring Mandal in Andhra Pradesh to continue their secondary education. Her parents are farmers and own about 1 acre of land on which they cultivate vegetables and flowers. In spite of financial difficulties, they wanted both their daughters to study well. They sent them to Madanapalle town to stay with their grandparents so they could pursue their education.
In the initial days, Revathi’s grandparents in the slums of Madanapalle laid many restrictions on them because they felt the slum was not a safe place for young girls. Revathi always wanted to have her own space in the outside world, the kind of restrictions put-forth by her grandparents disappointed her. In the initial two to three years in the town, their exposure to the external world was very limited. It was around this time that CRY (Child Rights and You) supported project, People’s Organisation for Rural Development (PORD) came in contact with Revathi. As a part of their door-to-door campaign, they invited her to join the child collective in the Colony. She was in Standard 8 at that time and was very eager to join the child collective. Her grandparents reluctantly agreed as PORD was facilitating the child collective.
Happy spreading child rights awareness
After becoming a part of the collective Revathi said,
I made sure I participated in every possible activity of the child collective. I found my calling when I learnt about child rights. It gave me a means to deal with the problem of child rights abuse which was all around me in the slum. I now had a tool to act on it. The vulnerability and innocence of children moved me. I thus decided to spread awareness about child rights and mechanisms to protect them.
Children’s Collective is a process created by CRY that recognises a child’s right to get involved in processes that affect their lives, encouraging participation. It is a place for sharing ideas where children come together, discuss, debate, encourage each other and understand their own community.
The child collective gave Revathi an opportunity to participate in diverse activities. She learnt about different child rights and how they were being or are violated. It opened up a new world for her. She had now discovered a tool to act on it.
Seeing her interest and motivation to be a part of the change, PORD’s team gave her the opportunity to participate in capacity building programs. She soon started acting in skits and conducting sessions on different topics.
Revathi conducting a capacity building session!
In the next two years, her scope of activities expanded. She had attended several sessions and capacity building trainings in the child collective. She felt more confident and wanted to work harder to spread awareness about child rights. She started bringing to the notice of PORD team any child marriages that happened in the colony. She also participated in colony-level awareness programs. She is now well aware about Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act as well as the concerned authorities. She shares success stories from within the community, encourages other children to study well, motivates out-of-school children to rejoin school, actively participates in the enrolment campaigns every year and counsels the parents of child labourers and dropouts. Looking at her involvement and potential, she was made the Secretary of the Child Collective.
PORD made her a child resource person and trained her to speak about child rights at various forums. She was given inputs on how to prepare for the sessions and how to answer questions during the session. She has visited several schools to speak about child rights. She also conducts sessions for girls on Menstrual Hygiene Management.
with PORD’s community organiser
Impressed by Revathi’s efforts and contribution to the society the community organiser said
Revathi has been one of the most sincere and active members of the collective. It is great when we have child rights ambassadors from the project take up their cause. My team and I have always ensured that we engaged Revathi in discussions on various issues, addressed all her queries and kept her curiosity alive. We enrolled her in various capacity building programs, encouraged her to act in skits and take sessions for other children in the collective.
She has a special spark in her and is extremely motivated to work for children. She has now become a role-model for the community and inspires other children. As an ambassador of child rights, she is definitely going to make a big difference in the lives of children.
You can help more efforts like this, by donating to CRY and its partner organisations here.
Arkat, all of 12 years and impish smiles, was excited to go to school because it was library day. His school, Kadla government primary school in Balaghat district of Madhya Pradesh, was host to that week’s library session. It was not the case just a few years ago. Arkat, who studies in Class 5 and loves stories, didn’t have many books in his small school library.
The school mostly stocked textbooks and most storybooks were not of his interest or reading level. “I wait for new library teachers to come and distribute books so that I can have so many books to read. I like these books,” Arkat told VillageSquare.in. “There are so many stories which have children like me and my friends.”
Tribal children in India face several challenges in completing primary education. According to government data, 58% rate of dropout among tribal children at primary school is much more than that of non-tribal children at 37 percent. While they are equally affected by poorly provisioned and ill-functioning schools as children from other communities, one key aspect that has been less explored is the language and cultural difference.
“If you map the parts of India where illiteracy is highest, you will find that it matches the parts where the mother tongues of children are different from the official language,” says Ganesh Devy, a linguist and the 2011 Unesco Linguapax laureate. Devy is the founder of the Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Trust.
Over the past few years, some states like Odisha and Andhra Pradesh have tried to integrate tribal languages in government schools, but most other states where indigenous people live in large numbers have been reluctant to take this step.
Accepting the challenge
An initiative in Madhya Pradesh in central India is trying to overcome this reluctance through successful interventions on the ground. The state has a tribal population of 21.1%, with 46 recognised scheduled tribes and three tribal groups identified as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). The Baigas in Balaghat district are one such group. They live alongside other tribal communities like Gonds, to which Arkat belongs.
Kadla, Arkat’s village, is broadly representative of most villages in the block. Home to 110 families and 635 people, Kadla is dominated by the Gond tribes but also has a small population of Baigas and people from the Yadav (OBC) community. Located in the non-buffer zone of Kanha National Park, most villagers depend on the forest for livelihood, or migrate to neighboring districts for work in fields. A few practice rice cultivation but their livelihood is affected due to the close proximity of the park.
The village has less than 10% of youth who have cleared class 10, and even they are unable to read and write effectively. As such, parents continue to be apathetic towards schools and expectations from schooling are low. Schools in the district face the issues of rural schools all over the countryside like poor school facilities, difficulties for teachers to travel and lack of appropriate training, the lack of appropriate books or written material for children. It is clear that there is a need for a supportive learning environment for these children to help them learn well.
Love for books
Seeing the children’s love for small books, a few library coordinators of the grassroots intervention took an initiative and translated a couple of books into the children’s own languages — Raighari, a local dialect that combines elements of Hindi with the tribal language of Gondi, and in Baiga. “I just thought it would be easier for them to understand it, and was so happy to see their response,” Shiv Yadav from Dhaiyantola told VillageSquare.in. Shiv Yadav has translated and illustrated a handmade children’s book in Raigarhi.
The delighted children responded to this effort by taking up the initiative in their own schools. Arkat’s love for books has led him to translate Hindi storybooks like Pakka aam, Naav chali, Humari patang into Raighari, which are read by other children with lot of interest. This activity of Fun and Learn is being taken by many students under the guidance of librarians and schoolteachers.
“When I used to read books of Barkha series, I saw these stories are from our surroundings and day to day life,” Nitu Tandiya, a student of class 6 in Kukarra village, told VillageSquare.in. “I too thought of gathering my thoughts and writing them down as stories, so I could create some of my own stories.” She has created and illustrated her books, Nitu ki Chai (Nitu’s tea) and Maine khela (I played).
House of joy
Aide et Action, a non-profit working in the area of education, is working with tribal children in Balaghat to create a model for quality education in some of the most underdeveloped areas of the district, namely Garhi, Parsamu and Jaitpuri, in partnership with Tata Trusts. Their key intervention has been the Anandghar, or supplementary learning centers, which are presently operational in 77 primary schools. True to its name, Anandghar emphasizes on creating a joyful environment in the classroom through facilitating teaching learning based on activity based learning (ABL), games, poems, songs and teaching-learning materials.
While the project staff anticipated some hurdles due to the challenging remoteness and difference in language, they also noted the complete lack of suitable, contextual reading material for children as a major gap in the efforts to increase children’s learning outcomes.
Mobile libraries
The library component of the intervention, which was initially planned to play a smaller role, was adapted to respond to this. The organisation got support from the Tata Trusts and their resource partner Muskaan to train their library coordinators and select contextually appropriate books. To serve the widely spread out villages, the project adopted the model of mobile libraries where traveling library coordinators visit the Anandghars during the morning hours. They carry a carefully selected box of 20 children’s books. Most of them are graded as per reading levels, meant for early readers, and a large number of them have children from villages and rural contexts.
A community story telling session in progress in Balaghat. (Photo by Alaknanda Sanap)
The library coordinators conduct a variety of activities in schools besides issuing books from the zip-lock bags. These include read aloud sessions of big-sized books meant especially for young readers, shared reading, paired reading among students and storytelling. Children enjoy these sessions a lot, and look forward to the librarian’s visits. Other than school visit, library coordinators also take their cycles to villages and set up a library in a particular place where children and youths come and issue books.
A key reason behind the enthusiasm of library coordinators for trying innovative ideas is the learning brought home by four of the organization’s team members from the Library Educator Course by Parag, an initiative of the Tata Trusts. By encouraging activities like role-play with stories, they have made children confident in expressing and talking in their own language in the classroom.
Creating books in tribal languages
Research shows that learning in their mother tongue helps in children’s engagement in schools and motivation to learn improving their learning scores, and also that multilingual children develop better thinking skills compared to their monolingual peers. The project team engages in a variety of such activities to allow children to speak and learn in their own language while also learning the school language. These low-cost, scalable, micro-innovations are practices that tackle real-time challenges and organically become steps towards a larger change.
Organising open library sessions for the community is another activity to gain their interest. Once a week, all library coordinators converge in one village where story telling by the coordinator, singing folk songs, folk stories and puzzles are encouraged. Parents and grandparents are invited to discuss the need for education in the school, the importance of supporting children at home, and to ensure that every child attends school to learn how to write and read these songs and much more.
This activity thus becomes a complement to community mobilization for improving children’s attendance that is undertaken by Anandghar volunteers. Many women who see the beautifully illustrated children’s books then encourage children to read books. “I read books and encourage my children also to read because books give us lot of new knowledge which we have not seen and broaden our imagination,” Anita Dhurwey, living in Armi, told VillageSquare.in.
Learning gets a boost
Over the last couple of years, the annual learning assessment tests at baseline and midline surveys have shown a consistent increase in learning levels of tribal children who are part of the program. Schoolteachers in the area have responded positively to the intervention and noted the role of books in engaging children. “They were very shy and hardly spoke up. Now we call them forward to read stories to their peers,” Phoolsingh Markam, the proud teacher of Arkat, told VillageSquare.in.
While many education programs are helping children through supportive learning centers, what makes this intervention program different is the micro-innovations in bridging learning in school and the community. The present effort is providing opportunities to tribal children to not only learn the school language and become proficient in it, but also connecting them with their own language and culture.
With inputs from Cosmos Joseph, Program Manager at Aide et Action, Balaghat.
Alaknanda Sanap is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development Research in Pune. Prior to this, she was program officer for education at the Tata Trusts, Mumbai, and researcher at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.
Views are personal.
Adapted from an article originally published on VillageSquare.in. Subscribe to VillageSquare’s weekly update on the website for more stories from rural India.
Many years ago, the rural community of Yamuna Khadar that resides on the bank of Yamuna in Delhi, lost its only school to demolition by the city’s development authority.
Yamuna Khadar being a slum, none of its inhabitants had any formal land in their name, despite having lived in the area for decades. With eviction orders, most of the structures were brought down – including an NGO-run school for the children.
But youngsters in the community didn’t lose hope. Led by Naresh Pal, they erected a structure using plastic sheets and bamboo fitments, where children could continue studying
However, a structure made of plastic sheets is not sturdy enough. So imagine the plight of students during monsoons. They wouldn’t know what to expect – a leaking roof or probably no roof at all!
This is when two architects, Swati Janu and Nidhi Sohane, came up with the idea of constructing a school that could not only be easily dismantled but would also protect the children during monsoons.
It was called the ModSkool project, and was undertaken with the aim of providing climate responsive, self-built, and better sanitation solutions for the community.
“The community members had filed a Public Interest Litigation or PIL, following which they were granted permission by the government for rebuilding the school. This school could be let off from being demolished as long as it’s structure remained temporary,” explains Swati, who is the creative director of mHS CITY LAB, a social enterprise working for the homeless in India.
After coming up with the design of a low-cost and modular ‘anti-demolition’ school for 250 kids that could be disassembled, the duo joined hands with the community members and worked for almost a year to make the project a reality.
The engineering expertise was provided by Mr. Vinod Jain, the director of Vintech Consultants, who was also the largest donor for the project.
However, the big task was raising funds. But it didn’t turn out as hard as they expected. “Our family members and friends happily volunteered for the cause and we were able to collect enough funds to go ahead with the plan immediately. Our agenda was to rebuild the school before the onset of monsoon,” says Nidhi.
Starting with just three members in June, Swati and Nidhi soon had over 50 volunteers on board.
The workforce included architecture students, photographers, journalists and even some parents from Yamuna Khadar, who took time off their busy schedules just to contribute to the cause. After three weeks of hard work, the dedicated group was able to raise the structure.
“The classes have been running for two weeks now. Despite many challenges, we have successfully managed to put the roof up in time for the monsoons and are now only left with the flooring, which will be completed after the monsoons,” she proudly mentions.
But the architects are not done yet!
“By building the school, we feel that our engagement with the community at Yamuna Khadar has just begun and we hope to help in putting up more facilities such as a library and toilets next,” Swati says.
The women staff teaching at self-financing schools across Kerala will now be able to avail one-day paid period leave every month.
The announcement was made by the All Kerala Self-Financing Schools Federation (AKSFSF), which is a collective forum for unaided schools, at a press conference held in Kozhikode on Monday.
Starting from August 1, the initiative will be implemented across 1,200 unaided schools in the state as mentioned in the press release.
Ramadas Kathiroor (centre) making announcement at Kozhikode Press Club on July 31.
“As menstrual awareness is gaining strength worldwide, many organisations and workplaces across the country are offering paid menstrual leave for their women employees. We thought why should we stay behind?” says Ramadas Kathiroor, who is the president of AKSFSF.
Explaining that such an initiative would offer respite to many women employees, Ramadas stated that among the teaching workforce in unaided schools across the state, over 60,000 were women.
“The teachers can avail the leave on any day of the menstrual cycle, and it need not necessarily be the first day. This will benefit the women staff, who won’t have to drudge physically on these days”, he clarifies.
The press release in Malayalam.
Another noteworthy announcement made by the body was that they opened doors for members of the transgender community to be hired as teaching staff.
“We are spearheading this change for bringing the transgender community into the education sector and will hire candidates who will fulfill the eligibility. While minimum requirement for the teaching post is a B.Ed degree, we are open to appointing even candidates who have the teaching qualifications for kindergarten students”, Ramadas says.
The initiatives put forth by the federation are an attempt at making the field of education a better place for not just women, but the transgender community as well.
While we experience differences in socially constructed gender roles every day, shouldn’t we be bothered by what words people use too? Can language go unchallenged while we try to stop inequality from lurking around us?
Gendered language isn’t difficult to spot, but can be easily overlooked. Words like ‘mankind’, ‘manpower’, ‘man-made’ are widely accepted as gender-neutral terms, but they tend to exclude women or make them rather invisible.
Realising that gender-neutral terminology was missing in a lot of languages we use every day, Neera Narang devised a new course for the students of Delhi University. In this course, students will be taught how to identify sexist terminology in language.
It will be introduced for M.Ed students of the university from this academic session.
The basic structure of the course includes identifying gender differences in language as well as during casual conversations. The students will also study about the use of sexist and non-sexist language. For instance, words like ‘bossy’, ‘aggressive’ or ‘nagging’ are subtly sexist words and often used to criticise women or girls.
“Our purpose is to look for a vocabulary where gender-bias can be removed with the usage of pronouns,” Neera told the Daily Mail.
According to the dean of the department, N Ranganathan, this course will be fundamentally very non-restrictive. The two-year M.Ed programme has been renewed and 27 such specialisations are being offered at the department of education. The student can pick whichever one they want.
The course has been approved by the academic and executive councils of DU and will have four units talking about the “role of language in culture, identity, gender and media,” as reported by the Daily Mail.
In 2004, Dr. Jitender Aggarwal, a dentist, was robbed of his vision due to macular degeneration.
After losing his sight, he came to realise the hardships differently abled people struggle with, especially in an environment characterized by limited resources and opportunities.
But Jitender was not resigned to his fate. He got trained to use screen readers (software programs that allow visually impaired users to read text displayed on computer screens with a speech synthesizer or braille display) and other softwares that help him with daily tasks. And ever since, there has been no stopping.
“When I lost my central vision, I got the feeling of apathy any disability can fill you with. But despite the loss, having an insight became a lot easier. I started believing that if you have a will nothing can stop you. With my blurred vision, I visualized a platform, where, differently abled individuals could explore and realize their different abilities in real sense.”
The dependency on a caregiver is one of the the biggest traumas people with disabilities experience. And this had to be challenged, believes Dr Aggrawal. He dreamed of a center where people with disabilities can be equipped with the skills to find good jobs. And this is how Sarthak Educational Trust came into being.
What started as one centre in Delhi, is now operational in 21 states with six centres throughout India.
While its centre in Delhi is working towards the skill-development and employment of visually impaired candidates in medical transcription, Sarthak has successfully placed 7,250 persons with disabilities in various fields spanning retail, BPOs, IT and hospitality, through all its centers in Chandigarh, Delhi, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Ludhiana, Mumbai and Lucknow.
When one enters the Sarthak Skill Development centre at Andheri in Mumbai, it looks like any other coaching class would– with two classrooms, a small reception area and an equipped computer lab.
This centre trains over 80 students with various disabilities belonging to Below Poverty Line and middle-class families from around Mumbai, without charging them a penny!
A batch of 40 hearing-impaired students looks on the teacher with rapt attention, as her arms move in a practiced fashion of sign language to explain the intricacies of the concepts being taught.
While some of the students travel from as far as Virar and Ulhasnagar, travel poses as a major challenge for the centre to get students, as not many spaces in Mumbai are disable-friendly.
The employability training program lasts for a duration of 90 days or 3 months and is divided into two phases.
Phase one includes providing the students with basic computer skills, learning English, and other soft skills. Based on the level of disability and their interest, the second phase marks job specific training in the areas of retail, BPOs, IT and hospitality.
“If a hearing-impaired person is interested in IT. We’d look to employ them in fields like data entry. Similarly, with visually-impaired people, their voice is their strength. So we enhance their skills with vocal training and modulation and help them work in BPOs,” says Preeti Rathod, Project Manager of the Mumbai centre who has worked with Saarthak for over a year.
The eligibility criteria for this training model is the age range of 18 to 30 years with a minimum qualification of Class 10. The idea is to help PwDs with the willingness to work, post training.
In the last 15 days of training, the students are taught about the do’s and don’t’s at their place of work and thoroughly counselled. With over 300 hiring partners across India, the centres line up interviews for students and once they get selected and start working, a rigorous 6-month follow-up is maintained.
“Many a times, they leave their workplaces due to miscommunication with their managers, travel issues, shift changes or constant leaves. So, we have to bridge the gap and counsel them at every step,” says Preeti
.The focus during the training is also to establish an inclusive environment within the centre where students with different disabilities support and interact with each other on Saturday, which is a day for fun activities.
“We have guest lecturers who are PwD and have carved their own niche. Hamita, a visually impaired guest lecturer, who spoke to our students is a banker at SBI. When they see somebody from within them achieve great heights, they are motivated to push themselves,” says Preeti Rathod.
The other areas of work under Saarthak Educational Trust include:
Early intervention
Sarthak Antakshep Kendra which works to prevent, identify and intervene in the earliest stages of the disability. This is done with a team that consists of gynecologists, pediatricians and health workers.
Inclusive education
Working towards inclusive education, The Trust has collaborated with the government to identify schools in West Delhi, where a group of 250 disabled students have been given medical aid and classroom support, to bring them on par with their other classmates. Workshops are held for parents and teachers along with vocational training for the children.
In her final message, Preeti encourages people not to look at a disability as something being amiss in a person. “We are all disabled in some way or the other, so to single someone out because their disability is a lot more visible than ours is unfair. Empathy is a lot more important than sympathy. So treat PwD with respect and dignity because they are just as capable as any of us are.”
The last lesson plan was all about introducing adjectives.
This lesson plan is going to be all about describing the location of objects. We are going to create words that describe the location of an object with respect to its surrounding objects. Whether the object is under the bed or beside the Almirah, forming these kinds of sentences is what your student will learn in this lesson plan.
If you look at most common sentences that describe an event or activity, you’d see that they have spatial and temporal information contained in them. By this, I mean that they contain information about where the activity/event took place and when it took place. In this plan, I will discuss how you can teach your student about specifying the location of an object in a sentence. I’ll cover the temporal component in the next article.
We will specify location using the grammar tool of ‘prepositional phrases’. It is quite easy a concept to grasp and I suggest you go through this wonderful link if you need a refresher on this.
We will be using the subject list that we built up in the last lesson plan and describe their location. In a short while, you’ll see what that subject list in action in a tabular structure. We have been building this subject list all along starting from scratch and if you’d like to see how that was done then you must visit the last three lesson plan articles – lesson plan 1, Lesson plan 2, Lesson plan 3.
We are going to use these subjects in the first and the last column of the table in this lesson plan.
The structure of sentences in this lesson plan is going to be
For e.g. ‘He is in the house’ – ‘He’ and ‘the house’ are subjects, and ‘in’ is the preposition. Another example: ‘My friends are at the playground’ – ‘My friends’ and ‘the playground’ are the subjects and ‘at’ is the preposition.
Notice that in the above sentence structure we are telling the location of subject 1 in relation to subject 2 for e.g. in relation to the desk where is the chair? – Answer: ‘The desk is beside the chair’. Creating these answers is what your student has to learn and this is exactly what he will learn through the table that will follow shortly.
So let’s begin the actual lesson. As always, we start with the vocabulary section.
Vocabulary List
Prepositions that are commonly used to describe location: in, at, on, beside, inside, above, below, under. These are the must haves and but you should add more words to this list if you can think of them.
Here, there – these words are adverbs and I’ll use them to describe object location. It’s as simple as – I am here, the bag is there etc. But as you know what’s obvious to us isn’t so obvious for your student. So we’ll put an explicit focus on this in the table.
So after you list down the vocab words just go through their meaning with your student, for e.g. ‘in’ means what in typical sentences, ‘on’ is used to denote what?. Use examples to clarify the typical usage of these words – ‘in the playground’, ‘on the table’, ‘under the desk’. With examples explaining the meaning is quite easy. Be innovative! with your examples.
Ok, so with this background made, we are all set to move on to the crux of this article. No surprises here. As always it’s the table that puts everything done so far in this lesson plan into context.
And here are the sample sentences:
As I have already mentioned in the previous lesson plans, the table encapsulates the main idea of a lesson plan. Everything else, including the exercise and activities (link at the end of this article) and the vocabulary section, is created to help the student understand the table and form sentences from it.
Use this lesson plan as an opportunity to get your students to name all the objects that surround them in English. And then ask them to specify the position of the chosen object w.r.t its surrounding objects. Create sentences like: The chair is between the blackboard and the table. My desk in front of Anjali’s desk. My desk is behind Ruhi’s desk. Keep adding these new objects and their location to the table and keep creating new sentences from the table. Putting things into the table ensures that everything is structured and easy to follow for the student.
The negative sentences
For every positive sentence, there is a negative sentence. And if your student has understood the positive sentences so far, then learning the negative of these sentence would be really a cake walk for him. Teaching about negatives does make a lot of sense. Why? Because now for every question, your student has another answer choice – he can say no as well. Let’s pick up a positive sentence – The ball is on the table. It’s negative version – The ball is not on the table. It’s as easy as that to create negative sentences for the sentences in this table.
You must recognise your power as a teacher
How many sentences to teach? How many new words to introduce? When to stop? – You have to take the call on your own. After all, you are the teacher. You must answer these questions based on one of your biggest asset – intuition. As you gain more experience, as a teacher, the answer to these questions will come more easily (or say intuitively) to you.
You can only make your students learn the sentences that we discussed so far by asking the right questions? Questions whose answers lie in the table. I just cannot stress enough on it. You shouldn’t go into the class, draw the table on the board, and expect your students to learn the table sentences by themselves. You have to ask them. Ask them questions whose answers lie in the table. Ask them repeatedly but patiently.
At the end of the day, this content in itself can only make a little impact in your students’ progress. You the teacher have to bring this whole lesson plan to life – by asking the right questions, by creating suitable background situations and by your patience and empathy. That’s how your student will make real progress.
Go slow. Deliver bite-sized. And let your students digest what you just taught. In my experience, that’s the best way to teach English as a volunteer.
About the author: Raghav Nyati is the founder of Volunteercurriculum.com, which provides English teaching content for volunteers.
In 2014, a classroom in Vidyaniketan School, Chennai, transformed into a fashion show. Nathaniel Seelan divided his students into groups of choreographers, models and designers, and took them through the entire procedure of organising a show. Why bring fashion into the classroom?
After graduating from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Nathaniel spent three years in the fashion industry. As he went from designing clothes to providing brands with creative direction to fashion forecasting, his interest gradually shifted to process design. Mulling over pursuing his masters, Nathaniel decided to try his hand at teaching. “I was taking a break, so I applied for the Fellowship. Because the way I looked at it, teaching was a process too. The plan was to get back to my Masters and design, if I didn’t like teaching. But I fell in love with the work that happens here and the creativity and design that takes place at Teach For India,” he says.
“Design has got a lot to do with problem solving. We are taught to arrive at the best solution given the constraints. At Teach For India, I had a bunch of kids, we had a bunch of problems to solve, and it was all about thinking critically and being creative.”
During the summer break between the two years of his Fellowship, Nathaniel was a resident volunteer at the Sadhana Forest in Auroville. Apart from taking up environmental protection activities at the reserve, the volunteers spent four hours on weekends with children from the local community, practicing a method known as ‘unschooling’.“
The children were given practical, hands-on experience with the environment. Some days they were taught how to grow pineapples or take care of baby rats! We also had sessions to discuss topics like politics, to encourage an exchange of ideas,” explains Nathaniel.
His experiences at Sadhana and in the mainstream education system shaped his current vision of creating a legitimate middle-ground by “taking the quality of alternative education to the scale at which mainstream education is functioning now”. After his Fellowship ended in 2015, Nathaniel spent six months as the Chennai City Coordinator at Youth For Seva, an organisation that mobilises volunteers in health, sanitation, education, environmental protection and women’s rights. “I realised that each sector is massive and has multiple battles to fight.
So I decided, after dabbling in all of them, to focus on education. I felt like we could impact all these other sectors via education,” he says.
In January 2016, he went back to work with Vidyaniketan as an Assistant School Leader, and has been there for the past year and a half. Quite early on in his Fellowship, Nathaniel had begun to see that the education system was “not as much broken as it was lopsided.”
“There were kids in my class who were academically inclined – ones who were good with numbers, or languages, or at memorising stuff; and the system catered to them fairly well. But I felt like there were these other kids, with different skill sets, that the system just refused to see,” he explains.
It was this imbalance that he went back to try and correct. After conducting research, he discovered that talent exists mainly in three pools – academic, artistic and athletic. “The reason academics is taken so seriously is because it is assessed,” he says.
His goal is to move towards a fairer system – one where all three pools could be at par, be assessed, and help spot potential.
This is, of course, a complex task. It was at this time that Nathaniel came across RASA: an organisation in Chennai that works with special-need individuals through theater. He collaborated with RASA to devise an assessment rubric, dividing each pool into further sub-pools. The arts were categorised into music, visual arts, drama, and movement. “With music, for example, we broke it down into rhythm, tempo, form, and other elements. We assessed each aspect to determine the student’s aptitude.”
The school ran this pilot program for the fourth and fifth grades, and explained to the parents that their children would be receiving three report cards that year – one each for academics, athletics, and the arts.
“We wanted the parents to understand that their child shouldn’t end up becoming a mediocre engineer when he/she could’ve become an excellent something-else!” says Nathaniel.
He managed to reschedule the students’ timetables in order to devote more time to arts and athletics. He believes that, “for the system to be truly fair, we have to work towards exposing kids the same or similar amount to arts and athletics as they have been to academics.”
This year the goal of his project, ImpART, is to develop intricate rubrics for each aspect that they focus on, create more transparent assessment procedures, and design a solid arts curriculum in consultation with professionals. Through this initiative, they also aim at providing support to artists who want to teach. Orchestrating such change was not an easy task. “My biggest strength is ideation and planning, and I feel like the Fellowship contributed a lot to it,” says Nathaniel. “My execution was relatively pathetic. I have now come to appreciate the people around me;
I realised that I could not do all of this alone.”
This spirit of collective action is what’s helping Nathaniel and others like him work to give every child an opportunity to shine!
Written by Ananya Damodaran – Communications at Teach For India.
Applications for the 2018-2020 Teach For India Fellowship program are now open. Please visit apply.teachforindia.org to submit your application by September 3rd, 2017.
It is a sad fact that even after 70 years of Independence, it remains a challenge for children like Ramya to live their dream as they fall victim to poverty, deep-rooted practise of child marriage in the society and an education system that is yet to provide better access to school infrastructure. However Ramya’s burning desire to study and make a difference in her community despite the many hurdles that came her way, like child labour, migration and child marriage is an inspiring and heartening story.
Ramya lives in K.K. Naidu Petta village with 175 other families. She was only 6 years old when she started shouldering responsibilities at home by taking care of her brother. Her parents travelled a lot for work as her father, a rickshaw puller met with an accident and lost his job. Their frequency of migration increased after Ramya completed Std 5. High school was 6 km away and her parents were not keen to send her that far to school. However, on the condition that she would completely manage household responsibilities like cooking and managing her brother’s schooling, she was reluctantly allowed to continue her studies. Having won the battle for now, the fiery 11 year old decided to take a plunge into English medium education as she felt it would help with higher studies.
The long walk to school, the long hours of work at home or the difficulty to cope with a new medium of instruction did not deter her from the pursuit of education.
During her summer vacations she even joined her parents and travelled to Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam and Odisha for work. Eventually she completed her Std 10 with a 7.7 GPA (Grade Point Average). This was the time when she again met with resistance from her parents to continue her studies. Child marriage is a common practice among the Reddika community that Ramya hails from and her parents were worried that a delayed marriage would only increase her dowry. So when Ramya was adamant to not to marry and instead study further, a long argument forced her to leave home and stay with her Aunt at Vishkapatnam where she worked as a domestic work, all this just to avoid getting married.
After two years and much persuasion, her parents agreed to let her re-start her education on the condition that she would be managing the household and would be married as soon as they found a suitable groom.
Ramya joined Koyyam Junior college and opted for the Science stream as she harboured dreams of becoming a doctor, a dire need in her community.
This was a turning point in Ramya’s life. She met the community organisers from CRY Supported project, Helping Hands Association (HHA) and joined the children’s collective organised by them.
When she learnt about child rights, Ramya realised that she had found a perfect platform to pursue her dreams.
She was especially inspired to work for the rights of girl children and she started actively participating in all the activities of HHA in the village. She took a lead role and inspired other children by sharing her own story. This gave them new courage to talk against child marriage in their own homes. One such time when Ramya was actively campaigning against child marriage, she came across an instance of a child marriage that was planned. When convincing the parents on the ills of child marriage fell to deaf ears, she directly contacted the groom and explained the situation. Ramya told him that her friend wanted to continue her education and also explained to him about the negative impacts of child marriage. To her surprise, the groom was convinced and voluntarily postponed the marriage by two or three years. That was her first successful case of directly dealing with the issue and boosted Ramya’s confidence further although she was accused of destroying her friend’s life by some. The spark in Ramya ignited her passion and she continued to campaign against child marriage and was successful in stopping 5 child marriages and preventing many later. Ramya inspired many children in the collective to strive hard to realise their rights and stood as a role model in her community.
Ramya was busily working at a field near her village, cutting the wood along with her mother, unaware that the results of Std 12 were out. The next day, her college lecturer called her parents and informed them that she had stood college first in her stream (Biology, Physics, Chemistry) and her happiness knew no bounds. She had secured 966/1000 marks. Ramya had put in all the effort took these exams as a challenge as she was determined to continue her studies.
As Ramya passed an important milestone in her life with flying colours, she was not allowed to even apply for medical entrance exam as her parents refused the idea. Her movements were restricted and she could not confide in her mentor from HHA.
Once again she stood against the discrimination and refused to co-operate with her parents by going on a hunger strike at home.
HHA were keeping a close watch on Ramya. They visited her at home and tried to convince her parents to let her continue her education. The fact that her parents could not afford the education, books or coaching was a harsh reality that needed to be addressed. The staff counseled her parents and assured them of sponsorship for Ramya.
Ramya’s mentor from HHA says, “When we first met Ramya in 2015, we observed the spark in her to achieve bigger things in life. Looking at her, nobody would imagine that she would have undergone such hardships in life. We built her capacities in the area of child rights and gave her an opportunity to play a lead role in the child collective. We were happy to see her involvement in the community and her concern for the girls as she felt their problems as her own problems. We at HHA knew that if we cannot convince her parents and give her an opportunity to realise her goals in life, it would only hit the morale of other girls in the village and hence we were determined to ensure continuity of her education.”
With much persuasion, Ramya’s parents agreed to let her continue her education. She is now staying with her Aunt at Srikakulam and has been going to a private Nursing college where HHA has negotiated for a full scholarship. Ramya is likely to join a Government Nursing College and is awaiting admission in September 2017. She also plans to give her medical entrance exam next year.
Ramya’s dream is to see all parents in the village allow their daughters to study further, refrain from child marriage and recognise the value of a girl child. She hopes that one day parents in the village would feel proud about their daughters with regards to their education and jobs. She also strives to be a role model in her own community i.e. Reddika where no woman has joined a government or private job up till now.
Recalling the entire episode in her life, Ramya says “I was not really sure whether I would be able to continue my studies after Intermediate as my parents came down heavily upon me to get married. If not for timely intervention by HHA staff, things might have been different for me. The difficult experiences and hardships that I had since my childhood gave me determination to pursue my goals. My desire to stand as a role model not only in my village but in the society will never fade away. I have joined in B.Sc. degree course for now just to escape from the danger of child marriage and I will prepare well for medical entrance test next year and get a seat in M.B.B.S. Once I become a doctor, I want to serve my village and also visit different villages to make girls aware of their rights, strengthen them, inspire them and make them role models in their own communities.”
This Independence Day, let’s help unlock a child’s potential through education with CRY-Child Rights and You.
You can help more efforts like this by donating to CRY and its partner organisations here.
