On the 12^th of April, we watched “Freedom Writers” – a movie starring Hilary Swank.  A highly moving and thought-provoking movie, it brings forth the true story of how a classroom dominated by immigrants and native students in America move from despondency, hate, and revengefulness to inspiration, understanding, and a sense of accomplishment.  The teacher who guides them through this, Erin Gruwell, clearly shows an understanding of where her students come from and puts in her efforts to make her lessons a less alienating experience for them.  The strictly hierarchical order of the school is brutal with efforts; the people caught in the web of this bureaucracy not only refuse from helping her, but also prevent her from pursuing her unconventional teaching methods. 

More than anything, this movie helped me bust a few of my own myths about a constructivist classroom: I had always thought that both teachers and students equally helped create a constructivist environment in the class, I realised that this wasn’t quite necessarily the case.  The traditional dominant role of the teacher gave to her the power to make it constructivist if she wanted to – that was usually how I have seen things happening in most constructivist classrooms.  This movie, however, wasn’t any other white-teacher-uplifting-black-students story.  It showed the tensions and complexities that lay on either end in a much better fashion than in some of the other movies.  The two are not shown as polarities; rather, the problems faced by each, not merely by virtue of their colour, but also by virtue of them being human beings with a number of social relationships, are depicted.

What struck me as the most vital issue the movie was hinting at, in terms of the curriculum of school, was that of acute alienation felt by the students.  None of the stories/ methods of teaching/ language used in the classroom were of the kind the children could relate to.  And when Gruwell tried to bring in such relatable books and methodologies, she was faced by stiff opposition from the members of the bureaucracy of the school.  The movie critiques the odd position that most schools today (even in India) have gotten into – the enormous stress laid on excellence and high standards of the school are never quite given a second thought, examined more deeply, and questioned more thoroughly.  There is a yawning gap between the intended lofty aims of a certain education and its actual manifestations in the system.  At the backdrop of the movie, runs a call to rise against such empty conformist tendencies; the least one could do is examine why one follows certain rules and put forth questions that address its validity with changing times.

The movie certainly touched a chord in me, and even brought a lump to my throat at certain points in the narrative.  Each character seemed to have something special and important to say and there were no real heroes – or, it could be said that they were all heroes in one way or another.

My two-week field placement was in Pondicherry.  My friend and I visited two government schools – one in Virampattinam, which was attended by children from the fisherman community, and another in Andiyarpalayam, attended by children of daily-wage labourers.  One thing that was clearly evident from the few days we were able to spend at each school was that the classification and framing in both cases was extremely strong and rigid.  Not only was there a clear-cut dominant power structure visible, it was clearly hegemonic in its dominance also.  One simple example to illustrate this would be the vegetarian meals that were provided to the children of the school in Virampattinam as a part of the midday meal scheme – and this was when they were clearly a fish-catching and fish-eating community!

Teacher attitudes were discouraging, and it became frustrating to listen to them after a while; but one had to be level-headed and look at all of it in perspective.  They complained of the students’ lackadaisical attitudes, the parents’ apathy and negligence, the government’s unreasonable schemes and demands… the list seemed endless.  The teacher educators seemed no different – their complaints included absence of teacher motivation, lack of government sympathy, etc.  We then thought of doing a bottom-up investigation – we went and spoke to the students and their parents.  All of the parents and children we spoke to seemed to highly prize education, perhaps for a variety of reasons, but in fact, to many of them, it seemed almost stupid that we were investigating into why they wanted an education.  The answers were pretty obvious: a good education secured a good life.  And this was not just any kind of education; English education dominated interests of all the parents we spoke to.  In fact, having an education sans English was often equated by many to be equal to no education at all.  Those that attended government schools seemed to do so because they were the poorest of poor; even the slightly better off preferred private English education.  Despite this high desirability for the English language, we observed a few English classes and found them to be of a dismal quality: English was taught in translation, and one would always hear more of Tamil than English in these classes.

We had arrived at these schools sometime just before their exams; though a lot of my classmates had complained about the inappropriateness of such a time for field visits, I thought it suited me just fine.  The absence of regular classes for the sake of preparation for these exams obviously pointed towards a school culture in which these assessments were of high-stake value.  Many of the classes conducted revisions while we were around, very often to save their children from the embarrassment of not knowing the right answer in front of us.  And it was amusing (though equally depressing) to note how instead of ideally moving from the aims of education to stage-specific objectives to content selection to instructional methods to teaching-learning materials to assessment techniques, the educational process was in fact moving in the opposite direction.  Exams, tests, and any other assessment of sorts seemed to hold an immense, almost insurmountable, power over not only students, but teachers, parents, administrators and almost everyone else who was a part of the system.  

Our field experience was overall a very fruitful experience in terms of understanding how the curriculum was affected by various power structures and in turn showed its effects in the classroom space through various conscious/ unconscious manifestations.

            In our final week of school visits, we visited a Kendriya Vidyalaya.  The overriding ideology was clearly that of creating national citizens.  The textbooks, the songs sung in the assembly, the accepted usage of only Hindi and English – all pointed towards a certain allegiance to a centralised form of education.  A few friends and I observed how this manifested itself within language classes. 

            The day we visited the school happened to be National Science Day.  When we arrived, the assembly was on, and a few students were making little speeches regarding certain science experiments.  Some of these experiments were demonstrated on stage, and some were presented descriptively.  A number of factual questions were thrown at the audience, and when a right answer was given, the child was applauded.  Clearly, this highly fact-oriented game has long been an obsession with most Indian schools.  Students who are able to deal with this large-scale hoarding of certain prescribed facts would thrive well.  The languages used in the assembly were Hindi and English.  Even as the children were dispersing for classes, a group of children remained on the dais singing patriotic songs in Hindi.  The drum beat formed an essential guiding component throughout the assembly. 

            In spite of being in Karnataka, Kannada did not seem to be an obvious choice for language options that the school offered.  The languages the school offered were: English, Hindi, and Sanskrit.  Moreover, students were not allowed to speak any other language within the school premises.  Fascinatingly, it seemed an obvious restriction for many of the children we spoke to: Yes, they said, our teachers want us to learn Hindi and English well.  This raised a lot of questions in my head: It surely seemed like a form of linguistic deprivation to me, but could we really call it deprivation if children were unaware of it?  Would it be deprivation if the children were aware of their condition but still chose to take the path recommended by the school?  These questions could be asked at other levels of deprivation, too.

            A friend and I attended a Standard VI Sanskrit class.  This class seemed to my friend and me as more of a moral education class than a language class; whether this was due to the nature of the slokas or the manner in which the teacher articulated his lesson, was a little unclear.  Whatever the reason, this teacher was out-and-out prescriptive; he had no qualms about presenting his ideology of Sanskrit being a “language of culture” up on a pedestal for all the children to emulate.  The other languages (especially perhaps those that were forbidden in the school?) obviously seemed to lack this “cultured” feature.  I asked a student I was sitting next to whether he enjoyed Sanskrit.  He promptly replied that enjoyed every other subject but this.  When asked why, he told me that at least Hindi had its uses, that of being of help wherever one went out in the country; but he saw no use of learning Sanskrit – what good would it do us in future, he asked.  This “usefulness” of a subject was articulated even by the SUPW (or Socially Useful Productive Work) teacher.  This subject had recently been renamed as “Work Experience”; neither teachers nor students saw any particular reason why this name was changed.  The teacher showed us the syllabus and clearly told us that despite CBSE’s options of art/ craft, macramé, etc., most KV schools, across the country, taught the making and handling of electronic equipment as a part of this subject because of the utilitarian value they attached to it.

            It was interesting to contrast this ideology to that of the other schools we had visited.  It almost gave us a pragmatic idea of how certain educational aims and ideologies are engendered by what are articulated as the needs of a given society.

We sure did learn a lot from our school visits.

            Ever since we began preparations for our group presentation on ‘process translation’ of the NCF 2005, I had hit upon a newly-found interest: that of observing how the textbook culture manifested itself in classrooms.  That this was in sync with the latest requirements for our next curriculum blogpost was but a stroke of luck for me. 

Our latest visit was to a government school.  We were fortunate enough to observe both – a Nalli-Kalli class for a vertically-group of standards I, II, and III, and rather textbook-centric mathematics class for standard VII.  We asked the Nalli-Kalli teacher to tell us more about this method of teaching and how she thought it affected her and her students.  She seemed to have a clear preference for this method over the older ones.  Surely, it required her to put in more effort from her part?  Of course it did, she said, but she enjoyed it.  Moreover, it was very satisfying for her to be able to see a visible improvement in her students’ reading and writing abilities.  It was also a more suitable system, she said, for children of migrant labourers who often went on long trips to the native places.  These children, once they returned, could then pick up from where they had left off and immediately fall back on track.  Such largely self-reliant methodologies of learning had made the children much more self-confident, said the teacher.  There was, largely, an absence of the textbook-centric culture in this classroom.  Of course, the children were continually encouraged to read and write, but in methods that seemed more appealing, and that included a larger choice, for the children.

In stark contrast to this was the standard VII mathematics class that we observed.  All of the children invariably had their textbooks open before them, while the teacher conducted an entirely one-way delivery of the class.  His one-way delivery could, however, be defended on the grounds that he was only yet introducing the topic, and hence providing the students with the necessary foundation before they ventured further.  Nevertheless, as in many other schools we had visited, we observed a steady (and in some schools, a rather exponential) increase in the dominance of the textbook culture as the child grew older.

A common-sense understanding of the word “constructivism” had led me into hypothesizing that as the child grew older, the more would be the child’s foundational apriori knowledge about the subject, and the more teacher could rely on increasingly interactive methods to make learning more meaningful.  However, what we saw in most schools was the exact opposite of this.  Whether this was an attempt at helping the children fit into what they made out to be as the dichotomous “real world”, or a give-in to most parents’ expectations of the acquiring of certain study skills, or whether associated educators and teachers genuinely believed this to be the best learning method for children of this age, was something that could be only figured out with deeper probing.    

            On the 7^th of February, our group visited an Alternative School.  My first direction of inquiry came rather naturally to me – that of figuring out what was so “alternative” about this curriculum.  A popular notion that has floated around for a while now is that such schools are suitable only to those who can afford to be “alternate” in their ways, that objective-driven and job-oriented education is what the working classes can afford.  Of course, the affluence of the families of the students didn’t do much to prove the contrary, but I anyway highly doubted such allegations, if I may call them so. 

 

            I have, so far, visited two Alternative Schools, and a consolidation of my experiences told me that they put a lot of stress on working with the hands.  The school that I visited almost built their curricula around their surrounding flora and fauna.  They studied, for example, the new African variety of a snail that had taken over their campus last year; their campus was a host to all the varieties of snakes found in India – they studied about these, too; they collected the slush from their ponds and lakes, placed them in little jars and studied the various insects and animals that subsisted in this; they collected the eggs of various insects, carefully observed their progressive growth into a fully-grown insect, and in this manner related well with their environs.  How could this kind of education possibly alienate students and make them incapable of securing jobs for themselves?  In fact, most people are often so taken by radically objective-driven forms of education that they fail to deduce the long-term impacts of such an obsession. 

            We had made this visit after reading parts of the NCF and understanding some of its core concepts, like constructivism, child-centred learning, and of the knowledge being of a relatable kind.  So we looked for the manifestations of these principles in practice, and were delighted to find many.  We attended a middle school (vertically grouped) class where the concept of motion was being discussed.  Half the class was sent to the football field where they calculated their own speed of running for a given distance.  They filled up charts of the distances they had covered, the time they took, and hence their speed and brought these charts into the classroom for discussion and analysis.  It was delightful to see how relatable concepts such as speed, velocity, distance, displacement, motion, and friction were made.  Of course, these concepts have been derived from our surroundings itself, but they are often made so abstract, esoteric, and hence difficult to grasp, that the children end up either learning them as a duty or feeling thoroughly disenchanted about the entire exercise. 

            The interest sparked off by this kind of learning encouraged the students to probe further.  We were witness to class where much was being learnt without a single textbook on the table.  It was an excellent illustration of why student understanding should be the centre of a class.  Interestingly, pushing textbooks to the periphery never quite seemed to give students the idea that they were unnecessary.  They, in fact, did understand the importance of books in general and judiciously used them for projects and assignments, despite the fact that most of them came from backgrounds where they could procure any and every kind of information with the click on a button.  The dearth of computers on the campus, and the prohibition of cell phones (and the like) formed the part of the curriculum which encouraged a child to come out of the virtual world.  Their conversations weren’t devoid of Youtube videos or Angry Birds; so, said one of the teachers, we were sure they getting enough of that from their homes, we therefore concentrated on what they wouldn’t probably get.

            The organic, ever-changing quality of a curriculum was very interesting to observe in a setting like this, and heartening, too.  It encouraged me to next look into what biases could creep into curriculum by way of the exclusion of an idea or by loading it.  But about that, maybe next week…  

            This week, our group wasn’t assigned a select school for our practicum, so I could head in any which way, as was the requirement for the first practicum.  But my head was in a muddle after the debate we had had in class yesterday, so I decided to de-clutter my head to begin with.  The interactions could wait until next week; I was, at the moment, in dire need of organizing my thoughts a little more coherently before I ventured out.  Of course, there was always the danger of ending up even more confounded than one was before the deliberation, but the least that I could hope was that the dust in my head settled and my befuddled thoughts remained steady at their conflicting points of view.

            The debate was about whether we should have a common curriculum or not, and we of course, placed this in an Indian context.  I was in the group that supported a common curriculum.  Towards the end, it was very visibly evident that both groups had moved into the safe regions of the middle path, i.e. providing all children with similar opportunities, but localizing the curriculum accordingly.

            I was, nevertheless, still unsettled.  We have always talked much about localizing curriculums for a given set of children, or making it child-centric and highly individualistic.  But where exactly it was appropriate to draw this line was something that had troubled me to no end.  How could one, for example, based on several assumptions of the needs and wants of a child, restrict a tribal girl to only learning her indigenous forms of livelihoods?  Then again, how appropriate would it be to introduce her to something as alien as Keats and Shelley and Byron? 

            The more I fought for the cause of a common curriculum, the more I seemed to think that it was truly the best way out.  In fact, my earlier visits to an International school and two Alternative schools had strongly put forth their case for equal opportunity for all.  Most importantly, none of these schools went easy with their insistence that all children learn to “work with their hands”.  While one of the schools was more inclusive in its admission, the other two had, despite building separate physical spaces for the “different” types of children, adhered to very similar teaching practices, so that the underprivileged lot didn’t miss out on anything.  The idea of such an obvious distinction, again, was something that had never stopped troubling me, since the time I visited those schools.  True, each set of children had very different needs; but weren’t those schools, in a way, reinforcing those distinctions and reproducing society as it was?  Wouldn’t there then be a greater danger of a vertical distinction as opposed to a more levelled horizontal differentiation?

            The questions never stopped… But this time, they only pushed me to want to visit more schools and find out possible answers myself.

            7:00am, 24 Jan: Bracing the chill of an early winter morn, Swetha, Shehnaz, Barkat, Dhiraj, and I visited the Indus International School.  Among the first things that hit me as I entered the campus were the well-pruned gardens and the cool grey-stone buildings.  Extremely well-kept places always drew my suspicion.  And after travelling through the rather unkempt regions of South Bangalore, the ambience of this school seemed out-of-place, almost staged.  Of course, I immediately shrank back into my reveries and hastily concluded this to be “one of those” exclusive, esoteric shrines where knowledge was selectively imparted.  But of course, these were just my initial, impulsive thoughts; I was prepared to be persuaded otherwise.

            After a tour of campus, led by two young school captains from Grade V, we had a small interactive session with the director of ITARI (Indus Training And Research Institute), during which he gave us an overview of the school, its activities, and details about the ITARI section of the school. 

            We next observed an English class being taken for the students of Grade VII.  They were doing a reading of the novel “A Christmas Carol”.  After having a short discussion regarding how one could go about writing a character sketch, the teacher showed the students a rap video around the same topic.  They then took out some classroom time to write down the character sketch of one of the characters – Tiny Tim – and the teacher got us to carry out some constructive criticisms about their writings.  Post-lunch, we observed Grade IV students actually making their own meanings of “Machine and Man” (of course, due to my sporadic dabbling with gender issues in education, I couldn’t help but note that we were still quite a distance away from talking about “Machine and HU-man”).  This wasn’t exactly one of those sessions when the children got to decide what they wanted to learn about machines (the teachers told us that they often went on such joyful tangential classes, too); nevertheless, they were allowed to take their own little differing wiggly paths to get to the point, which was also quite delightful to observe.

            We ended our visit on a high note.  The nine-year-old Indus International had set up a Community School (or the Indus International Community School – IICS), which they called all-inclusive.  In fact, during our tour of the school, our student guide had introduced her school as one of India’s first all-inclusive school.  I was all-too-curious (and at the same time cynical) to find out how this inclusivity worked when they had built a clearly segregated physical space for the “underprivileged lot”.  Of course, as a conclusion, I did end up appreciating their efforts more than being critical of it, because the activities at the Community School did seem to be moving closer to the achievement levels that mother-school commanded, not just in terms of academics, but also with regard to sports and other cultural undertakings.  (The IICS reminded me a lot about the Kaigal Project of the Krishnamurthy Foundation, which runs schools for tribal children.)  Moreover, our interaction with the principal of this school gave us the impression that a lot of in-depth research had been carried out amidst the communities they were catering to, that they actually benefitted the group they hoped to target.  It was clear that at the moment, the needs of their target group were very different from the needs of the children at the International School.  (Besides, I often wondered whether this “inclusivity” they kept coming back to referred to the inclusion of the many foreign nationals they catered to, especially those from non-English-speaking backgrounds.)  

Yes, I did see smiling faces at both ends of the Indus spectrum; it was gladdening to see that, and that was what had ended this visit on a high note.  But my heart yearned for far more – I dreamt of a day when I would see the smiling faces at both ends of the spectrum under the same roof.  Equality over the mad rush for excellence… Now that would be a dream come true.