Cerebration

2012-02-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

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

I have, so far, visited two Alternative Schools, and aconsolidation of my experiences told me that they put a lot of stress onworking with the hands. The school thatI visited almost built their curricula around their surrounding flora andfauna. They studied, for example, thenew African variety of a snail that had taken over their campus last year; theircampus was a host to all the varieties of snakes found in India – they studiedabout these, too; they collected the slush from their ponds and lakes, placedthem in little jars and studied the various insects and animals that subsistedin this; they collected the eggs of various insects, carefully observed their progressivegrowth into a fully-grown insect, and in this manner related well with theirenvirons. How could this kind ofeducation possibly alienate students and make them incapable of securing jobsfor themselves? In fact, most people areoften so taken by radically objective-driven forms of education that they failto deduce the long-term impacts of such an obsession.

We had made this visit after reading parts of the NCF andunderstanding some of its core concepts, like constructivism, child-centredlearning, and of the knowledge being of a relatable kind. So we looked for the manifestations of theseprinciples in practice, and were delighted to find many. We attended a middle school (verticallygrouped) class where the concept of motion was being discussed. Half the class was sent to the football fieldwhere they calculated their own speed of running for a given distance. They filled up charts of the distances theyhad covered, the time they took, and hence their speed and brought these chartsinto 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 derivedfrom our surroundings itself, but they are often made so abstract, esoteric,and hence difficult to grasp, that the children end up either learning them asa duty or feeling thoroughly disenchanted about the entire exercise.

The interest sparked off by this kind of learning encouragedthe students to probe further. We werewitness to class where much was being learnt without a single textbook on thetable. It was an excellent illustrationof why student understanding should be the centre of a class. Interestingly, pushing textbooks to theperiphery never quite seemed to give students the idea that they wereunnecessary. They, in fact, didunderstand the importance of books in general and judiciously used them for projectsand assignments, despite the fact that most of them came from backgrounds wherethey could procure any and every kind of information with the click on abutton. The dearth of computers on thecampus, and the prohibition of cell phones (and the like) formed the part of thecurriculum which encouraged a child to come out of the virtual world. Their conversations weren’t devoid of Youtubevideos or Angry Birds; so, said one of the teachers, we were sure they gettingenough of that from their homes, we therefore concentrated on what they wouldn’tprobably get.

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

2012-01-30T21:59:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

The more I fought for the cause of a common curriculum, themore I seemed to think that it was truly the best way out. In fact, my earlier visits to anInternational school and two Alternative schools had strongly put forth their casefor equal opportunity for all. Mostimportantly, none of these schools went easy with their insistence that all childrenlearn to “work with their hands”. Whileone of the schools was more inclusive in its admission, the other two had, despitebuilding separate physical spaces for the “different” types of children,adhered to very similar teaching practices, so that the underprivileged lotdidn’t miss out on anything. The idea ofsuch an obvious distinction, again, was something that had never stoppedtroubling me, since the time I visited those schools. True, each set of children had very differentneeds; but weren’t those schools, in a way, reinforcing those distinctions and reproducingsociety as it was? Wouldn’t there thenbe a greater danger of a vertical distinction as opposed to a more levelled horizontaldifferentiation?

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

2012-01-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

2012-01-18T05:13:00.000-08:00

On the morning ofthe 17th, Srilakshmi and I set out on foot looking for anything that wouldcatch our attention. Observing people and interacting with them, in general,has always interested me. But this time around, I wanted to be able to interact with peoplein order to be able to make them comfortable enough so they would be abledivulge what exactly it was that they did in their school/ profession, why theydid what they did, what it took for them to get to where they were, and manysuch things.

Our walk took us toSt Joseph's School – a yellow-coloured, small, plain, but neatly maintainedbuilding. St Joseph's is a private unaided English-medium school located near the Hosa RoadJunction. We walked in, a little apprehensive about whether we would be disruptingclasses. When we arrived, the principal wasn't available for permission, so wetalked to a few teachers and they showed us to a class of bubbly fifteen yearolds. The Std X was joined in by Stds IX and VII for a while during ourinteraction with them.

The first thing I noticed, perhaps due to thedifferent kind(s) of curriculum I was myself familiar to, was that the girlsand boys were made to sit separately in the class – an unwritten part of thecurriculum to differentiate between the two sexes. When asked about this, thestudents giggled, almost as if to taunt the irrelevance of my question. When I persisted, they said that they preferred sitting like this. When asked why, the boys andgirls began hurling ridiculous comments at each other’s camps. According totheir responses, it seemed like this was mostly because of the naïve sense ofsuperiority the members of each sex thought they had over the other, a typicalphase I have often observed most children to go through. A young lady, who was oncea student of the same school, and had come back as a teacher on the request ofher principal because the school was facing a dearth of teachers, explained tous that it was important that such a distinction be maintained keeping in mindthe society that they catered to – most students were children of governmentemployees, weavers, or carpenters. I further noticed that the boys wereparticularly very outspoken as compared to the girls. When I asked the girls whythey were shy, whether they had been told to remain quite, they responded withshy “No’s”, but still remained mostly reserved in their replies.

I asked them if they enjoyed being in school, and theyunanimously responded with a strong “Yes”. When asked why, most replied that itwas because they felt wonderful to have gained “knowledge” (on further probing,we felt that they used this term interchangeably with ‘facts’ or ‘bits ofinformation’). This school-gained information clearly seemed to make them feelmore empowered than those who were not “educated” in the children’s sense of theterm.

But what was most heartening about our interactionwith the students was that though they cherished being in school and thought itput them a notch above those who hadn’t ever attended school, they also keenly understoodmany of their school’s shortcomings, and critiqued it eagerly. For example, oneparticularly enthusiastic boy listed out all factors that he thought were theschool’s drawbacks: it lacked computer facilities, a playground large enoughfor sports, had a dearth of teachers, didn’t cater to what they perceived to be the “extra-curricular”interests of students, and, as one girl put it, their academic syllabus didn’tmake them think much. We ran a cursory glance across the children’s SocialStudies, Chemistry, and English textbooks, and made a casual inference regarding how the questions at the end of each chapter could have been morecomprehensive rather than appealing only to the ‘fact-gathering’ sensibility.

When we asked students what activities they would haveliked to be included in the curriculum, and whether they would enjoy it if one oftheir carpenter or weaver parents came over and taught them the art, theysaid they would definitely be interested in such activities, that working withhands would surely help them in future. It should be mentioned here that theythought of this “help” mostly in terms of improving their job opportunities.

After ourinteraction with the children, we spoke to the principal, who had arrived bythen. The interaction with him was rather short, and more of an explanatory one asto why we had come over. During our explanations, there cropped up an awkwardmoment when he asked us what good we would do anyone, or how we would help them, after having carried out such observations. Of course, we did not have a direct reply to thatquestion, but we told him that we hoped to enter the field as educators in thenear future, analyze better and actually improve situations.

Yes, that’s the hope!