Experiences with the Varadenahalli school children

Mukunda, Kamala V (2016) Experiences with the Varadenahalli school children. Learning Curve (25). pp. 47-49.

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Abstract

There are thousands of people working with our government school system to improve learning conditions and psychological outcomes for students. For these dedicated people, I feel deep appreciation and admiration. I myself teach in a non-formal private school (Centre For Learning), and most of us teachers and students come from city backgrounds. One of the many objectives of the CFL education is to connect with lives and worlds outside our own, to break our bubbles of physical comfort and self-indulgence from time to time. We do this in several ways, one of which is to engage regularly with students from the nearby village primary school. From the start, we have seen that the Varadenahalli children treasure these interactions too, so we continue them year after year. I hope to share in this article some of what we have observed and learned from these rich and varied sessions. However, it is clear that we can share neither the depth nor the breadth of experience of those who work full-time with government schools, and therefore I offer these points in humility.One extreme example of this tendency comes from a history project that we did with the Class 5 children (we were using Deepa Dhanraj’s film for ideas and inspiration). They learned how to draw a family tree beginning from their grandparents and they were each to make their own at home by asking family members for as many names as possible. The next week when I asked to look at the sheets, there was some giggling among the girls, and then they showed me—identical family trees! They happily informed me that they had all copied from Anasuya (she was clearly the acknowledged ‘good student’ in class). I turned to the boys and asked for their sheets. One of them grabbed Anasuya’s and started copying it! It took a while and a lot more giggling to explain that Anasuya’s grandmother was not everyone’s grandmother, and so on...

Item Type: Articles in APF Magazines
Authors: Mukunda, Kamala V
Document Language:
Language
English
Uncontrolled Keywords: Education, Elementary education, Early childhood education
Subjects: Social sciences > Education
Divisions: Azim Premji University > University Publications > Learning Curve
Full Text Status: Public
URI: http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/915
Publisher URL: http://apfstatic.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-...

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