25 kids and a one-room school

My next trip (and the last one for 2007) took me to Mulbaagal Taluk, Kolar district, Karnataka. I admit, I still get surprised at how different the world looks even 5-10 kilometers away from a national highway. I'll cherish 2007 for those moments when I broke the inertia, got off my butt and went out to see some worlds different than mine.

A friend's mother works as a teacher in the one room school some 6 kilometers from Mulbaagal. I'd been hearing accounts of the school for a while now. My good friends, knowing of my interest in learning and education and things like that, invited me to see Sarva Shikasha Abhiyaan in action. Their mother, on the other hand, just wanted her 25 kids to meet some new people and told us it would be a treat for the kids if we took them some biscuits. 25 kids, coming to school mainly motivated by the mid day meal. Kids whose parents worked as labour on the nearby fields, kids definitely from families that our economists would slot as "very poor".

The clay elephant

The one room is spacious – big enough to accommodate 2-3 classes if need be (the schools are designed to be multi-grade, with one room and one teacher handling all of the students). Two big blackboards on two walls. Lots of sunlight. A gas stove, a back-up cylinder, some utensils and provisions to cook the mid day meal are piled in the corner. The boards have the mandatory list of two-syllable words and basic math written out. The kids are doing a word repetition exercise. The first thing that struck me was a series of clay figures made by the kids, sitting and drying in the sun. Pretty much like what I'd have expected to see in some urban school, or school that "fostered creativity". There are assorted things, including an elephant and a model anthill supposed to be inhabited by a snake. I am told they kids will be making vegetables tomorrow.

Am I in the picture?

Armed as we were with cameras, camera phones, a small laptop etc, we began doing what comes almost instinctively to us these days – clicking pics and videos. The kids were curious, they smiled, nudged and shoved. But one thing they were not – shy. Few kids showed any sign of hesitation. Some took a moment to warm up, but within minutes they were all there... wanting to be in the picture. I transferred the pictures to my laptop and ran it for them. I had anticipated that the kids might show some curiosity to the technology. But it was as if the technology was opaque to them... they were so focussed on the content. On the pictures. Hey look, that's Lavanya.. and here is the other lavanya. Look, it's me. Where is Marappa? Hey we forgot Maarappa... call him from home.

The transition from still pics to video was equally simple. The kids responded spontaneously. No surprise, no awe. Yeah, now we are moving. Yeah yeah, now I can hear us singing... Look she wasn't singing at all... Bharath can tell a story...

Having started with these observations, I figured I could try some other "experiments" as well. I turned the laptop into a tablet mode and picked up the stylus. With the kids crowded around me, I began writing their names on the screen (or what appeared convincingly like ruled paper). Again, the kids were there, correcting my spelling, telling me which letter to write next, recognizing the letters and words I was writing – completely oblivious to something called the computer. By the way, it was the first time the kids were seeing a computer of any sort (some of them had exposure to TV, not all).

Lunch time!

At lunch time, the kids pulled out steel plates from their bags. (Most bags contained little else), and lined up to get their food (which on that day, turned out to be a combination dish of rice, dal and vegetables). They sat outside in lines (the ranks swelling a little by the arrival of two or three younger siblings from the houses nearby) and ate. The over-friendly neighbourhood dog also arrived and was shooed away, lovingly.

By the time we left, the kids were winding up their meal. They waved us goodbye, clutching the biscuits we'd bought, which had turned out to be the treat for the day.

 

A space for violence

As I was speaking to the teacher later, she narrated something I had to record. The teacher tells them stories about being kind, clean, good – the staples of any primary education. As long as they are in the story space, the kids seem to get it. They empathise with the characters in the story, predict the consequences of actions etc. Then they go out after school and mindlessly stone and injure a bird or puppy.

Most of the kids continually see violence at home and around them, mothers being beaten, people beating up each other, for any reason, for no reason, violently. How much did I expect stories to accomplish?

Agriculture Adventures

The next leg of my discover-livelihoods-adventure took me to Ghanpur in Warangal District, about 120 kms from Hyderabad. This time I was trying to understand what agricultural livelihoods looked like. Ghanpur about 10,000 population and on Hyd-Warangal Main Road – by no means a small village. My NGO friends were able to however take me another 10-15 kms away from the road and into a less accessible area where the NGO is working on a watershed program.

Impressions:

• Agriculture? Give me a job any day! This patterns repeats from Pochampalli. I’m here doing this agriculture thing because there’s nothing else to do. Give me an opportunity, I’d rather go and work in a job with a salary at the end of the month. The kids? I’m sending them to school so they can at least go get that job. If they don’t, bad luck… they’ll probably end up doing agriculture till they find an opportunity!
• What’s there to learn about agriculture?!! The dealer’s a good enough source of info! This was interesting. The farmers clearly thought there was no skill-learning that was relevant to their livelihood, At the most they would need continuous information… and the local dealer at the market was good enough for that!
• BSC Agriculture vs an “agriculture ITI”. My NGO friend had a different perspective. Continuous learning was relevant for agriculture… it’s just the farmer didn’t realize that fact. However, he adds quickly – “what we need is not more agriculture Degree courses – that’s not going to help – they’ll all go and sell seed and fertilizer anyway for big companies. Neither will very short term intensive lecturing / training work – ever seen a farmer cooped up in a training session? He’s spaced out in 2 hours max. What might work is a very practical knowledge and skills approach like in the ITIs. Good enough to support a livelihood and provide context for sound learning – but not complex and demanding as a degree. On the whole, a much better option”. Hmm. Well. Certainly makes sense to my way of thinking!
• Just how many cell phones was that?? I read a TRAI report that says India added 6.8 million cell phone connections in Jan 2007. I nodded, thought of a billion people, and filed away a purely numerical data point in my head. When I met 10 farmers working in the middle of practically nowhere, and discovered two of them had cell phones, the impressions hit the gut. This is moving faster and bigger than I’d imagined.
• We talk, not sms! Even with all those cell phones, SMS (that scourge that possesses large numbers of people in urban areas) seemed happily irrelevant and absent. First, why type when I can speak? Two, how the hell am I supposed to use English for messaging? Three, even if my handset and service were to supports local language, can you imagine the interface nightmare to type Indian language phonemes using phone keys??
• What’s a computer? No, no one’s seen a computer. Doesn’t seem like any sort of meaningful contraption for our friends the farmers. Obviously asking about the internet didn’t make any sense. The cell phone and internet aren’t yet talking to each other – for a variety of reasons: cost of service, handset capability and a simple lack of meaningful web based content / services for the farmers
• 10k to 130k in 6 months flat. And going higher. Land prices – including land no one particularly cared about – just went through the roof. The people buying it are just investing in real estate because it’s the hot thing in the first quarter of 2007. Definitely no agricultural interests! Can anyone think of a good reason why a farmer might not be sorely tempted to sell off his lands?
• Loan-ly state of affairs. I ask my friendly farmers - why not take loans to improve agricultural practices or invest in other / related livelihoods? Dairy or livestock, perhaps? I get indulgent let’s-humor-her smiles all around. Getting a loan from a bank without pledging land as collateral is about as plausible as snowfall in May in Warangal. And later I’m educated by my untiring guide – loans are taken for seed, and for weddings. Nothing else seems to merit a financial mis-adventure as grave a taking a loan!!

Compared to Pochampalli, this trip was as different the proverbial chalk and cheese. But completely educative, nonetheless!

Close encounters with Livelihoods - Pochampalli

For a long time, I've thought of the questions of learning, learning for life and learning in the context of "making a living". And since the question has kept me engaged for so long, how about focussing my research question on the topic? Not a bad idea...

Step 1: Get a broader view of livelihoods. Read, talk, discuss a bit. And I figured there was loooots to be read - and I scraped the tip of the iceberg.
That being done, I was itching to go and get a look at a wider variety of livelihoods, first hand. I called up my good friends working all over the country and began my first brush with a non-urban, non-IT livelihood: Weaving in Pochampalli. Not really far away from "Urban" at 50 km from Hyderabad, just an hour, even in the bumpy red government bus... but still, not exactly your mall-infested city.

Some events and impressions that stayed with me and gave me much to reflct on:

• The weavers (at least all the ones I met) have an almost pre-prepared "script" to tell an outsider about themselves, their work and their woes. I don't for a moment doubt they have their troubles, but obviously, they've seen many many people come asking for their story. And quite predictably, they are quick to play up the "I-am-downtrodden-and-the-world-is-so-cruel" aspect of their lives. I repeat - it's not that I don't empathise with their genuine issues ... but I guess the "outsider-interest" in their lives might have gone too far.
  
• Pochampally weaving is an amazingly complex, skill intensive and time consuming activity. I'll need the rest of 4 blog entries just to describe it, so you can just read it elsewhere or hang in with my observation without a description. My weaver friends told me they make about Rs 200 (about 4USD) per saree... and they need 45 days to make 8 sarees. And that's 8 sarees of the same design... change the design and you've exended the production life cycle! A typical silk saree sells for around Rs 2000 to the customer (45USD) That left me thinking... what real value is being added here? "Completely hand made" ... is that a vlaue that the market is willing to pay for? And will the price for that perceived value be adequate to cover costs for the weavers?? What would automation do to this? Does it kill the "traditional", "artistic" aesthetics of the saree? Is automation impossible (as the weavers seem to be convinced). Is there another way to improve the economic incentives in this activity??
  
• "Who wants to weave?? I want to do computers". That's the common refrain from everybody - the 60ish year old master weaver to the kid just out of school. Computers is where the good life is. What of computers? you ask them. What does it mean to you? "Computers are well... you can do accounts", "With computers, you can get a job", "I dont know, I havent seen one, but Computers are the only way forward". Most of the younger kids are not familiar with weaving and dont intend to be. Neither do their parents want it. The old man at a shop near the bus stop asks me - in a friendly sort of way - what do I do for a living? Did I come here by car? How come I know Telugu? What do you call a banana in English? We fall to talking - and he tells me quite confidently "Teach all these kids computers! Only then is there some hope"
  
• Along with computers is the conviction that English is the way forward, the city is the way forward.. and interstingly for the two girls I spent all afternoon with - working and earning your own money is the way forward.

Watch this space for continued adventures with other livelihoods, in other places...

The making of policies...

Just back from the National Instructional Design conference organized by USAID, EDC, Azim Premji Foundation.
The conference brought together a bunch of people from government, non government and commercial e-learning content development to think about how instructional design can improve the quality of education, and what policies are required to support this improvement.

Some recurring themes at the conference:

• The learning comes before the 'e'. Technology is only a tool. (Hmm. Good. Nobody can disagree with that. But as APF head Dileep Ranjekar pointed out, we need to think too about how to actually use this tool to improve the quality of education. There is potentially much at stake)
• Train the teachers and the teachers' teachers! Why aren't we using technology to educate teachers and teacher trainers? (Not teachign them how to use technology but to improve their own perceptions of teaching-learning anf what value they can add to the process)
• Learner centered design!! (Yes. Right. So what exactly are we going to do about it? how do we make our lessons learner centered? And where are the people who will do this?!)
• Technology is not computers alone. Yup. Got that. There's plenty of other great stuff to use. How about radio? Video? But just what economic and operational models do we have to make it happen?
• Let's make judicious use of resources. Let's evaluate, continuously improve and all that. Sure, let's. No one's disagreeing.

I see a pattern here. There really isn't much disagreement on the broad picture. This itself was a little surprising to me. I was under the impression people were vastly divided on the issue of technology use in the teaching learning process.

So, what's missing? I think a "middle level specificity" of what could be done, and how. Not the usual 50,000 foot view that most policies provide, but something more concrete. Not ground level specifications and prescriptions, but something at a higher level of abstraction that can be interpreted for different contexts. Something to enable practical actions in a large scale.

If stuff is articulated at this "middle level" is that a policy or is it called something else? I don't think it's important what we call it. I think it's important to be done.

Learning to faint

Today's mime workshop was cool.

Hot actually - since the electricity went off and we had neither ac nor fan but twenty sweaty kids in the room trying to learn mime and one sweaty me.

It was either the heat or fascination for the macabre, but I've never seen a bunch of kids so enthusiastic about fainting (which was the action-of-the-day). 80% of the kids had never fainted in their lives. Most hadn't even witnessed anyone fainting. But all fell to it with dedication. And an authentic job they did too! Legs crumpling up neatly beneath them, arms limp, face on the floor - I was impressed.
I suspected they were doing it because they got to lie on the relatively cool floor till they were "woken up". But I continue to remain impressed.

This blog is dedicated to:

To all those who spent years memorizing useless facts ("mugging up" or "by-hearting" was the verb we used when I was a kid).

To those who never discovered why art and music classes were always sacrificed to accomodate science and social studies if the time ran short and the syllabus remained incomplete.

To all those who mixed chemicals in labs and never figured out the connection with some equations written in their blue lined notebooks with thin red graph paper.

To those who who eventually enrolled in the algebra-is-a-cobra school of thought

To all those who wrote exams so they could become an engineer, doctor, software professional or something like that. And to those who wrote exams just to get their parents off their backs. And to those who write exams to get their "fix" of seeing a 98 on their report card

To those who blissfully spent several years at a university drinking chai and old monk, smoking grass, satiating lust and finding love.

And to all those who have, at some time or the other, sung with heart-felt emotion, that old pink floyd number - we don't need no education....