Examples of teaching for understanding in India

I can’t describe all the examples I saw of wonderful educational projects at the Aditi, Srishti, and Drishya schools in Bangalore. So, I will describe a few of them that seem particularly emblematic of the way these schools blend ancient traditional crafts and history with contemporary design, academic learning with the arts, and school work with efforts to improve the community. Often these projects result in artifacts and/or performances that directly enrich both the school and the larger community.

Unfortunately, the Aditi School was closed on the Monday when I first visited, due to a disturbance in a neighborhood of Bangalore. As happens with some frequency around India, tensions between Hindus and Muslims erupts when some small incident is interpreted as an insult and sets off the ever-present kindling caused by poverty and crowding in some urban neighborhoods. I have the impression, partly from reading Amartya Sen’s fascinating book called “The Argumentative Indian” that some political parties try to spark this kindling to gain power through people’s fears. Some rock-throwing incident on Sunday had led to looting and the police who eventually arrived to quell the violence caused additional destruction as they tried to calm the crowd. A curfew was imposed on the area which lasted until 7AM on Monday. The principal of Aditi didn’t want to risk sending school buses into the neighborhood to collect children nor did he feel confident that all would be calm by Monday afternoon when children needed to return home. So, in the wee hours of Monday morning, he canceled school for the day—the equivalent of a “snow day” in New England. I heard that many children were happy for the unexpected vacation, but I was disappointed to miss seeing the school in action. Instead, I walked around the school with Geetha and the principal Satish Jayarajan and heard about its philosophy, programs, and projects.

The school was designed by a team of young architects, so inexperienced that their designs had to be reviewed and approved by senior architects. Perhaps their youth gave them fresh ideas and helped them remember what kids want to experience at school. The school is beautifully designed for a climate that is balmy for most of the year. It is built from high-quality local materials like stone and tile. It is open so that classrooms branch off of handsomely landscaped courtyards with nooks of varying sizes where groups gather to study, eat, or practice performances. Many of the walls in these open corridors and courtyards are decorated with murals and projects that classes of students have made.

One of thse projects generated a gorgeous mosaic floor depicting a complex scene of dinosaurs roaming the earth. It was designed by young Aditi students, and then built in collaboration with college-aged design students from the neighboring Srishti School (more about that school later). All of the work was coordinated and guided by one of the Aditi teachers. Some of the materials for the mosaic were purchased, but many of the stones were collected by students from the surrounding neighborhoods, including scraps from nearby potteries and stone-cutting factories and bits from along the road. Hallmarks of this project that I saw recurring in many other projects in these schools are: recycling of materials, integration of art with other academic subjects, and collaboration of students and teachers across grade levels, all in the service of creating a product that expresses and sustains the community spirit.

Late one afternoon, I visited the Drishya classrooms, housed next to part of the campus for Srishti school. These are resource classrooms where children from the slums of Bangalore come for special instruction that enriches the experience they have in the Drishya school located inside the slum. On this afternoon, the students—a group of about a dozen 10-12 year olds—were practicing their culminating performance for an extensive project. The performance is a public service radio program to be broadcast on low-tech radios that will be set up throughout the slum neighborhood. As their teacher passed the microphone around, each child made a short speech in Kannada, their local language, about how to protect animals. The microphone was connected to a test radio and we could hear their sturdy voices reproduced on the speaker. Although I don’t know one word of Kannada, the strength and commitment in each child’s voice was moving. I learned later that the students, some of whom are homeless, had cared for a litter of abandoned puppies as part of their study and had visited a shelter for homeless animals. Part of their broadcast includes information about how to contact this animal shelter. After this practice run, the teachers, with assistance from Shristi students and faculty, will help students set up radios throughout the slum. They hope their broadcast will be the first in a series that eventually enables the students to run their own local radio station for the slum.

This unit on animals was part of a major project called “Earth is Just Right for Me” that links many units taught at different grade levels across the Drishya School. The overarching theme of these units is based on Goldilocks’ refrain about a bowl of porridge, a chair, and a bed that were just right for her. Drishya children study planet Earth in comparison with Mars and Venus and learn about oxygen levels and respiration systems of plants and animals on Earth. For some students, this leads to investigations into lungs and factors that impede healthy lungs, including pollution and smoking. They have launched an anti-smoking campaign among their families and neighbors. Other classes have studied metamorphosis in butterflies and moths. They have created a butterfly garden at the school so that they can gather pupae and watch when the butterflies emerge. Their butterfly garden is fertilized by compost generated in handsome pots where food scraps gradually are transformed into rich humus. These pots are part of a project developed by one of the founding faculty of Shristi School, Poonam Bir Kasturi. She designed the pots and set up a business in Bangalore called Daily Dump (www.dailydump.org) which distributes the pots. The business plan is available to be replicated in other communities, using their own local materials and designs.

In all these projects, I see extensive enactments of the principles of Teaching for Understanding. Topics are richly generative, goals are clear and ambitious, performances are wonderfully varied and focused on development of understanding. Many teachers involve students in conducting assessments of their own and peer’s work. Although the Teaching for Understanding framework is not explicitly used by many teachers, I learned a great deal about how to enact its principles from visiting these schools.

For those who are interested in learning more about Geetha Narayanan and her ideas, you might check out the comment she added to my previous note about networked learning. Let me take this occasion to invite you to add a comment to any posts in this blog. My hope is that it will serve to connect people who are interested in applications of TfU and WIDE World around the world.