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In the last week or so Ash and I went down to Ahmedabad in Gujarat to stay with his family and do a bit of work without distraction. The structure I was talking about before is starting to take shape, and we’ve a time plan over which we intend to introduce it.

Balwadi (ages 4, 5 & 6)

We’ll start in one month with a new daily and weekly time-table for the younger kids (the Balwadi, also now known as Phase One). They’ll essentially be doing the same as now (playing, singing, drawing, creating etc), but the days and the weeks should take on a certain amount of rhythm which will help keep the kids comfortable and give them a natural timing to the happenings of Hunar Ghar around which they will then be able to explore and learn more. We akin it to day to day life; structure just means you know the sort of thing you should be doing at certain times and where to do them naturally, so you can spend more time getting on with the things that matter. If we all ate at a different time each day and the market was unstructured so everything was always in a different place at a different time, you’d spend most of your day just trying to arrange eating and not be able to do anything else.

The Balwadi kids will also be getting and introduction to the Rishi Valley learning materials. These help children and teachers with Hindi, Maths and Environmental Studies for Grades I and II. We don’t have grades, but we can use the materials as a tool for helping the kids learn certain skills, which will help them learn more in the future. In time, say 4 or 5 years, we hope to phase the Rishi Valley materials back out, but for now they will help. They are designed so that in the beginning the teachers help the children out, but the children become increasing independent in their learning until it is entirely peer-reviewed, which we think is a great way to do things.

Phase Two (ages 7, 8 & 9)

We see this as something of a crucial time in for the children at Hunar Ghar. They’ll be making a transition from the more dictated-structure of the younger years to (hopefully!) a dynamic, student equalibrised environment as they start to engage fully with the project-based (ie life-based) mode of learning.

We are concentration on getting these 2 phases up and running, as well as Phase Three (age 10, 11 &12). It won’t kick in fully until this time next year, by which time Ash, I and whoever else we can conscript will have written a set of syllabuses for the facilitators to work from. They should provide guidance enough that the facilitators can see and easily create for the children strings of logic, theme and thought which thread all the learning experiences inside and outside Hunar Ghar together, as well as providing projects to work through and activity ideas so they are never stuck for what to do, but not so prescriptive that it should stunt their and the students’ growth.

Again, over the years we’ll be reviewing and modifying the syllabus and shift everything but a few basic guidelines over the the collective consciousness of the learning community. Woven inthis transition for the next year will be ongoing facilitator training to help them discover and use new ways of interacting with the children and how to create opportunities for the children to learn rather than telling them what they should be learning.

We’ve just been having a chat about how we are going to create a better structure for Hunar Ghar and we may just have arrived at our solution, or at least, the beginnings of the next stage of it. That we want it to revolve around projects we’ve been clear about for quite some time, but just how that will work we’ve been less clear on.

We are starting to establish a resource pack of projects. Each concept, or capacity gain, we consider important for the children will be covered three times at incremental levels of complexity, within the project mandate. To do this, each project will be done three times by each child, at incremental levels of complexity. However, a skill done in one project won’t necessarily be done again at a higher level the next time the project is done; the skill sets will be interchangeable between projects so that the layers of repetition – that of the skills/concepts and that of the projects – will be related matrix-wise rather than linearly, a kind of premeditated randomness if you like. Nothing will seem to be repeated verbatim which will keep things interesting and engaging even in conceptual repetition, and the interchangeability will be a living example of how all ideas and skills interrelate.

Each time there is repetition in either layer the child’s role will change. The first time they will be led through the idea, the second they will go through it independently but facilitated, and the third time they will be acting as facilitators to children still in the first two cycles. The way the children are arranged in classes in approximate age ranges of three years, will reflect and facilitate this cycle.

Because the projects are long, lasting for a month for younger children and a six months to a year for the oldest, there is lots of time for each new concept or skill to sink in. It’s not merely a matter of children only having three discrete opportunities to learn, say, how to calculate the area of a circle or what are the kinds of measures they can take to stop a well from being infected but within the context of each project there will be various takes on it.

The prescribed randomness will create an engaging process for the children within which they can continue to follow their interests and use their initiative. Each project will contain many different skill sets; different children will do different things as per their ability and interest. The teacher will monitor the children’s abilities in certain areas to make sure that some capacity gains aren’t neglected because a child only wants to do one thing (unlikely as that is anyway). The children will be continually be doing things because they are interesting, useful and relevant in themself, bu these things will also be seen and developed in the light of being capacities enabling the children to engage in more diverse, abstract and complex activities later on.

As the process will be cyclical for the children, as it will be for the teachers and their capacity building. For the next two years the projects will be fully prescribed for them, and they will be supported in executing such that the informality remains for the children. The following two years the teachers will have a really good idea of what is expected for them, but should be much more autonomous in the process but will still be facilitated. By the third two years, they will be entirely competent at creating and leading projects, and will be able to share those skills clearly with new staff.

That’s the idea (however unclearly I’ve typed it!). It is a work in progress, of course we wouldn’t dream of remaining anything other than flexible in our approach and development, but it will give the teachers a really clear idea of just what is expected of them and how they are going to achieve it and likewise clear to the community just what we will be offering.

In England we have a bit of a reputation for talking about the weather, but during monsoon season in India, the weather becomes a part of the national, social and individual consciousness. Understandably. India is a country of rural people, with small farms, and in our area most of the crop is rain dependent. Therefore, no rain, no food. With this comes physical, financial and psychological insecurity.

If you add to this the fact that the rain has not come yet, that seed have been sown and are drying out in the soil, the ‘uncreditworthy poor’ are taking on high interest loans (15% per month) to buy new seed and the endless days of unbearable heat and humidity (40+ degrees), along with associated ailments and I find it a miracle that people aren’t more stressed. Nonetheless, we continue to wait for the monsoon. Ed and I for the cooling effect of the rain and people from Bakhel because their livelihoods depend upon it.

This last week has been good for me and my idealism. I find it pretty hard to ease up on things that I believe in sometimes, and believe no-one should have to compromise on something important which they know to be correct. This manner I really value in its generation of passion and self-determination, but I am also aware it can be alienating when it comes to actually achieving the ideal.

This week I’ve come to better understand how I can temper my idealism into constructive compromises. It was the illustrious Buddha who advocated the middle path and I’m starting to (conditionally) agree with him(!). Taking our community as an example, unless we create conditions that are value to them, whether rightly or wrongly in my opinion, it makes the position an artificial one (not to mention ethically inappropriate) and any progress from that point harder; we’ll be wanting to carry Hunar Ghar one way towards our ideal and they the other back to the condition they consider to be of value.

This week the issue has revolved around the three R’s and examination. This is what government schools offer, that is the only type of education the community has been exposed to and therefore it is the definition of education to them, and by inference what it means to be educated, and thus is what they demand. We don’t neglect the three R’s – many of our children read and write better than children from the local government school (it’s a very crude comparison, and shouldn’t be use as a measure of relative worth between the two schools or types of teaching) – and I also value them for what opportunities they give to the children as much as the community does, but we don’t do it in the way government schools do it, so we can say that the way things are perceived is important irrespective of the outcome, and we haven’t yet provided exams for the children. This the community are unhappy about.

The three R’s

The three R’s are most important skills. As skills in themselves they enable such things as participation in democratic processes, access to information concerning the develop in a community, access to the evaluation of that information, the capability to earn higher wages, and reduce exploitation through ignorance, such as a doctor giving a glucose injection instead of a proper drug, or overcharging happening in the market place. For them to cause a genuine net increase in a person’s capabilities, such is the aim of education, they must not compromise those pre-existing in a person and the process of their acquisition must not damage those capabilities and skills, or the person’s ability to gain new ones beyond those prescribed by the syllabus. Unfortunately this is what the government style education tends to do in rural areas, which is why it is so important for us to enable the community to gain insight into this perspective, so we can better serve them, and they can demand more of the education system.

Examination

I am against examinations; it sets the wrong tone for what learning should be about, narrows the focus of the process to things children will be examined on, creates competition between the intellects of the children and creates a situation where children have either passed or failed in their learning process – both of which are impossible in true learning. We are in a position to write our own evaluation/examination process up to children of Class 5 standard. Ash and I had a long discussion about providing 5th grade certification to parents. I was against it, and still am, even if we make the evaluation an on-going background process where the children don’t know they are being examined and include in the evaluation things other than the usual, such as confidence, ability to talk, listen, share etc. I don’t think it is right to quantify such characteristics, and I am afraid of the need to reach a certain level by a certain time (the time factor will be imposed from the community and teachers because of the expectations set by government and private schools) in a certain area may distort a more natural and favourable learning process. I do see the value of having a clear understanding of how each of our children are getting on in their learning and identifying where they may require additional support in certain areas to make them better able to enhance their learning, such as being able to read well enough to see new ideas and information from books. As well as this, clear marker points of progress for the teachers will help them feel more comfortable and that they are achieving, and the community demands it of us.

A school like Hunar Ghar requires education of the entire community to reassess their judgement of quality and necessity in learning in order for it to function as it is designed to do – learning is a conversation between learners, facilitators, and the community and to neglect one aspect would be to undermine the entire process. The process we are going through is a constant one of nudging the teaching/learning in Hunar Ghar in the direction of our ideal while simultaneously nudging the community perception of that process so it can exist in an environment that is conducive to its propagation, so it can again be nudged up a notch and so forth. I really consider the precedence that certain actions can set, which is why I am against having any kind of certification provision at Hunar Ghar; it may regress the perception of what Hunar Ghar is and so stunt its growth. On the other hand it sends a really clear message to the community that we have listened and are responding to their concerns. With the support that creates we’d be in a better position of trust and understanding to keep pushing how Hunar Ghar operates and moving towards the ideal. That we can create our own evaluative process is a great bonus meaning the compromise towards the unwanted need not be quite so far back as it would otherwise have been.

So long as it is kept in mind that the middle road is only the middle road while the old opinion exists, so that we keep cutting new trails ever closer to the ideal, a compromise – as a step forwards rather than a set situation – can be a very good thing. To wit, not compromising my ideals could be to critically, if not terminally, compromise them.

Despite the titles of this and the last post, I’d like to be writing more than weekly. The reason for not ahving done so though is because we’ve been pretty busy.

This week has been really brilliant for Educate for Life, and so for me, too. Last Wednesday we met with Sharmaji of RBKS. We had a clear, concise meeting and all residual confusions and conflicts were put to bed. Only the few days before Ash and I had been discussing the necessity to improve our communication with RBKS, that we so readily acheived it is a great thing. Sharmaji definitely has a much clearer concept of what we are creating at Hunar Ghar, so it means less frustration on our part, less confusion on his, more focussed discussion and so RBKS and Hunar Ghar can interact much better than before.

This improved dialogue thus led to an intorduction with two teachers from Agra who are as of today on trial with us for one month, and a ‘master trainer’, who is going to provide training support to the teachers. Initially I was wary of the idea of a master trainer, but he has exposure with informal education from before and seem keen on learning our thoughts on pedagogy and visiting some of the establishments that have inspired us so he can the better train our teachers in ways appropriate to Hunar Ghar. Good stuff!

We are now looking for one local woman to be teacher, and another faciliatator to support Deepak, and we’ll have our team for the next 12 months in place. That will be a great elief if we can get it done, allowing us to focus more directly on Hunar Ghar.