GOAL: To assist a visible number of govt rural high schools to become high quality institutions for imparting holistic education. Guide them to gradually move towards a need-based , much more diversified curriculum catering to all kinds of children; and to see that these schools play an active role in enriching rural life in many ways.
BACKGROUND
From 1997 till 2006 Swanirvar has worked with 10-16 year old school going children by forming village youth groups .In their free time , once or twice a week and more during their vacations , they did a lot of surveys, their analysis, other useful activities and also learnt a lot of songs, dances , theatre , puppetry etc. We felt that all this should be part of school curriculum. In 2006 the Govt of West Bengal, following the Supreme Court order, decided to start teaching Environment as a separate subject from Class VI onwards. But no teachers or any training was provided. Many school asked Swanirvar staff to become the teachers of Environment. In 2006 we started with 9 schools. Currently our 12 staff teach in 21 schools with 14,000 students . There is now mounting demand and we are moving towards teacher’s capacity building.
WHAT IS DIFFERENT IN THESE 21 GOVT SCHOOLS ?
(i) Almost all classes have garbage bins while there were none before
(ii) Children’s committees are coming up for cleaning classrooms and school in general
(iii) Environment classes involve going outside the school to do ecological studies and pollution monitoring
(iv) Surveys and analysis are being done of home garbage , village demographics , birds , insects , herbs, fuels , livelihoods, tubewells, water bodies, domestic animals, crops, markets, electricity connections & appliances, use of water etc
(v) Use of work cards , group work , quizzes, framing of questions by students started in Environment classes and have percolated into other subjects
(vi) There is a simple piece of wall earmarked as “news wall” with environment and other news being put up by teachers and students
(vii) The office and teacher’s room have important school information on their walls
(viii) Several schools have a student managed school garden
(ix) Many students have learnt and are building up totally organic intensive kitchen gardens at home
(x) In many schools children are making wonderful handicrafts in their work education classes
(xi) Two schools have started the reading of news in assembly instead of only singing the same national anthem everyday
(xii) One school is forming a singing group.
(xiii) A network of work education teachers who meet every month to learn from each other has been formed in June 2008
(xiv) A similar Maths teachers network has started in June 2009 .
Report August 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment