Helping peers to overcome language issues

Pune: In a bid to use the students themselves as the resources to empower other students and enable them to overcome the language barrier that threatens the learning process, the teachers at the Zilla Parishad School in Khadakwadi village in Manvat taluka in Parbhani district are employing a couple of children from the tribal community itself to impart lessons to other students.

In a primary school with a strength of mere 62 students, where maximum children come from the Wadar community that speaks ‘Wadari’ language, the teachers have employed this technique under the ‘Collaboration for Transforming Education’ (ECE), a programme run jointly by Maharashtra government and EdelGive Foundation in a public-private partnership.

The programme, run on the guidelines of the mission ‘Progressive Education Maharashtra’, is being carried out in four backward districts of the State, namely Nandurbar, Parbhani, Gadchiroli and Amravati.
The programme has been especially helpful for Manvat taluka in Parbhani which is one of the talukas in the State with the highest drop-out rates.

“Rising dropout rate and migration were the major challenges before our school. In my school, we have both Marathi as well as Wadari speaking students, however, the latter are more in number. It is always difficult for these students to understand the concepts and write them in the examination, which is conducted in the formal language of instruction, that is Marathi,” said Mahatmaji Surwase, a teacher at the school.

In order to address the issue, the teachers decided to use students from the community. “Each student is different. We recognised that in each class, a couple of students from the community understood Marathi better than others. This is when we decided to use the group learning strategy. The teachers focus on a couple of bright students and teach them the concepts properly and then these students, in turn, teach the other students in the class. This method helps them understand the core concepts in a much better way. Once that is done, we help them write these better in Marathi,” Surwase added.

Talking about the issue of migration, he added, “The students from the Wadari community often migrate with their parents for specific periods in the year, for earning a livelihood. This leads to a huge academic loss. However, since the past two years, through the ECE programme, we are creating awareness amongst the parents and community members to not take the children along with them. The children now stay back with their grandparents or any other members of the community, on the responsibility of teachers. Last year, we prevented the migration of 100 per cent of the students.”

“Connecting the village/community to the schools and helping them understand the need to prioritise education is one of the major roles of the programme,” said Ashok Pingle of Gyaanprakash Foundation, an NGO that works for the implementation of the programme in two of the districts, Nandurbar and Parbhani.

He said, “When we started working with the schools, some of the challenges that we recognised were those of migration, accessibility, language barrier and dropouts. The programme aims at addressing these issues by training the teachers and the locals in each area, as these are the people on ground zero. As they are the ones who understand the problems the best, they can find the much effective solutions.”

Pingle stated that what the NGO and the programme do is that they organise conferences and meetings for the teachers, where they can be guided. “We aid the teachers in how to teach focusing accurately on the need, sharing and learning amongst the students, etc. We train them to understand the need of each student and teach accordingly. We have something called ‘clusters’ which comprise of around 10 to 12 schools in different areas. These come together to devise solutions for the different issues of the students in their areas,” he said.

He also said that the baseline assessment tests under the Progressive Education Maharashtra (PSM) are actually helping the teachers understand the areas where their students need to be paid attention upon.

For better education
    “Under the first phase of the ECE programme that started in July 2016, we carried out the transformation in 272 Zilla Parishad schools in the special four districts. We carried out intervention in the schools at school, community and cluster levels. In schools, we have improved the classroom material, transforming the school building into different teaching-learning aids, making the libraries child-friendly, ”Atul Gandhi of EdelGive Foundation said.

    He further added, “In the second phase, we will be implementing a District Transformation Programme (DTP), wherein we will be targeting more than 6,000 schools with more than 9,40,000 students.”