Conducting explorations with teachers

I have been writing about my experiences in the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Program (HSTP) as a part of my initial journey into the work of school education in rural areas for the past few issues of Samuhik Pahal. Having lived most of my initial life in Delhi, the experience in HSTP was extremely enriching. HSTP began with 16 schools in 1973. The philosophy and the materials for the program, as well as the pedagogical details and the materials to be used as kit in the classrooms, was developed with the help of the teachers.

The program was extended to the whole district of Hoshangabad in 1978 by the Department of Education, Government of Madhya Pradesh. The organizations implementing the program, along with NCERT (through its Regional College of Education in Bhopal), were asked to oversee the expansion and to ensure its quality.

How the expansion came about, how NCERT got involved, and how the system in the State educational administration was prepared to take up the program is a long story. One small step in the exercise of changing the science teaching in these schools was the orientation of teachers to the philosophy, principles, materials, and pedagogy of the program.

The orientation program was supposed to be over 21 days, full-time. The teachers were to come from all over the district at one place and many of them had to stay over. Therefore, space was needed for conducting the orientation program and for the teachers to stay. The Department of Education did not think about these kinds of problems, as they did not at the time do long workshops with many teachers. The orientation program needed a space for the sessions, a large number of rooms for accommodating the teachers, a room for the kit materials, and a place where we could have the feedback meetings. Arranging this was another big project and that is for another story.

All this happened thanks to the special interest taken by a few senior illustrious and remarkable educational administrators, who happened to be in office and were a major factor in this idea even becoming possible. The planning for the arrangements, and the necessary movement toward making them, started. However, in order to make it happen as per the wishes and the needs of many people, the organizers had to struggle with the system at multiple levels. Intentions at the top and the orders passed needed explaining and convincing to be implemented properly, particularly when the attempt was to do something that was different from how such things were being conducted at that point of time.

In the orientation we were supposed to prepare teachers to teach according to the ideas in the prepared textbook using the methods and the spirit of the program. The program was in its first year for most schools, as it was expanded to about 250 from the initial 16 schools. The orientation was only for the Class 6 textbook. We had about 500 teachers participating. We had to interact with them and share with them the spirit of the program.

Given the large number of teachers, they were divided into sections of around 40 each. The interaction was designed in a manner so as to provide a window to the kind of process that was expected in the classrooms as well. So, the teachers who were to be oriented worked in groups of four in their section. They were then supposed to do the experiments, record their observations and respond to the questions in the book which would gradually lead them through a series of experiments and questions to the concept through the guidance of the facilitator.

The orientation was hands-on. It was visualized as dialogical and experiment-based. So, one part of the task was to marshal the kit for each section according to the chapter being taken up and, in enough sets, so that each group would have its own complete kit set to work with. Then the kit had to be distributed and collected at the end. The teachers needed help to conduct the experiment and record it. The second task was to have someone facilitate the instruction-giving and discussion on the observations, helping the teachers make sense of their observations and inferences.

This was envisaged as a complex open-ended process. Very often the experiments would throw up a new and unexpected observation. Or the experiment would not work at all. Both these kinds of situations had to be addressed both at the level of the group doing the experiment and at the level of the collective discussion. We will talk a bit about this in the latter part of this piece.

It was known from the work with the initial set of schoolteachers that it was not possible for one person to deal with the groups of teachers who had never done experiments before. Many of them were reluctant to start learning to do experiments at what appeared to them as a late stage in life.

So, there was a team who worked with each section. The team was generally of a mixed composition. It had three to four members who had been a part of the group of teachers who had taught HSTP in the schools. Many of these teachers had just studied science till Class VIII. And so, besides these teachers with classroom experience, there were one or two persons from a background of college or university science in some way.

The team’s functioning was envisaged in the following way. Each team would have one person who would be able to make them listen to the instructions about what to do and discuss the science with them, and the others who would work with the teachers in small groups. These resource teachers would not perhaps have found acceptance in the role of actually giving instructions and coordinating discussions in the initial years. They also did not then have the confidence in that role.

So, the ‘trainer’ group was a mixture of greenhorns like me who knew science but did not know the teachers and the conditions in which they worked. Of the people who came from outside of the Hoshangabad school system, there were university professors, college teachers, and some of us who had graduated just a few years ago from our Master’s programs in Science. The science team members of Kishore Bharati, which included two of my class fellows, were in a separate category.

In the set of people coming from outside Hoshangabad (some of us from Delhi) had spent a varying amount of time with the program. Some of the people, in that sense, were more senior. But I was very new and had no experience of teaching till then. So, I landed up in Hoshangabad and due to the lack of enough Physics, people were drafted into doing the chapter on magnets. And as was the practice of Anil Sadgopal, he put me up to it like he had for so many others.

And then, we started the interactions. Right in the beginning, we started with open-ended questions. We got so many responses about what would happen to an iron piece and to a magnet on being treated in different ways. We were very happy that we had got teachers engaged. Following the spirt of HSTP, we considered all the points that were brought up. Many of them required testing and explanation, and we did that as well.

I started asking them reasons for the suggestions. This led some of the most participative ones in giving suggestions to explore. This surprised me. It also left me flummoxed. I had all along been happily assuming that the suggestions that were coming were with some reasons. It also occurred to me then that maybe they were also testing as to how far I would go in trying their suggestions out and maybe I sensed that. But for many of them, it was a genuine exercise in exploration in looking at science in a different manner and in participating in a process of observations and analyzing them to build an understanding of the phenomena.

We had many more sessions on magnetism. In these we explored all aspects of magnetism including the really complex question of why only some materials are magnetic and how does repeatedly dragging in the same direction, the same pole of a magnet on a bar made up of some magnetic material leads to the bar also acting like a magnet, and so on.

So, there was a lot of excitement, a lot of fun, and intense thinking and discussions as well. I learnt a lot in the process, not just about the way to interact with teachers but also about the underlying science of magnetism and what was known about it and what was not so well-known. As a team, we did things together, but I am not sure if I realized then that the others in the team did not come from the same background of privileged knowledge of physics and science. I think I was less successful than I hoped in empowering the rest of the team to answer some of the questions that arose during this time, partially because I was struggling with the answers to those questions myself. However, they were keen and enjoyed the excitement of my exploration, discovery, and learning supported me in whatever new experiments and demonstrations that I wanted to set up.

Coming from the tied-up system of formal experiments and structured questions to think about, this journey for me was invigorating while being challenging. It was always not easy to fight the urge to give the ‘correct answer’ and move on. The initial challenge was getting teachers to speak. Then the challenge was of getting them to speak in turn, listen to each other’s arguments and build on them.

So, it was an interesting first encounter that stretched over days. This then led to the decision that each chapter would only get a certain number of sessions, and that we cannot go on carrying it endlessly into more and more sessions. So, the idea emerged of finishing the chapter in a pre-decided number of sessions, keeping the spirit of openness of HSTP alive, but also to keep a balance and make the choice of pursuing only the relevant emergent issues and themes.