The Journey Starts Where the Learning is Now and Ends When the Learner is Successful

Beginning of the Journey

Samerth started its first learning center in 2017, in one of the most densely populated low-income housing areas of Ahmedabad. This was not our first initiative in education. Before this, we had worked in the area of early education for more than a decade.

The learning center was envisaged as a space for us to implement different pedagogies and teaching learning materials and gauge their impact, and then start working in schools.

The idea was to build the communities’ capacities and once they are empowered, they would demand and access services and entitlements. In most cases facilitators like I were also from the community, and ensured that learning and connect happened from within the group.

After a few years, once the governmental anganwadis took over our early education centers, we decided to work with government schools to enhance the quality of learning. We had already undergone extensive training on creative pedagogy, various developmental stages and child-centric learning for children from three to five years of age. The plan was now to start working with them once they reached schools.

We requested support from Eklavya (Bhopal), Dakshinamurti (Bhavnagar) and Digantar (Jaipur) to help us further build our capacities to work with children aged 6 to 8 years in government schools. At first, I baulked at the idea of going and teaching in a school.

I had discontinued my education after I failed in mathematics in 10th grade. My father was not keeping well and I was expected to start earning to support him take care of our family that consisted of my parents and two younger brothers.

Learning is a Social Act: Some Personal Notes

I was born and brought up in Juhapura (an area in Ahmedabad) and had never travelled outside. I had started doing odd jobs and then joined Samerth when I was 19 as a support teacher in an early education center. Over the next three years, I was fortunate enough to undertake trainings by many organisations such as Muktangan, Mobile Creches, etc and was now confident working with preschool children and helping them achieve developmental milestones.

During my tenure, I had worked closely with many Anganwadi Karyakartas and Child Development Program Officers, most of whom had been very accommodative. But working with government teachers seemed very challenging. I did not have great memories of my own school teachers and showing them different ways of teaching and learning – in their own classrooms – was a daunting idea.

My colleagues resonated with my idea. Together we thought of starting learning centers in areas where there were many first-generation learners and out of school children. The idea was to start a center in the area with high need, support children, and work in the same schools so that the learners feel comfortable with an adult they know in the school.

The learning center was envisaged as a space for us to implement different pedagogies and teaching-learning materials and gauge their impact, and then start working in schools. This strategy helped us regain some of our lost confidence and made us a little less scared of the idea of going to schools and teaching there.

Making Education Central for a Marginal Social Group

In the initial selection of the place for a learning center, we continued in the areas which had a lot of out of school and first generation learners. One of them was a basti of more than 500 families belonging to the Mir Fakir tribe.

This Denotified Tribe is known to travel from one place to another in search of livelihood, stay for some time, and then move on. Till a few decades back, they were known as performers – who would sing and dance on the streets. Village communities would offer them food and spaces to stay. The Mir Fakirs would travel from one village to another, telling tales, performing antics, singing and dancing.

With the advent of television and internet in villages, people have less time and patience for such performances. So, the Mir Fakir folk now travel to cities, take up small jobs, and sometimes sell cheap Chinese toys on footpaths and at traffic signals.

Their children are exceptionally street smart, with a host of talents. But being first generational learners, they often have had difficulties in mastering the foundational skills of reading, writing and numeracy.

It was a perfect area for setting up a learning center. But the first issue was to find space. After many weeks of negotiations, the community allowed us to start a center in an open space within their basti. In a few months, around 20 children had started coming regularly at the center.

As time went by, we realised that owing to the nature of their work, the Mir Fakirs would migrate for about four months every year. This would be to cities like Surat during festivals or to other religious places when there would be an expectation of better earnings by performing and begging. They definitely needed their children with them then. Hence, continuity of our processes at the learning center was a big challenge.

The other issue was their reluctance to send children to school. Since parents did not have reading and writing skills, they were unsure of their children going to school. After a lot of convincing, a few parents agreed to send their children to school from the next academic year. By now, the community had grown more accepting of us, the children were learning well.

Coping with Disruptions the Samerth Way

And then suddenly, the road abutting the basti needed to be widened. People employed by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation came with a bulldozer and almost overnight about 80% of the people shifted to other areas. Some of them shifted out of the city, others to different areas within the city. The remaining 20% did not want to continue the learning center. They were also not interested to send their children to school.

This was a huge setback, and a great learning. It is imperative that there is a school in the vicinity of a learning center. It is also important that the parents have to be on board with the children continuing their education – not just at the learning center but for a more formal engagement with the school system. This is especially relevant, if the children in question have a role to play in earning their livelihood. The other centers had exceptional results. In the first year, we were able to enrol 24 children in schools. They have continued with some hiccups; but are now well entrenched in the mainstream system.

We work hard to make the words, the poems, the stories and the teaching-learning material something that the child can relate to, is inexpensive and therefore easily replicable. It takes into account the socioeconomic conditions and cultural traditions of the learners and the local environment. In a few months, the children would come running at the sound of us opening doors of the center.

The other challenge was to divide the groups at the center based on their prior understanding of concepts as well as age. Sometimes we would have a five-year-old and a ten-year-old – both completely new to foundational learning. But there was an ease with which the ten-year-old could grasp concepts and later overshadow the five-yearold. This meant having many groups on the same learning level to begin with and later branching them out based on levels, all the time keeping things fluid.

We work hard to make the words, the poems, the stories and the teaching-learning material something that the child can relate to, is inexpensive and therefore easily replicable.

After a year of running the learning center, I started working in the school. To my surprise, things had changed for the better there. The teachers were more open. Once they realised that we will be working with them (and not above them) they were very forthcoming. We had examples of teachers from other classes coming to discuss a concept and enquiring if it could be presented in a more simple and straightforward manner. The principal would call us for important meetings and visits and this helped us become a part of the school system.

And then Comes the Pandemic

The pandemic changed all of this. After the initial mayhem, we started receiving calls from children, parents and school teachers to start something as there was a complete gap. Initially, we started weekly distribution of grade-wise worksheets for children, both at the centers as well as at the school. Children, parents and teachers would collect them once a week and submit them over the next week. Queries would be answered on submission of the worksheet.

As days went by, we reopened the centers, maintaining social distance and other Covid protocols. More and more children were now showing signs of boredom and anxiety. We started general workshops on dance, drawing, public speaking, mental games etc., where children participate, have fun, and connect with themselves and each other.

After the onset of the pandemic, the learning center has evolved as a community space that is used for distribution of ration kits to the needy, and where members hold meetings on issues related to basic amenities etc. This has also morphed into a place where schoolteachers come to collaborate and hold meetings with parents. It has become a space rooted in, and owned by, the community.