Foundation Building within Low Literacy Contexts – The OELP Experience

OELP’s journey with Early Literacy began in 2006 in Municipal Corporation schools on the outskirts of Delhi, bordering Haryana. In 2008, we relocated to rural Rajasthan. We began work within the early grades of a few select government-run primary schools as well as in night schools or non-formal centres for out-of-school children.

During our establishment phase, each member of the OELP team taught for at least one year. We also engaged with the communities that the children came from. This allowed our small team to gain firsthand experiences and insights into some of the complexities that define classrooms within this rural context.

This compelled us to remain grounded and focused on conceptually sound, low-cost and doable pedagogies that address the diverse needs of our learners and the challenges of the teachers. The latter traverse the highly structured terrain of centralized mainstream curricula that is driven by ‘outcomes’.

Each journey is fuelled by the stories which drive it. These are stories of children, teachers and classrooms, as well as of those who linger on the margins of schools. Among the plethora of stories that have driven my experiences within OELP, there are a few that I refer to as ‘quantum leap stories’. Sanju’s is one such story.

Sanju Learns to Read

It is a story from the early years of our journey. Sanju—a little wisp of a girl with untidily cropped, shaggy hair and large soulful eyes—was anywhere between five to seven years old. She attended the night school in Deendhwada village. This school was located in the Balai Mohalla of the village. This was a community of mainly landless, daily-wage labourers.

Like many children in the night schools, Sanju was invariably huddled in a corner. She generally remained a mute spectator when any learning activity was taking place in the class. For several days I found her completely passive and inert. On rare occasions I found her hesitatingly join a play activity. I was very aware of her silent presence.

After a spell of about ten days, I decided to quietly reach out to her. I sat next to her during group work. She gradually overcame her discomfort and began to respond as I engaged her with a few symbols and sounds from the akshara chart and its corresponding poem poster.

After almost two weeks of quiet resistance, Sanju wrote /ma/ and /la/ in tiny letters in one corner of her slate, but quickly covered these with her hand. After another three days of similar behaviour, she gathered the courage to show me her written symbols. I pointed to the letters in quick succession… “/ma/ /la/”. As she repeated these sound symbols, Sanju heard herself pronouncing the word ‘maalaa’.

I then asked her to find the word from the poem poster. Next, she looked for other lines in which the word maalaa was written. At this point her excitement was palpable. She now willingly drew the picture of a tiny little maalaa (necklace) in one corner of her slate, and ventured to sound out some other words. To my utter surprise, despite her apparent passiveness in the class, she had learnt to recognize quite a few aksahras.

When this particular class was over I noticed a slight buoyancy in her body language. As she picked up her bag to go home I overheard her telling her sister “manne padbha aagiyo” (“I have learnt to read!”). When I entered the class on the following day, I found Sanju running her finger along the words in the poem poster.

Several years have passed since. However, her words still echo in my ears – “manne padbha aagiyo”. For me, this was her ‘quantum leap moment’. It transformed her engagement in the classroom. More importantly, it transformed her sense of self. She had begun to view herself as a learner.

The Importance of Self Development in Pedagogic Processes

Based on his work on critical reflection, Max Van Manen, has written prolifically on the pedagogic experience. In an article titled ‘Pedagogical Sensitivity and Teachers’ Practical Knowing-in-Action’ published in ‘Peking University Education Review’ in 2008, he says, and I quote, “It is not surprising perhaps that many stories that students tell have to do with approval, being noticed, feeling special. To receive recognition literally means to be known. Someone who recognizes me thereby acknowledges my existence, my very being. This is not the same as fleetingly noticing people who one passes in a busy street.”

While cautioning us on the possible negative impacts of recognition, he elaborates that, “Recognition is inextricably intertwined with selfhood and personal identity. And self-identity is the realization of the tension between the being of self and the becoming of self, between who we are and who and what we might become. And that is how recognition plays such powerful role in teaching and learning. Recognition, and the feeling it produces—a positive sense of self—are public phenomena. It is something that unfolds in the space of relationships.”

During our initial engagements with early literacy within schools in rural Rajasthan, we realized that we were working with children who were actively engaging with written words and written worlds for the first time only after they had entered classrooms. They were in fact emergent readers and writers who, unlike their more privileged peers, had not had exposure to reading and writing in their early years at home.

The school program was not addressing this disadvantage. To compound matters further, most of these young learners belonged to communities that existed on the lower rungs of the social ladder. By the time they entered grade one, many of them had learnt to navigate and submit to the contours of the social, religious, gender and linguistic frames that defined them. They had a fairly clear idea of their place in the social world.

The classroom was a reflection of their realities in the world outside and ‘who you are’ seemed to matter within this learning space too. Interestingly, this was not only in terms of how most teachers viewed the learners, but more importantly, in terms of the self-perceptions of learners themselves. It seemed as though their low self-esteem drove a lack of confidence. Perhaps as a consequence, many of them were afraid to risk participation in the class.

Working with local team members helped to deepen our understanding and engagement with the children, their communities and their lives outside school. We also began to explore ways in which children’s lives and knowledge could inform classroom practice. It also helped to build bridges with the government schools, and the administration, at the levels of the block and the district.

We were however, thrown into new challenges of addressing shifts from oracy to literacy within the adult members of our local team. They were conversant with the narrative and anecdotal forms that were derived from their oral traditions. The more expository written forms such as writing reports, proposals or reviews were hugely challenging for them. Assignments, which were required as a part of their professional development courses at times, became nightmares.

We were now grappling with the perplexing question of how to create engaged readers and writers within environments that did not nurture these modes of articulation and expression as a part of natural communication. This dilemma led OELP to initiate a parallel community reading program. This was part of the attempt to create a culture of reading and writing within the villages in which we were working.

Navigating Literacy as a Set of Social Processes

We juxtaposed our ground experiences with insights from available literature on early literacy. As far back as 1989, Professor Krishna Kumar had argued in his book ‘Social Character of Learning’ that “The experience of education under the prevailing curricular and instructional norms can serve to assist students who come from so called backward backgrounds to internalize symbols of backward behaviour.”

The scholarly works of Brian Street, Lisa Delpit , Purcell-gates, James Gee and several others from across different academic disciplines, alerted us to the shift in early literacy perspectives. Within this vast body of work, literacy is viewed as a set of social practices which are not neutral but are influenced by the context within which they unfold. This newer thinking which emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century compelled us to explore meaningful ways of addressing the context within which our own early literacy program was evolving.

At this stage in our journey, there was a churning within our program. We were struggling to address the specific needs of young emergent school goers from low-literacy, and often marginalized, communities. We were, at the same time, grappling with the demands of mainstream education and that of large-scale, centralized programs like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. We were being evaluated against standards that were beyond our reach. We felt stretched and challenged.

Our focus now shifted to the development of a nurturing, responsive and facilitating environment with a corresponding focus on the wholesome self-development of all learners and teachers in a classroom. We began to view self-development as the bedrock upon which learning unfolds. It was at this point of time, i.e., around the year 2014, that we revisited our instructional design. Our idea was to design a conceptually sound yet grounded foundational program, which addressed the multiple needs of emergent learners from low literate, rural communities. We were clear that our priority was to ‘make success achievable’ for the target group of learners we were engaging with.

By the year 2015, the key elements of our redefined and overarching theoretical framework emerged as follows. We now view literacy as a set of social practices which are influenced by the contexts within which they occur. There has been a shift from our earlier skill-based reading readiness approaches to process-based emergent literacy perspectives. This has taken place alongside a change from deficit perspectives which view learner inadequacies as inherent gaps within learners to discontinuity theoretical perspectives which address the social, cultural, linguistic differences of learners.

Translating Conceptual Clarity into Action

Our focus has become sharper and our objectives clearer. These have emerged as follows. We now want to equip children from diverse backgrounds for schooling by focusing on foundational learning and self-development. The goal is to address shifts from oracy to literacy for children from low-literate backgrounds through foundational literacy and numeracy.

Addressing shifts from home language to school language is a part of this process. Our objective is also to enable high quality learning by enhancing higher order thinking for each child. We are also pursuing the goal of addressing the challenge of making a conceptually sound framework simple, doable and accessible for teachers who are working with limited resources.

We have operationalized the above objectives through an instructional design which consists of three strands or pillars. These are: a) Foundations for learning; b) Foundations for literacy and numeracy; and, c) Foundations for higher order thinking. These three pillars or strands are implemented simultaneously over a two year period across grades 1 and 2. Some of the key components within each strand are detailed below.

Foundations for Learning: Creating a nurturing, non-threatening and active, printrich learning environment in the classroom is an integral part of this process. The focus is on the physical environment and on building relationships of mutual trust and cooperation within which each child experiences acceptance and a sense of belonging.

An important element of this environment is the use of the written forms of the children’s names. This is our starting point. It offers the multiple advantages of giving the learners a sense of belonging and acceptance. It engages them with print in meaningful ways and creates an inclusive classroom that honors each learner. Developing the skills for school-based learning, i.e., self-regulatory skills and a focus on building the skills of efficient executive functions, is also critical.

Foundations for Literacy and Numeracy: The Varna Samooha Approach for engaging learners with the written script is central to this. This approach was developed through our engagement inside classrooms and aims to make decoding and engagement with a written script a meaningful process. The main idea of the Varna Samooha Approach is that each child needs to experience aksharas as sound symbols, which she can combine to construct the written forms of her own meaningful spoken words.

Engaging with planned print-rich classrooms and daily read-alouds in a variety of meaningful ways are strategies that are at the heart of building foundations for literacy and numeracy. Classroom practices for strengthening basic numeracy concepts such as number sense, quantity, cardinal and ordinal numbers, and number facts involve games, activities and their application in daily life activities.

Foundations for Higher Order Thinking: This is attempted through a variety of planned opportunities that address the varied interests, needs and levels within the class. The issue of language disadvantage has been clearly identified as an area of concern within the Indian context. However, a parallel concern has not received as much attention. This involves the shift that a large number of young children are required to make from the oral cultures in their homes to the unfamiliar print culture of a classroom. Research indicates that this transition does not come naturally. It can be very challenging for children from low literacy backgrounds. This is because they often do not have any support for reading and writing in their homes and social environments.

Through our journey of a decade and a half, we have learnt that children get to the school their real world experiences and knowledge. They also bring along competencies in the usages of spoken language, i.e. of their home language or mother tongue. They also carry their imaginations, curiosities and natural inclinations to be purposefully engaged. These resources can equip young children to engage with their new classroom experiences in meaningful ways.

Classroom learning environments need to encompass these experiences and resources that children bring into the classroom. A young child’s home language, and the world that it encompasses, must find acceptance within the classroom. Otherwise, it is unlikely that she will participate meaningfully in classroom processes. Instead it is more likely that the child will internalize rejection and adopt the role of a benign spectator who does not want to risk failure.

Children, teachers and communities who have been a part of the OELP Foundation Program have responded positively to our interventions. The responses to the instructional design and classroom practices that have evolved organically within the program have been encouraging. These have propelled us to explore digital platforms and other options for making our ideas and resources available across wider geographies.