The many meanings of failure and success- Hoshangabad Science Teaching Program in memory

At a gathering recently, I ran into a collegemate, someone I had not met for over 45 years. He asked, “You were doing some social service in villages. Did you succeed?” And I went in my mind back to the heady days of working in the schools of Hoshangabad, Shahpur (Betul), and many other places. Leaving aside the irrelevant question of whether it was social service or not (as I never looked at what we were doing as that) I wondered as to how I should answer. Shall I talk about what can be seen today, because the question is asked now? But then I was a part of the effort a long time back, and this effort was at one time known all over the educational circles in the country.

The beginnings of a dream

Hoshangabad Science Teaching Program (HSTP), and the two other programs, of Social Science Teaching and Primary School Program, which rode piggyback on it, were talked about with respect and awe. People flocked to take part in the various activities voluntarily. This included helping with the work, seeing the work in the classrooms, and research and documentation.

People also talked about the program in state and national level conferences. Schoolteachers from the area of work spoke at these and oriented persons considered higher in the hierarchy, including administrative officers of other regions. HSTP has been taught in educational courses of many universities. The organization’s work, including all its programs, also started being written about in journals slowly, even internationally.

Many teachers across the areas we worked in called us to their homes for teas and meals. More importantly, the schools’ and the classrooms’ doors were generally always open to us, as were the offices of the education administration. Looking back, I am surprized at the audacity with which I interacted with the administrative officers and the schools’ headmasters. There was a sense of implicit trust and confidence in our intent, if not in our capability to help. I will not bore you with the details and more flashes from my memory. The question is whether this is success or not. What questions do I ask myself to judge success?

To understand this issue, we must consider what we and I were trying to do in that period. Beginning with the attempt to transform classrooms of science in the upper primary section, we embarked on the effort to transform as much of the schools’ classrooms as we could. These included all the schools that were governed in some way by the state education department. Since there were common board examinations, the private schools had to also make some of the adjustments that were directed by the government bodies. The journey to plunge into this work was a leap of faith.

I enjoyed doing things that were different, be it cleaning test tubes, or putting together materials to do experiments with, living in new kinds of situations, engaging in conversations that were heady even if presumptuous. The tasks were simple and there was space in that experience for all of us who so wanted to express ourselves and chart out paths. There was a sense of excitement about doing something that was purposeful and was to be transformative, and the fact that I was not alone in this journey.

There were people with me, and we were together in it. The experience was exciting enough for us to decide to attempt to do this well, to institutionalize it, spread it over a wide geography and extend it to the entire school system. And as we considered the goal ahead and planned, we thought that this would require not just work inside the classrooms and the schools, but outside of these too. So, as the conversations around what we were thinking of doing progressed, the scope of the work became wider and more complex.

The leap that we, and I, took was not based on any sensible evaluation of the challenges. There was also on my part a lack of complete understanding of what the task involved. The attempt’s complexity and enormity slowly unfolded. It is still perhaps unfolding in my mind. I don’t know how deeply the others who joined the initial efforts had thought about what we were setting out to do and the life we were choosing.

We had many struggles and arguments as we struggled and jostled for our spaces and our ideas. Each of us perhaps needed the vantage space to express their personhood. Yet, despite the frequent tussles and arguments, we were all comforted by the thought of being a group. Lest I convey a wrong impression, it is not that we had walked into something blindly. The decision to make this ambitious effort emerged from years of hard work. However, the dream was impetuous, and as many would have said, naive.

Interfering, intervening, and working with schools

It is important to spend a few lines on the details of what we were trying to do. What we were planning to do was to work inside the governmental school system, and all the branches of it that influenced the school and classroom functioning, and ensure that they changed. Starting with the teaching of the sciences in upper primary classes, we moved to also intervening in the social science classes of the upper primary and primary classes comprehensively.

So, what did this work involve? I use the example of HSTP here to explain this. The first thing was to understand the situation of what was going on in the schools, and based on that think about what alternative approaches should be tried out. Once the broad idea emerged from thinking, observing, interacting with the children and the teachers, and reading (including what was being tried out across the world), then try that in the classrooms, with the teachers and the children in small group settings.

Based on the experience, we developed tentative materials that formed the basic text materials for the schools. These materials were then tried out in schools and modified as per the feedback from multiple sources. This process simultaneously prompted the creation of a concept note on the materials being developed. This included the approach to the children’s stage of development, the nature of the subjects taken up, the methodologies and principles through which the desired ideas could be developed in children, and the notions relating to the children’s experiences and interests, etc. This list is not comprehensive. But it conveys what any standard curriculum, syllabus and textbook policy document proposes to do. But at that time, this was far from being the tradition.

After this was done, came the second requirement. That was to train or rather orient all the teachers in the new materials that had been developed. And that was another nontraditional thing. The orientation for us was a ‘chewed upon’ word. It implied participation, conversation and dialogue. It was not to be a training which we would classify as a mere preparation to follow a routine or a procedure. So, our attempt was to develop the ability to construct one’s own style of classrooms. So, the interactions were not about telling but developing a shared understanding. The sessions were long, of three weeks to begin with. They were structured around the materials to be taught and based on interactions involving discussions. The teachers did tasks just like the students would. They debated observations or the data they got, just like their learners were expected to. But obviously all of this happened at a different level. The teachers were to be supported in their work after the orientation by a ‘more knowledgeable’ person through regular, periodic visits. Additionally, as a part of support and continued orientation, monthly meetings of all the teachers in that area of study were to be organized. This was done in a decentralized manner, covering 25-35 schools.

Then there was the fact that the timetable was to be differently organized. Teaching learning processes suggested in the program required longer duration than the one period normally available for a subject. There also had to be a system for supplying and replenishing the kit materials for all the programs in the schools. The examinations were also different. The upper primary science program had an open book examination and a traditional exam for assessment of experimental abilities. The common public board examination had this open book examination for many years. And then in the assessment process, while evaluating and before awarding marks, an exercise in redistribution of the assigned marks to different questions was done to make the evaluation more effective.

All of these required major changes in the procedures of administrative functioning, allocation of funds, creation of new structures and positions, among many other things. To make all this possible to an acceptable level from the perspective of the ideas formulated required negotiation, persuasion and persistence in interactions with the administration.

The principle of respect and support for the teachers meant a struggle to build that within the government system. By then it had started looking at teachers as mere low-grade employees. There was reluctance to make arrangements for them, even if they were called for long orientations. There were no residential spaces of even minimal living quality available. There were also no provisions for immediate reimbursement of (leave alone advance for) the travel and daily expenses. The teachers had no agency to deal with the education bureaucracy. There were also no dialogues about the way the school system was functioning across hierarchies to identify and address genuine ground-level problems. All these were set up. A manual of all these principles, functioning norms and rules was brought out and circulated to the district offices.

And then we cut to today and ask, of all these, what remains with and in those schools. The reality of the life outside and inside the schools has changed considerably. For example, government schools’ classrooms are no longer over-filled. Children generally don’t travel over long distances to attend schools anymore. A large number of teachers no longer live in the community. Their children generally no longer study in the schools they teach in. The relationship of the community with education and schools has also changed.

The administration has changed, and some more systems have been set up. The points of emphasis have changed. There is a regular slew of trainings, as they have become the norm. Schools have been provided with materials off and on, and get sanctions for small purchases and expenses. The classrooms now, however, essentially make efforts to help children memorize and pass. They use a variety of legal shortcuts including procedures learnt through rote. Experiments are absent from the science classrooms. There is no open-book exam or question papers with redistributed evaluation.

Organizations like ours are not welcome generally. CSOs need orders from the higher authorities to enter schools. Even then, the headmasters may be reluctant. The teachers we worked with have retired and gone. The monthly discussions on academic issues and experiences in the classrooms have been replaced by something else. The books and materials that we created are no longer used. The training processes have also undergone a lot of change.

HSTP has become smaller and smaller as a concern in education departments. It has vanished from most discussions. It may remain as a footnote in some, rather than addressed in a full paper. There is not much talk on these in conferences either. Fewer and fewer people in this area of work remember that effort in Madhya Pradesh’s schools.

The many meanings of success and failure: a very personal take

So, how does one assess a long-term intervention like the HSTP? I believe assessment was a part of the process that we followed. However, we did not know that while planning and developing the work, we were doing it. We wanted to do the best. We wanted the next training to be good. Therefore, we were recording it, we were discussing it.

And these days, it is not ‘we’ who decide. Someone else decides that for us. Targets and their achievements have become very critical in assessing efforts, intents and purposes. There is pressure to define precise outcomes, measure them early, repeatedly and quantitatively, and judge the whole process on the basis of the numbers. There may be a need to revisit these trends. These may have started for valid reasons.

But here I am writing about success and failure and how I look at them in the context of my own life and work. Success and failure are normal words to look at performance in the context of individuals and even groups. We win if we succeed in climbing a peak or winning a match or passing exams. It is often expected that the effort toward rebuilding or reconstructing social reality can be and should be assessed in the same way.

People like me ask themselves, as do others, whether we succeeded or not. But it is difficult to assess such experiences and classify them through the neat categories of success and failure. It is a whole journey of carving out an experience, and being a part of the processes that unfold subsequently.

I can only end by sharing the experiences that stand out in my memory. Of the memories that flood my mind, I can share but a few. These are just illustrations. However, they do bring out the spaces for learning, growing and expressing I got as a brash young man, and the ways in which these shaped me and gave my life meaning and purpose.

The first memory is relatively simple to talk about. It is about the daily ‘feedback’ discussions on what happened in the orientation sessions with teachers on a particular day. The discussions involved not just how the sessions went and the pedagogy followed, tracing the responses and the overall atmosphere, but also intense discussions on areas from what would normally come under elementary science.

People who I held in high esteem as knowledgeable scientists were struggling to make a coherent sense of the outlier observations from the sessions. There were simultaneously heated arguments happening on conceptual ideas of elementary science. I was struggling to comprehend both the concepts and the intense debates. This made me look at knowledge, knowing and learning afresh. I learnt not just physics, but other sciences and many other ideas there as well. I also realized deeply that we never can learn enough and claim, “I know it.”

The second is about relationships with people. Here, I recount an interaction with teachers during one of the monthly meetings at a Sangam Kendra. I had been going to this monthly meeting for over a year. These workshop sessions focused on concepts of science and pedagogy, of what to do to give children appropriate opportunities to learn.

In every meeting, there would be a struggle. I thought that the teachers always tried to distract the meeting by raising issues that were not related to the science and pedagogy we should be discussing. They would complain about everything. This included the fact that they had to come for the meeting, and their travel bills were not cleared, etc.

It happened in every meeting. At first, there would be this venting. Only then we would do some science. However, that day, for some reasons, it went on for longer. Or, maybe, my patience ebbed earlier. We broke up for lunch. And I left them with the question that if they did not feel it was useful, I would stop coming from the next meeting.

After the break, we gathered again. One after the other, they started speaking that the meetings should not stop. The thrust of what they said was this – “It is a forum for us to vent our frustration and anger. You should not take it personally. We say all this because we can. And because you listen. If you want, we will stop complaining.”

And that is when the whole conception of what I was doing changed for me. I saw that I had notions about them and me. That I had the burden of doing something to change them. Yet, I was not them and didn’t understand their lives. It was a great learning. However, it was extremely troubling too. Once I became aware of this, the understanding started permeating many other occasions.

One is this conversation with teachers on my insistence about why they couldn’t find time to read when they went back, or didn’t try out the experiment that we had all got very excited about. One of the women teachers politely said, “I go back and have to start looking at the housework.” She then described what she had to do before going off to sleep. In the morning, she would finish all the housework before coming to school. I felt ashamed. Here I was thinking of myself as a kindred soul concerned about the learning of children in their schools while they were not even concerned about their own learning.

And then there was the time when I was particularly pushy. I was animated and was urging a group of teachers to do something. The response from one of the teachers was like a blow to the head. She said, “This is your job. You get paid for it. But for us, it is an addition to our job. Would you do my job, while I go around doing what you do?”

Another lesson came from an interaction with a district-level senior officer, an ADIS. These officials, at that time, were incarnations of fear for the teachers. The ADIS and I, with other teachers, were discussing about assessments of answer scripts that we were doing as a team. I was pointing out some things he was not doing right. He was much more senior to me. With all the power that he wielded, he was still listening to my harangue. And then he politely asked very softly, “Are you scolding me or explaining to me.” And I was stopped in my tracks. The man with the booming voice had given me a lesson that I am still learning. However, he made me aware of this anxiety in my conversational style.

Let me share another incident relating to the orientation of teachers and the feedback sessions that followed. The orientation was intense, with many parallel sections, with different resource teams conducting the sessions.

The guiding principles were that the teachers, working and participating in groups, would all engage in experiments, formulate inferences, extract learnings, propose reasons, ask questions, and express their ideas consolidated from these processes. The sessions were open, free flowing and could diverge from the plan. The team members often ended up disagreeing with what had happened during the sessions. This could mean being hauled over the coals during feedback.

The feedback sessions were incisive and critical. The teams reported their observations, which were sometime very critical of the session’s resource team lead. Each session was reviewed, as other teams shared their observations on the same chapter. Often the arguments and comments were sharp and biting.

It initially surprized me that perceptions differed so much. Some sessions went on smoothly with nothing much happening. There would be no excitement, no new experiments and no debates. In these sessions, the concluding presentations would also be clear. These would be much appreciated by some. However, I would be dissatisfied with these sessions. To me, sessions with intense discussions, new experiments and questions, where I was also intensely involved, were good sessions. The team, however, didn’t find all of them great.

Slowly I realized that these intense arguments and new experiments were often thrown in to disprove obviously false statements, experiments, or discussions, and sorted out tangential questions of specific individuals. These alienated most participating teachers. This was because, then the session just become about those few (sometime just him) and me. The rest of them sat disinterested. Sometimes, they even walked out. The understanding of what participation may mean, and some useful signals for it, emerged from these and other such experiences.

At the end, I must share the memories of my meetings with teachers more than 10 years after the program had been stopped. I was meeting some of them after about two decades. The sharing of details in small conversations, of small moments and the big ideas that we all owned made me feel as if I was back in those times. Their nostalgic wistfulness was not just about missing being young. It also came from a sense of having lost something that was precious to them as teachers and for the school system.

Did we succeed, as the experiences still live on in the minds of some people? And because these perhaps act on all of us in some ways? Or did we fail as the textbooks we created are no longer being used?

Some of the people I discuss, I talked to around 15 years back. A few of them have already passed on. In time, so will the others, including I. What does sustained change mean? What time periods are we thinking of? How do we judge changes and benefits?

Many of the children who went through HSTP have very significantly positive memories about it. However, many do not remember the experience at all. HSTP’s students’ life trajectories have been varied, as these are for other children too. I remember an old student who travelled a great distance, just to see us once. He said, he tries to get children to do experiments and make things from waste, as a way of passing on what he got from the program. Another alumnus said that they use the HSTP way of thinking in everyday work.

These are just a few stories and anecdotes. However, they still make me fool good and thankful for the opportunities we got to express ourselves and to do what we thought was good for everyone.

To conclude… So how do I describe my work in that period, as a success or a failure? We wanted to change the education system in a specific way. We put in efforts that were the best to our minds. However, it can be argued that there is no clear, specific movement in the direction we wanted to move things toward.

The science classrooms are now perhaps almost back to where they were before all this. The systems of communication across hierarchies have gone. The long preparation for any kind of orientation (or training as it may be called) does not happen anymore. Teachers are no more exploring and adding to the textbooks and other materials.

However, the idea of periodic capacity building is now embedded in the system. There is talk of creating materials for learning, and having functional libraries and laboratories in schools. The appropriate catchphrases are carried in many materials and used in conversations. But how much of these do we see on the ground today?

Much has changed. But most of it, even that which sounds positive in rhetoric, is detrimental when seen on the ground. There are many worthy papers written on education. These include the presumed or felt influence of this entire effort on the educational processes and indeed on the discourse of education in the country. But can that be ascribed to our work and efforts? Can we say that there was a success? Even though nothing of that spirit and those principles can be seen today after two decades of the closure of the program by the government?

It is difficult to say whether such an (or even a similar) opportunity would present itself to any other group. Indeed, it seems impossible. And it is even more difficult to imagine, if that were to happen, what would be the outcome. And the thought in my mind is whether the memories in our minds, and in the minds of the people who interacted with the ideas and the spirit of the program, are outcomes that we should be happy about. Is it not enough that we tried to do something and made changes in ourselves and what we were doing? We learnt and grew and re-discovered many things. Does that count as success?

Many of us who go into tasks like this, go in with passion and commitment. We may sometime ask tough questions and try to find points of inflection where things started going wrong. In the current scenario, it is the people who support these efforts who drive these questions in the seemingly ‘legitimate’ quest to find the best models. It is difficult for me to relate to that. Is there a ‘best model’? Or are there some good principles that are generic? And the rest perhaps is the attentiveness to relate to the situation with awareness of the principles you started with and not fall into the trap of changing them without realizing it.

Living and doing what you think worthwhile, with strong self-reflection and an urge to do better, is that not the only criterion that should be used for success? I will leave it there, with the note that I/we lived in those moments fully, and so did the people who I was interacting with.