Children and Well-being in the Pandemic – A Conversation Between Two Teachers

The account below is an edited, excerpted conversation between Jane Sahi (JS), who founded Sita School in Silvepura, Bangalore, and Thejaswi Shivanand (TS), who taught for many years at Centre for Learning school in Varadenahalli in the same city.

TS: I miss being in the presence of children, Jane. It has been over a year and while I have had some online contact, it wasn’t the same. How have you felt about this period of enforced isolation?

JS: I really miss the direct contact with children. The uncertainty of the situation and not seeing them for a long time has been difficult.

TS: My sense of speaking with children and with teachers as well is that they miss each other.

JS: Yes, indeed. Younger children miss the additional adult contact in their lives, which is now mostly parents, since their movements are restricted. This has been especially heightened in the second wave of the pandemic. But even this experience could differ depending on where the child lives. For instance, in a neighbouring community of migrant workers, children have been restricted to their homes with their parents away the entire day at work. I’m sure this must have an emotional impact on them. In other communities as well, where children are in contact with parents throughout the day, they are restricted to their homes for fear of the virus. In both cases, limited movement has restricted children from meeting their friends or to freely move in the community.

TS: I have also wondered about the role of the community in the well-being of children. If you consider today’s children in urban spaces, the isolation is greater in some ways as fear within a city is already all pervasive, the fear of strangers, traffic, so much unknown. I also wonder if it is fair to compare their situation with children in rural communities, given children everywhere don’t have a choice in where they are born or live.

JS: That’s true, one can’t put it on the children! Since we work with children in rural communities, we have been thinking of them and their situation, and discussing possible ways of reaching them, now that there is real fear in communities everywhere. But it is important to recognize the role of communities in children’s learning and well-being.

TS: I know that you are in touch with your colleagues…

JS: Yes, I have been working closely with colleagues Sarojini, Gousia and Rebecca who are in direct contact with children. We are also working with the NCF (Nature Conservation Foundation) Nature Classrooms team to look at ways of creating learning opportunities for children who attend government schools in the neighbourhood of Silvepura.

TS: Can you share some of your learning experiments and the thinking behind them?

JS: Well, we first had to think of the safety of everyone; the children of course, and the teachers as well. We tried remote work, but it didn’t really work. Not many children have access to phones. Where there is a phone in the family, it is usually with the father and they are out at work. So that was difficult.

TS: Was this during this round of the lockdown?

JS: No. This was before this lockdown; essentially over the last few months. Early on, when the first wave ended, we had children meet each other. And the government teachers also conducted outdoor classes under the Vidyagama program; but that stopped soon as well. Textbooks arrived very late in one school in the neighbourhood and haven’t yet arrived in another. I must make one observation here. The pandemic interrupted this tyrannous cycle of assessment that has taken hold of our schools.

TS: Are you referring to the large-scale assessment frameworks used to measure learning outcomes that are currently popular in the country?

JS: Well, more an extension of the impact these frameworks have had on the focus of the learning process. Teachers are focussed on getting children ready to pass tests, but are the children learning? What are they learning? The lack of textbooks this year exposed a vacuum where the teachers in the neighbourhood schools did not have anything to offer the children in class. In addition to the limitations of working in a pandemic situation, this was an additional concern. Sarojini, Gousia and Rebecca worked outdoors. In such a situation, it wasn’t easy to find open, public spaces and we were very conscious of requesting access to private homes given the pandemic. We ended up meeting at the temple premises, the verandah of the panchayat library, the government school grounds, and under trees in the community.

TS: You mentioned earlier that communities are important in children’s learning? Did this play a role in planning your program?

JS: In fact, we worked closely with the NCF Nature Classrooms team to develop a learning program where children observe the natural world in their homes and communities. For example, one of the themes we took was patterns. The overall objective of looking at patterns was to help children begin looking more carefully at nature and observing both the diversity and the relationships between natural forms. The basic idea was to notice and record directly from nature, and to become familiar with some terms to describe patterns.

But thinking about exploring patterns in nature with young children proved quite challenging when we asked to look around them and note or draw anything around them. While such observation comes naturally to them when they are very young, we wondered if the dependence on classrooms and textbooks for scaffolding has limited their direct observation skills.

So, our work with children began with NCF’s activity worksheet on patterns. It has so much potential as a topic for children to notice, record and think about and all within children’s reach. Patterns can be about numbers, shapes and the sequences of those. It has been described as anything that is not random. Sarojini and Gousia supported children in working with these worksheets. One interesting observation that I can share is that children recognized a difference between making designs with natural objects and patterns in nature and we used these as part of our sessions. However, it was helpful for children to understand the nature of patterns by looking at fabrics and textiles.

TS: Can you share an instance of this collaborative work with NCF on nature patterns in more detail?

JS: Awareness about how things can be differentiated/described through shape, size and colour seemed a helpful place to start. Sarojini and Gousia began by asking children to collect leaves in the vicinity of the school. The children were then asked to sort them in different ways. Children responded initially by looking mainly at the colour and the size. They then began to observe some of the basic shapes of leaves, describing them as sharp and round butterfly shapes. One child, Arati, asked why the bauhinia leaf is heart shaped.

They also noticed some leaves that had been eaten by caterpillars or other pests and so had holes. Kiran, 9 years old, drew a damaged leaf showing how parts had been eaten. They also began to notice some details like how different leaves have different edges or margins and also a variety of tips, noticing that some were long, and pointed… Looking more closely at the veins with a magnifying glass they noticed that the veins were arranged differently – some alternately and others starting at the same place – a symmetrical way. Tagnya noticed that in the nelikayi (amla) leaves the veins started one below and one above… Although the children did not have the vocabulary to define these, they could recognize the different characteristics.

The children were reminded how to do leaf rubbings, and were asked to try out leaf rubbings at home before the next session. A number of the children experimented with leaf rubbings and also used their differences to make designs. We used the book Pishi and Me by Timira Gupta to guide the children in the process of looking closely.

TS: Oh yes, the book is wonderfully illustrated by Rajiv Eipe, with images of the child navigating the world on its own and the world is shown from a child’s height and perspective. How clever of you all to use this in this context!

JS: It reminded the children that they observe their world on their own in any case, in their daily lives at home and everywhere they go! They just need to actively do it for this learning activity as well.

TS: This is interesting Jane. I have spent many years thinking and working with children on being introduced to nature, but I guess at my school it was an intrinsic part of the daily routine. But you are right, you don’t really need a green campus to look at nature. Nature is everywhere and not all of it is affected by the coronavirus.

JS: Yes, so we can look around our homes, and even indoors. How many of us look at cockroaches, mice, spiders, frogs, geckos, snakes, crickets, moths, ants – all of whom share our homes with us? They are also a part of the natural world. There are also many patterns in the natural world.

TS: The natural world can draw you in even in these times, when it is so difficult everywhere. It can be a refuge, a shelter to stay away from difficult emotions. It can protect you from the reality of the world.

JS: But children live in the real world. Everything is part of it. The current pandemic has brought with it some restrictions. But the fundamental reality of the world hasn’t really changed, has it?

TS: You mean, pain, death, decay and reincarnation?

JS: Your comment reminds me that there is an interesting way in which folk tales and fairy stories often deal with death. There are instances where someone dies in the story and becomes part of the environment, is reborn as a tree for example, that makes death a part of the cycle of life. It is another way to imagine death and allow for a child to imagine it as well. The water lily dies and sinks, but then something happens to it underwater, at the bottom of the pond. What happens when a butterfly dies, a child might ask. Nature has much to offer here as well, in teaching us about death.

TS: I agree, children are not in such close contact with nature these days. They are not so aware of the cycle of life, death, decay and regeneration. This view of death as cyclical is one way of looking at it in the larger context. In some real ways, relationships in children’s lives can be irretrievably changed after a death. That may need more ways of looking at death as well? Don’t you feel there are other stories or books that can be used in this context?

JS: Yes, death has been sensitively portrayed in several books that can be used with children.

TS: Stories such as the folk tales or fairy stories you mentioned earlier, where a character becomes a part of the living environment after death, sound like it naturally blends into belief systems in a rural community. Does this clash with the rational frameworks that we use to investigate the world and in school curricula and classes?

JS: In a child’s world, they don’t clash. They are all parallel realities they learn to navigate in their lives. Children are very resilient, live in communities, and encounter death. They will at some point understand the finality in death in the biological sense. But they can process it and understand it emotionally in many ways. Here the community plays a central role. Children also very much live in the present. Where do we recognize this in supporting them process death? The situation today is complex and ambivalent. The present moment offers no quick fixes. We can’t do anything but live fully in the present. This reminds me of the doctor in the Warsaw Ghetto, Janusz Korczak.

TS: I know who you mean. Didn’t he run a school for them in the ghetto?

JS: Yes, and you know, the remarkable story is that he and the children put up a performance of Tagore’s The Post Office in the ghetto. Tagore’s story is about a young boy living with an incurable disease who imagines that he would receive a letter from the King and lives in this world of fantasy in his last days. Janusz’s thinking was to help the children understand the reality of imminent death faced by all of them in the ghetto. Death camps, racial identity, Jews vs Germans, the holocaust, these were very distant to the children. The reality was, their parents, relatives, others in the ghetto were disappearing. Where did they go? What happened to them? What is death? Janusz didn’t want to fool them into a false reality. He wanted them to accept it as a fact of life and the way it was around them. Children live in the present moment. We have to be with them in the present during our interaction as well. How do we do it?

TS: That example leaves me with many thoughts and questions, Jane. There are so many dimensions to well-being, children and learning. Maybe we can pick it up again another time? Thank you for this conversation. I enjoyed thinking together with you today, as always. Any last thoughts?

JS: Nothing more than the last question! How do we bring a sense of curiosity and exploration in any learning interaction we have with children even in difficult circumstances? How does this link to wellbeing? That is the question that remains with me now. Thank you, I enjoyed our freewheeling, but still focused, discussion very much as well.