Education

In this article, the author reflects on efforts to strengthen early childhood education in Anganwadis. For this, she draws upon her organization’s three-year Shakti program in Pune. This initiative focused on trust-building, sustained mentoring, parental engagement, and contextualized support. The piece highlights the value of relationships, flexibility, and holistic learning in creating lasting change.

This article argues that India’s educational challenge is not inadequate teacher training but the absence of sustained instructional support. It highlights how weak school structures, missing instructional leadership, and limited on-the-ground coaching prevent teachers from translating training into improved classroom practice.

This article by Nidesh Soni argues that mathematics education should move beyond one-way teaching toward facilitative, dialogic learning. Drawing on real-life examples, it shows how mathematics can become meaningful, critical, and socially relevant for children, fostering deeper understanding, inquiry, and problem-solving abilities. 

This article describes Jeevan Shiksha Pahal, an alternative school run by Muskaan for children from marginalized communities in Bhopal. It highlights how flexible learning, multilingual classrooms, community participation, respectful teacher–child relationships, and connections between education and children’s lived experiences can help create an inclusive and meaningful learning environment.

The ‘Ground Zero’ piece captures experiences of organizations across the country, that are working in visual arts education, with objectives as diverse as developing 21st-century learning and life skills in children, creating safe spaces for them, and fostering their holistic growth and development.

The ‘Ground Zero’ piece tries to learn from organizations across the country that are innovating in the field of social sciences curriculum and pedagogy, and in the process, are building linkages between these subjects, the larger community, and their own organization practices.