Strengthening Foundational Literacy

Foundational literacy involves activities that build rich language skills. These include vocabulary, self-expression, and understanding with comprehension for children in the three-to-eight-years age group. It involves literacy practices and activities that could involve playing, singing, reading, speaking and writing. These five years include pre-schooling and elementary schooling. This period of time is known to be critical for children’s educational outcomes in later years.

National Education Policy 2020 has brought back the focus on the need for improving foundational literacy and numeracy abilities of children in our schools. Government of India has set an ambitious goal to achieve universal foundational literacy and numeracy in primary schools by 2025.

In this piece, we speak with organizations working towards improving foundational literacy of children belonging to marginalized communities. These organizations have adopted contextualized appropriate pedagogies that incorporate the children’s diverse experiences. As a part of this process, they develop innovative teaching learning materials. They also capacitate community members and schoolteachers to engage with children’s language and orality, both inside and outside the classroom.

Samerth Charitable Trust

Over two decades, Samerth has been working to empower vulnerable, marginalized communities and provide them with social and economic dignity. It is present in parts of Gujarat and Chhattisgarh. In 2001, Samerth started early education centers for children between the ages of three to five. The team capacitated community members to start facilitating sessions at these centers and activities were conducted using creative pedagogies. Once anganwadis became functional in the region, Samerth stepped away from running this program.

Their approach to foundational literacy entails a contextualized, activity-based and child-centric pedagogy to enhance the quality of education in the region. To bring about systemic and sustainable change, they capacitate government schoolteachers to adapt this methodology as well.

Rajul from Samerth shares, “These children’s parents are migrant laborers who are natives of states such as Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, etc., and speak different languages and dialects. Since the medium of instruction in primary schools is Gujarati, the children struggle in their lessons. It’ll be unfair to expect the child to start reading, writing and speaking a different language. We train educators who hail from the communities we work with. These educators usually have completed school till the tenth and twelfth grades. We encourage our educators to contextualize teaching/ learning materials (TLMs) to suit the diverse backgrounds of the students.”

Samerth runs 28 learning centers and works in 28 government schools in Ahmedabad. The idea is to make education more interesting and relatable for children, so their foundational concepts are strengthened. The current teaching method in schools is still through rote learning, chalk and board, with a focus on disciplining the child rather than igniting her creativity.

The team has observed that for vulnerable children, this leads to high dropout rates, poor performance in academics and a lifelong dissent towards anything to do with ‘education’. Samerth’s pedagogy, on the other hand, is aimed at establishing a relationship with the child, and to facilitate learning in ways that are meaningful and relevant.

Rajul recounted that some members belonging to the Mir Fakir community sustain themselves by begging. Their children are enrolled at centers or government schools. During the annual Urs, members from this community attend the festivities and must beg to sustain themselves. Since it is an event of great importance, the educators were encouraged to use things that the children could relate to from the festival. For instance, as the festival revolves around a Sufi saint, lessons on literacy could bring references to it in words, stories, etc., apart from the words used in common parlance in their homes. This helps the child to open up and connect better to the activities at the center.

Samerth’s pedagogy focuses on engaging all the senses of children and catching their attention and interest. This leads to better retention. Children love rhythm and melody. Most children have heard songs since early childhood. These are the songs that are sung to put them to sleep, those that have the rhythm of their swings, and songs that the adults sing during specific occasions etc. A poem with rhythmic sounds, recited with animated expressions and gestures, holds the children’s attention for longer periods.

Such narrations interest children. Over a period, they start repeating the words and gestures and gain an understanding of their meaning. It is after this that the team introduces the written form of the same lines. Thus, an association of words to the alphabet is then created.

The educators work with government schoolteachers and Cluster Resource Centers (CRC) to help them understand creative pedagogy. Rajul shares, “In government schools, in the first year, our educators take the classes, and the schoolteachers are the secondary supporters. It is ensured that the government schoolteacher does not consider this as a break and continues to learn from the educators. The classroom must become a support room for the teacher, where we impress upon them that creative pedagogy can be beneficial for their students.”

In the last few years, the team has also started working with Cluster Resource Centers. The CRCs conduct training for in-service government schoolteachers. This intervention with the CRCs provides them with academic support and aids in community mobilization activities. Resource persons from CRCs visit to understand the creative pedagogy adopted by Samerth.

The team has observed that through their interventions at the centers and schools, the retention of children and attendance in schools has improved. They hope to showcase their learning centers and schools as models where schoolteachers have understood and adapted the pedagogy.

Central Square Foundation

Central Square Foundation (CSF) is a nonprofit organization that works with the vision of ensuring quality school education for all children in India. They are driven by the mission to create effective, scalable and sustainable changes in the school education system to ensure that all children get equal access to learning opportunities. CSF prioritizes four critical areas of work. These include foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN), education technology, early childhood education, and affordable private schools.

Anustup Nayak and Debatri Sengupta from the CSF team share, “Children’s first interaction with any language is typically through sounds. Having oral abilities in a language does not necessarily warrant the more complex skills of reading, comprehending and writing – all of which could be considered literacy. Most children naturally pick up speaking and understanding the language(s) they are exposed to. They need explicit intervention to learn to read and write.”

The CSF team attempts to approach problems related to foundational literacy both from the outside in and the inside out. They support the state to envision, build, develop and sustain robust foundational learning programs. At the same time, they also design classroom-level micro-practices and habits that are necessary to build foundational skills. CSF’s interventions in foundational literacy are governed by espousing the Balanced Literacy Approach. This is implemented through a structured pedagogy and teacher support system.

The Balanced Literacy Approach promotes meaningful and relevant learning by focusing on both ‘skill building’ – like phonological awareness (bottom-up) and ‘meaning making’ – like reading comprehension (topdown) work at the same time. National Education Policy 2020 and the recently released National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Learning advocate this approach.

This approach emphasizes the simultaneous focus on critical literacy skills such as manipulating the smallest units of sounds in words (phonemic awareness); mapping a sequence of letters to a sequence of sounds in a word (phonics); reading accurately at an appropriate rate (fluency), breadth and depth of word understanding (vocabulary); and extracting meaning from text (comprehension).

Structured pedagogy support for teachers involves a scientific, evidence-based, learner-centered approach to teaching that equips every teacher with a ‘tightly knit teaching ecosystem. It has clearly defined scope and sequence of learning objectives and proven instructional methods embedded in step-by-step teaching plans. It uses student worksheets, print-rich materials supplemented by skill-focused training and classroom coaching. Such a systematic approach has been proven to work for empowering teachers in countries like India, where teaching skill is variant, quality training opportunities are relatively scarce, and instructional time is less than required.

CSF’s FLN work in the states focuses on strengthening and sharpening professional development programs for teachers as well. Teachers are supported through state-wide FLN-specific training and byte-sized videos. These support a teacher’s understanding of program elements and practices. Feedback is also shared by mentors through classroom observations.

The CSF team shared that the challenges of building effective foundational literacy are vast. It is impossible for any single entity to address all these challenges by itself. The team works towards building effective foundational skills in close collaboration with state governments, along with a coalition of their partners. The latter includes organizations such as Room to Read, Language and Learning Foundation, Vikramshila, Samagra, The Education Alliance and Madhi Foundation.

The responsibilities of the coalition are to design a strong, contextual, evidence-based foundational learning program for the states, support state-level cadres to implement the program, and build capacity in the states in monitoring and evaluation. The coalition envisions that the expertise in the domain is leveraged to build, design and create proof points of a strong program. The state then becomes capable to independently run the program’s subsequent iterations.

Anustup and Debatri added, “CSF has concentrated its efforts on home-learning solutions that combine pedagogically sound, quality content with effective digital delivery tools. Some of our partners include Rocket Learning, ConveGenius, TopParent, Google Read Along, Chimple, and Saarthi.”

Google’s Read Along app uses AI and Google’s proprietary speech recognition technology to improve oral reading fluency (ORF) and audio/sound to reinforce sounds, words, and sentences, all through a range of engaging, illustrated e-books rooted in the Indian context.

Rocket Learning, a Delhi-based organization, delivers fun, low-cost activities and bitesized multimedia content to parents’ smartphones/smart-feature phones. The goal is to nudge parents to meaningfully engage with their children to build key foundational literacy skills. This is helpful in Indian contexts, where many parents from lowincome households may not feel equipped to engage in their child’s learning.

The CSF team understands that improving foundational literacy and numeracy is an ambitious goal that involves multi-pronged efforts. These include streamlining our understanding of foundational literacy, capacitating our teachers, leveraging expertise of partners, and embracing ed-tech solutions.

The Community Library Project (TCLP)

In 2014-15, TCLP set up its first library in partnership with other non-profits. Currently it runs three libraries in Delhi and Gurugram. In libraries run by TCLP, everyone is welcome, irrespective of their caste, religion, class, gender and language. Anyone – child or adult – can become a member and there is no membership fee. TCLP facilitates programs that focus on encouraging first-generation readers as they embark on their reading journeys.

Prachi and Rajni from TCLP share, “We believe that by becoming independent readers, children will also be able to become independent thinkers and writers. Children should not merely learn to decode the text. We see reading and comprehending as an intrinsic part of literacy.”

A large proportion of the members coming to TCLP libraries are first generation readers. It is usually their first experience of going to a library, certainly so for those children who are four to six years old. At this age, some of them are usually not enrolled in schools either. This means that for many of them, their exposure to print, and experience with any kind of text, is negligible, contrary to what is considered as an important part of a child’s literacy learning.

The team runs a multitude of reading programs in the library, including the ‘Headstart to Reading Program.’ This program envisions giving children an early orientation to libraries. It helps children from ages four to six years to feel comfortable with books. As a part of this program, sessions are organized once a week. These are led by a trained team of librarians and volunteers.

Each session focuses on developing print awareness among children before they start reading and writing. The goal is to build their cognitive capacities and engage them in creative playtime. These sessions develop better communication skills among children.

They help improve their awareness of issues related to health and nutrition as well. Headstart sessions have varied components. Each session starts with a read-aloud. This allows children to listen to the text voiced. This interactive dimension of the strategy bridges the gap between rich oral storytelling traditions and books. Read-alouds are a significant part of TCLP’s reading curriculum and happen every day, multiple times in a day. Children are often read aloud by older siblings or members in the library. This enables the younger ones to be motivated to develop their reading habits.

Prachi and Rajni from TCLP shared that in each read-aloud, children are engaged where they are prompted to answer questions. This evokes their interest in the story and encourages reading with thinking. These questions could relate to their understanding of the characters, how they think the story would unfold, and their reflections, etc. Children are also invited to share their thoughts and ask questions of their own.

In the Headstart Program, after each readaloud, children are divided into three stations where they spend twenty minutes on each station. They engage in activities that focus on enhancing their imagination. These include solving puzzles and patterns, and creating art.

For instance, if the theme of the Headstart session is animals, children are asked to imagine inviting a dinosaur for dinner and picking him up from the railway station. Then they are prompted to think about who will become a dinosaur, who will ride the train, etc. Other activities could involve using letter puzzles to write names of animals such as ‘fox,’ ‘cat,’ ‘dog,’ etc. and make an animal from Lego pieces.

In the book circulation program, a collection of books curated for children who are four to six years old is kept at each library within easy reach of the children. Children are free to select books to issue, from this collection or any other book in the library. They are allowed to issue two books at a time, six times a week.

The team also runs a Book Report Program. As a part of this, children who have completed 80 books in the circulation program are encouraged to share reports. In these they summarize the stories and their reflections. Very young members, who are unable to write yet, use the pictorial format to draw their thoughts about the books. They often do this with the help of an older sibling or a librarian. They also give oral book reports to the librarian, who writes them down.

After each report, children sit with a librarian and discuss the report. The librarians ask questions and prod them to think about the book. For instance, discussions could revolve around their favorite illustration. Or if the book is on a particular theme, such as rain, questions on what the children feel about rain, have they previously read any book on the theme, etc. are thrown up and discussed.

The team has observed that children participating in the Headstart Program Samerth Charitable Trust develop a sustained and deep relationship with books and reading. Often these children go on to assume leadership roles in the library.

They are often seen reading aloud to other members, and reading aloud to parents, siblings and neighbors. They also bring in friends and siblings to the library, articulating everyone’s right to read.

In Conclusion

Focus on foundational literacy is crucial to avoid prolonging learning problems in higher grades. Through ongoing mechanisms and reflective platforms, educators must be supported with teaching learning materials, appropriate support in pedagogy and in building sensitivity towards young learners. The path to improving foundational literacy is fraught with challenges. It is rife with opportunities as well.