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| National
Conference on Enhancing Learning in Elementary Schools |
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| Speeches |
Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s inaugural address at
National Conference on Enhancing
Learning in Elementary Schools, July
23, 2004, National Institute of Advanced Studies,
Bangalore
Good Morning Friends. I am very happy and delighted
to see you all here. I understand a number of educationists
have assembled here and every state has three representatives
besides representatives from the Centre. I am very happy
to meet all of you.
Honorable Mr. T.N Chaturvedi, Governor of Karnataka,
Honorable C Dharam Singh, CM of Karnataka, Mr. Azim
Premji, Chairman, Azim Premji Foundation, Ms. Kumud
Bansal, Secretary Government of India, and Mr. Dileep
Ranjekar, CEO, Azim Premji Foundation and all of you
who assembled here to interact and have a beautiful
day. I wish you all the best. More |
| Address
of Mr. Azim Premji at the Inauguration of the
“National Conference on
Enhancing Learning in Elementary School”
Organised by Ministry of Human
Resources Development and Azim Premji Foundation
Bangalore, July 23-25, 2004
His Excellency, the President of India Dr. Kalam, His
Excellency, the Governor of Karnataka Mr. Chaturvedi,
Honourable Chief Minister of Karnataka Mr. Dharam Singh,
the Secretary of Elementary Education & Literacy
to the Government of India Ms. Kumud Bansal, ladies
and gentlemen.
I am neither an academician nor a classroom practitioner.
Therefore, the views I am going to express here are
in my capacity as a businessman, and a concerned citizen
of our country. More |
Valedictory
address by Ms. Kumud Bansal
In the last two and half days of this workshop titled
very aptly as the “Learning Conference 04”,
I am sure all of us have learned something about the
immense challenges in achieving Universal Elementary
Education. Also, the insights by experts, identification
of critical areas by the participants and sharing of
the wonderful experience by the NGOs and the representatives
from the state governments will strengthen all of us
and will help us in perceiving the issue of children’s
education in a holistic and comprehensive manner.
It is said that adults have limited retention capabilities
and I think we will all do well if we at least take
back with us two crucial observations made by none other
than our respected President that we should ensure the
child retain her smile in the schools and that our education
system should enhance the inherent creativity in the
young children. More |
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| Papers presented |
Plenary
Address: “Perspectives on learning in Elementary
Schools”
Professor Krishna Kumar
Events have a language of their
own, so have incidents, so have accidents and so have
controversies. One could pick up a theme from any these
categories, to learn about the system of education which
we are here to contemplate in the next two days.More |
Learning Guarantee Programme:
Creating Voluntary Spirit for Accountability
By Mr. S. Giridhar
Learning Guarantee Programme is
an initiative of Azim Premji Foundation in partnership
with Government of Karnataka. The overarching goal of
the programme is to create among schools, communities
and educational functionaries, a voluntary spirit of
accountability towards ensuring learning of children.
The programme throws up a challenge at schools to come
forward and be evaluated by an independent team of evaluators
on pre-defined criteria of enrolment, attendance and
learning achievements. Schools that satisfy the criteria
are eligible for recognition and rewards. Out of a total
9270 schools in the 46 blocks in the 7 districts of
North East Karnataka, nearly 1900 schools (20 % of the
total government schools) are voluntarily participating
in the programme. More
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Language
Learning in Rishivalley Multigrade Schools
By Mr. K Padmanabha Rao
Rishi Valley is situated in the rural interior of South
India, in a chronic drought area in the state of Andhra
Pradesh. The population consists largely of marginal farmers,
shepherds who have tended their flocks since Neolithic
times and daily wage earners on seasonal employment. For
more than twenty-five years, Rishi Valley Education Centre
has engaged in a variety of educational programmes that
reach out to its neighbours in this impoverished countryside.
These educational innovations have found wide application
and are presently being adapted in several parts of India
in programmes for universalising elementary education.
More
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Catalyzing
change towards quality education through rapid,
step-wise, short duration programmes in ‘learning
to read’.
By
Dr. Madhav Chavan and Dr. Vasant Kalpade
Since 2003, Pratham’s field experiences show that
in many parts of India, including Maharashtra (in that
year!), about 20-50% children in schools in the age group
(7 to 14) can barely recognize alphabets, let alone read
paragraphs. (This figure varies by region and state).
t is no surprise then that about 40% do not complete std
IV or V as governmental statistics indicate. The person
on the street (and also unfortunately in higher places)
says that poverty causes dropping out. More enlightened
people have correctly called these ‘push-outs’
of a system that is boring and ineffective. Together with
many others, Pratham, has maintained that lack of learning
achievement in schools together with the unfriendly and
non-supportive teaching-learning environment activates
the poverty related links leading to a child dropping
out of school at an early age. More |
Key
factor in Sustainability
By
Sister Cyril
The effort to enhance learning achievement at Elementary
Level has, indeed, resulted in the development of a number
of innovative practices all over India. Whether such efforts
can be sustained over the prolonged period required for
them to move from innovation to standard practice and
then to be scaled up for common use, will depend largely
on certain key factors, both in the initial introduction
and later on as they move for experimentation to real
life practice. More |
LEARNING:
ISSUES OF ACCOUNTABILITY: The Assam Experience
By Mr. Dhir Jhingran
Our success in putting in place a sustainable accountability
mechanism was limited. The support required from the policy
and political levels was inadequate. Political actors
were unwilling to back this arrangement of accountability
as it would have reduced the legitimacy of the discretion-nepotism
oriented system that they encourage, where accountability
to people is minimal. More |
LEARNING
ACHIEVEMENT AT THE END OF PRIMARY CYCLE IN DPEP
STATES
Dr Srivastava
Achievement surveys are conducted to provide data on quality
of education in terms of scores on achievement tests administered
to students at a given grade level. Such surveys have
been conducted across a number of counties by international
organizations such as IEA and OECD in the past. One of
the recent surveys of this type was conducted as a part
of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study
(TIMSS) that was carried out by Boston College and IEA
in 45 countries in 1994-95. More |
Professional
Development of the Educator
Vibhu
Nayar
The education delivery system is dependent on the performance
of the educator at the classroom level , for any systematic
improvement in outcomes. With this foresight, it is important
to focus energies and resources on self-actualization,
motivation and training of the vast number of Educators.
The Tamil Nadu experiment focuses on developing a Participatory
Capacity Building model and executing it through a Continuum
process of imparting training to 20 thousand educators
impacting about 12 lakh Children and their learning outcomes.More |
Paradigm Shifts
in Learning
Poonam
Batra
The practice of teaching is known to be driven by commonly
held assumptions about the nature of subject matter, how
children learn and what learning is. Yet, the existing
discourse on learning amongst practitioners and policy-makers
suffers from a lack of attention to what learning entails.
The assumptions teachers work with are taken for granted
and it is believed that once the 'instructional regime'
is set right, learning (as measured by 'assessment regimes')
will follow More |
Nali
Kali: The Joy of Learning
Anita
Kaul
'We saw that those children were working entirely on their
own. Our children were not so active in the classroom.
Maybe, because we were not teaching through activities.
When we saw how actively children were participating,
we realised how hard teachers must've worked with them.
We thought if we use the same methods, we might be able
to bring our children up to the same level' said Mahadevaiah,
a schoolteacher from HD Kote. More |
Innovative
Practices in Mathematics Education
K.
Subramaniam
The teaching and learning of mathematics is a complex
activity and many factors determine the success of this
activity. The nature and quality of instructional material,
the preparation and pedagogic skills of the teacher, the
learning environment, the motivation of the students are
all-important and must be kept in view in any effort to
ensure quality in mathematics education. Often when one
refers to innovations, one only has in mind the first
of these, namely, instructional material; even here ‘innovation’
commonly means teaching aids or manipulatives. A large
number of such devices that are excellent aids to mathematics
learning are indeed available. However, it is important
to remember that the other aspects mentioned are equally
important and together determine the range of actual and
possible innovations in mathematics education. More |
Synthesis
Report on Students’ Achievement in DPEP Districts
Gautam
The District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) was launched
in the year 1994 with twin purposes, one, to operationalise
decentralized planning and management and two, to accelerate
the pace of universalization of primary education in the
country. Consciously the districts, wherein the female
literacy was lower than the national average and where
the total literacy campaign has generated enough demand
for the universalization of elementary education were
selected for the implementation of the programme. More |
Delhi
Text books initiative
Dr.
Janaki Rajan
Children do various activities that increase in complexity
with increasing grade level.Learning starts from the child’s
own surroundings and draws on as little equipment as possible.
More
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Background
papers to Dharam part1
Modern Indian Education System represents an intriguing
fusion of the Eastern and Western values, albeit in a
feudal fashion. Most of the visionary Indian educationists
of the pre-independence era like Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo
Ghosh, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, criticized
and rejected the western approach to Indian education.
Rabindranath Tagore did his experiments with education
system in Shantiniketan, and Viswabharati University and
set a new trend in education; while Swami Vivekananda
concentrated on national resurgence through the Ramakrishna
Mission movement; Sri Aurobindo on spiritual regeneration;
and Mahatma Gandhi on achieving Swaraj. More
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Background
papers to Dharam part2
Special emphasis on the assessment of learning achievements
was given in the 1990s with the National Policy on Education
specifying the MLLs at the national level. The focus on
learner achievement came about in an attempt to ensure
that all children get education of a comparable quality
More
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AAS
PASS KI KHOJ (A Pilot Project for Learning Assurance
in Schools)
A.
K. Mittal
Aas Pass Ki Khoj, a school level pilot project was taken
up by the elementary school children to develop an understanding
of inter relationship of local history and ecology, in
a discovery mode. The children in the guidance of teachers
accomplished this in the form of an activity to understand
the local Jana (people), Jal (water), Jungle (forest),
Jamin (land) and Janwar (livestock). More
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