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National Conference on Enhancing Learning in Elementary Schools

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

 
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

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
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
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
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
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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