Opinion How classrooms in Nandurbar were transformed by a culture that trusts teacher and learner

This was the data when we began Project Vedh in July 2022: Around 3,000 children were at the introductory stage (not knowing how to read or solve mathematical problems) and 1,117 and 935 children, respectively, knew how to read a story at the Class 2 level and do division at the Class 2 level. In our quest to improve these numbers, which would go towards the overall improvement in teaching standards in schools, the guiding light was the idea of “heutagogy” or self-determined learning.

There is already a very well-established policy and administrative framework that has been contributing towards the FLN goal envisioned by the Nipun Bharat Mission, which is that 80 per cent of children in all public schools should know foundational literacy and numeracy.

What has kept us from achieving the Nipun Bharat goals? Is it teachers not going to school? Is it the lack of a smart class or access to the internet? Or is it a lack of parental involvement in how their children learn or are taught?

While none of these factors can be discounted, what we have learnt over the course of our “heutagogy movement” is that lack of trust in the teacher’s capability and creativity and in a child’s ability to learn on her own are the factors that are truly limiting.

Heutagogy translates to “self-determined learning”. It is something we have been doing all our lives, whether it’s learning a recipe or how to play a musical instrument from a YouTube instructional video, or even learning how to lie or steal! People become experts through the innate skill of self-learning.

This culture of self-learning can also be integrated into classrooms, for bridging FLN skills. A look at our traditional classroom shows three things: A monologic lecture delivered by a teacher; “x” number of students in a class being able to make sense of it; and the administration of exams to test students on the same level of understanding. This also means that a student is limited by the pace of the teacher.

We did not intend to disturb this in the classroom. What we brought along with us was a technique of behavioural administration that showed that the transition from teaching to self-determined learning is possible. This was done through a guided training module that apprised the teacher of how learning interventions could be actualised in a classroom.

First, we broke the bias about poor or tribal children — that they are slow learners — by showing them live examples as possibilities. Second, we helped students understand how, over the course of their lives, they have learnt a host of things on their own. The exhaustive lists made during the training period helped us prove our point.

Third, we helped teachers understand how the problem of lack of learning can be solved. Many teachers assume that this problem can be solved from the outside, with the help of either the local office or the government. This restricts their creativity and initiative. But once they realised that creating basic learning materials or making “student peers” (two students put together to help each other learn) or looking up YouTube videos on pedagogical techniques lay within their powers, there was a marked change in attitude. For example, one teacher used bottle caps, stones and a plate full of sand as teaching aids, to reach the FLN targets in his classroom.

Fourth, we helped teachers realise that self-motivation for completing a target in their classroom is important. This was again done using a guided module where teachers were asked to list down and think about the things that they learnt through self-motivation and why these learnings have lasted longer in their lives.

The fifth and final intervention was to help students organise themselves into “peers” and learning groups and identify “subject friends” (students with expertise in a subject, who can help their classmates understand it better) in their classroom. All of this was pinned around the concept of “aavahan” or “challenge”. This was a practical learning intervention that was based on the idea that a child can learn best in a competitive environment. This didn’t mean that the teacher no longer teaches, but instead, that she plans one such “aavahan” for each child. The student is incentivised to complete each “aavahan” within a time limit by the promise of a “Selfie with Success” with the class teacher.

Slowly, we saw the emergence of classrooms where the teachers were busy planning and monitoring such challenges and then awarding the students with selfies. There were a number of different challenges and tasks: Solving the maximum number of mathematical problems in two minutes; the use of cricket match scores by a “subject friend” to help her classmates learn mathematical skills; Creating as many words as possible using letter flashcards. All these challenges were curated by the teachers, with the children learning and helping their friends learn. This went beyond the monologic delivery of lectures by the teacher and helped classrooms reach their FLN targets more rapidly.

This is how we should envision education in 21st-century India because as technology evolves, we need no longer rely on teacher- and classroom-limited pedagogies. The sky should be the limit.

The writer is Sub Divisional Magistrate and Project Officer, Nandurbar, Maharashtra