I believed from a young age that being a teacher was not just taking responsibility for a child’s growth but rather making it happen. A teacher is appraised as a “Guru” in our culture & it’s the most reverential among all professions. It was also my childhood dream job.
One of my comrades introduced me to eVidyaloka, a non-profit organization that focuses on transforming the educational landscape of rural India. I opted as a volunteer teacher to provide my selfless service to underprivileged children. There is no prerequisite to becoming a volunteer in eVidyaloka except the willingness to serve a social cause. A volunteer teacher will be allocated to a government school with a subject for grades 7 or below. As a volunteer teacher, tutoring any subject of state syllabus in the local language was pretty comfortable. I was assigned a topic called “Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)” for a Primary school student, which surprised me as my expectation was limited to the area of general subjects.
In the modern world, most of us invest time & money in grooming ourselves to master academic excellence but we often forget to groom our social and emotional skills. I felt privileged to be learning & coaching Social and Emotional Skills for these kids in my free time.
There were a couple of introductory sessions about the Social and Emotional Learning program organized by eVidyaloka through iShine. The session gave me a synopsis of the importance of educating this topic to underprivileged children, and I learnt that there is a need for the same at an early stage of child development. The session also gave me the confidence to facilitate the children rather than just being a teacher. I was given detailed orientation and the right amount of reference material to prepare myself as a facilitator. The instructions & material were mostly in English; the model of content appeared way beyond for a primary school child. Converting the content into the local language and in an unambiguous way is where creative thinking plays a major role. Creative thinking helped me to gear up and deliver the content in the best possible way. The conventional expectation of tutoring is to reach 100% of the entire class from my preparation, so did I meet my expectation?
I was assigned with grade 6 students from Govt. Model Primary School in Somapura a Village of Dharwad district, Karnataka. Well, the facilitation process was extremely well organized through the virtual world. I just needed to log in via skype and I was in front of the children. Ms Ashwini who is the coordinator from eVidyaloka managed all the schedules of online classes at the respective school.
The day arrived to start the journey with these little innocent children, and I felt butterflies flutter in my stomach. The feeling of self-doubt was sneaking into my mind now and then, as I am not a trained “Teacher” and whether the children would accept me. I convinced my mind with an upbeat note. The universe had given me an abundance of experience to learn, so even the modest act of sharing these experiences mattered a lot to innocent minds. A child’s mind is like a sheet of white paper, and it’s in our hands to create positive impressions. On the first day of my class, those innocent faces began to teach me more than I was teaching them. Participation in activities, involvement in conversations, expressing mindful thoughts, being sensible about others’ feelings, gratitude towards elders, gratefulness about surroundings, and so forth were the key points that we went through together. Those mesmerizing moments kept me thrilled to prepare for recurring classes. Interactions with them created a virtual bond as the days progressed. I learned during the course that I needed to adapt to the mindset of these children. Two standpoints based on my experience and focus to adapt my interaction were:
1. Girls v/s Boys: Girl’s behaviour was gentle. In every class, the majority of the girls participated politely with their understanding of the content. While expressing their viewpoints, girls were picky in expressing emotions. The presence of these girls gave me the visualization of perfectionism. They had dedicated seating arrangements, & they did not want to share them with others. I could observe in girls, that a small change, be it in seating arrangements in class or stationaries that they own or most importantly on the emotional background, would distract the learning process. I could feel the disturbance in decision making if the situation around them was not methodical. Boys, on the other hand, were audacious. There was no second thought while expressing their viewpoints. During participation in the class activities, boys used to express the content as raw as they could, without any fineness in emotions and were pretty straightforward in their thought process. They were able to adapt quickly during the twist and turns. During the initial days, forming a team with a mix of genders for a team activity was the most challenging task. There could be multiple reasons for not getting along amongst them. Due to limited time for interactions, I could not dig deeper, rather I focused only to break the bias. Learning these factors at the beginning stage of the program helped me to navigate my classes. Of course, these learnings are of limited participants and from a certain region.
2. Urban v/s Rural: The reason I wanted to point out this difference is that the reference material for this program covered ample activities, and usually rural kids have less accessibility to such topics. In Urban areas, most parents prefer to admit their kids to so-called reputed central syllabus schools, and very few prefer state syllabus schools rather English medium. Only a countable number of children study in Govt. schools or regional language schools. Urban children are packed with nourishments for 2 breaks and are given pocket money to buy their favourite delicacies. Stationery shops are plenty to buy any art & craft supplies. Name any toys, and the next moment they could own them. Access to any form of entertainment is available around them: different types of indoor and outdoor games, distinctive paid games in shopping malls, and whatnot. The pandemic created access to social media as most kids own an exclusive smartphone. On the contrary, rural kids enjoy studying in prestigious Govt. schools where the medium of instruction is in their regional language. Free food is common for all and hardly costs a penny for candy. Desi games are predominant, and nowadays the influence of smartphones exists few and far between. It’s hard to have the luxury of stationery items at their desk. Local festivals in the village are the greatest entertainment among any other. Rural kids suffered in reaching education during the pandemic, as school is their main and in most cases their only connection to education.
Analyzing these differences helped me to navigate the entire curriculum. The very first step was to create an environment; to make everyone feel that they were all treated equally & bringing self-awareness. I would like to share some incidents that are connected to my heart; I could never forget those interactions.
Centring activities with mindful meditation for about 3 to 5 mins was creating such a positive vibe for them. Most of them enjoyed the process of meditation, and few used to murmur in between. To handle the murmur effect, I spoke to a non-participant and tried to understand. The reason was that he believed meditation is of no use. I appreciated his candidness in expressing his thought process. Having learned they were receptive to new ways of learning, I introduced different techniques for mindful meditation, there was no repetition of activities during the entire curriculum. It became a habit for everyone to sit for meditation just after joining the class.
While talking about habits, I encouraged all to openly converse on the habits along with an activity. Here I felt girls were very conscious about talking in a very socially conformed manner. I randomly identified a girl to share her habits. She knew spending time in front of the TV is not a good one to share, so she expressed the good habit she will incorporate is to overcome watching TV for too long. Sometimes one only needs a small push to create a better life with good habits. Diving deep into the habits of an individual and creating the power of positive habits made a slight change in their behaviour.
Usually, there will be competition to become the favourite student for a teacher. I observed in a couple of classes that one particular boy always wanted to be in front & answer any question I would pose. One day, I intentionally encouraged other children to speak and did not allow him to express a single word. I politely told him that I wanted to give others a chance too. His raucous expression kept me pausing for a while, it was telling me, “Come outside, revenge is ahead”. In fact, the guy was innocent but an extrovert by heart. He was encouraging other children to follow the class. He is a beloved student by most of the teachers. Also, the way he was grasping the content in the class was on par. He is one of the top 3 in the class. He just wanted to be in the limelight always.
In every class, I aimed to interact with all the participants and I had prepared accordingly with round-robin activities. During the interaction, I observed several behaviours of individuals, and one that caught my attention was calm & composed behaviour. His participation in the activities was based on demand. A brilliant candidate and his
answers were either yes or no or only to the point. During the conversation with him, I had to use more words to understand his feelings. I was wishing he would become more communicative during every interaction. One day there was a small debate competition on a specific topic. For the first time, I was listening to him just expressing himself with a clear flow of words, clear thought, and apt content without any prompts from my side. He did not show any sign of disconnecting from the content, I could simply follow his uninterrupted flow of words. There was no gap between his thoughts and the words poured out. That was an impressive talk! I understood that each one is different & exhibits his/her talent in a different forum.
Another incident related to creativity comes to my mind. The activity was intended to exhibit teamwork. A team of 2 to 3 children joined for the role-play activity. Based on the given instruction/the topic, all the team members joined together, prepared their dialogues, choreographed the scenes, and enacted them magnificently. To my surprise, two separate teams joined to enact two different topics & converging for a common goal. I was astonished to see such an amazing role play. No script, no director, no cameraman, no make-up but the play touched my heart. More importantly, using two different team concepts & converging at the end to meet the purpose gave me a thrilling feeling. Creativity flows uninterrupted in the wee hours.
Every moment I spent on this topic was a value-adding to my learning, I sought to write poems in Kannada, created my own stories for them, made some hand-crafted toys, and much more. Being connected to the internet helped us to use different sources of teaching aids during live classes, show them a different world & create a virtual bond. Things that I could not explore in my childhood, I could explore through this venture. I am blessed to have had this experience. The luxury of childhood lives in the rural world. I thank each one who supported me in executing the classes online. A special thanks to my son for validating my thought process and giving me the input in using the necessary tools suiting the interest of a similar age group.
Ending my note by wishing all success to all the children in their future endeavours. The world is small and we will meet soon.
Soumya, Volunteer Teacher