Creating Solidarity Across Diverse Communities

The programme I directed — SRUJAN — is conceptualized to establish community and school linkage through child-centric activities, thereby building solidarity between community and school. The main objective of SRUJAN is to create a common platform where community, teachers, and children will work together to understand the environment outside the school as a source of learning. Its aim is to create a child friendly atmosphere in the school which are familiar to the children (games, music, art, craft, tales, and songs) so as to bring out the inherent talents of each child through the community knowledge (oral and materials resources) for curricular support.

Odisha Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA), the apex body of state education programme, adopted SRUJAN as a flagship to build a bridge between the community and schools. In January to March 2007, three workshops were conducted inviting the creative teachers, Block Resource Coordinators and Cluster Resource Coordinators to conceptualize the SRUJAN.

The discussion in the workshop were on teachers exposure to community’s knowledge and their cultural methods of learning .Besides, following discussion were also made . The questions discussed in the workshop were,

When there is no school in our village, how the community members were learning? Do you believe that the villages having no school still have an education system?
How knowledge is generated? What are the methods of dissemination of knowledge in the school and in the community?
Why do you need culture? Do you think that our culture is lost? If yes, how you regain it?
How many of you have read national Curriculum Framework 2005? What is the NCF speaking about the community role in school?
What do the children like? If you have to make your school child centric what would you do for the children?

Briefly their findings were as follows.

School is run by teachers who don’t involve the community in schooling except the monthly meeting on school management. Teachers have very little knowledge about the community knowledge system. Teachers feel that since the community is non literate, they can’t understand the school knowledge, and therefore teachers don’t share it with the community members /parents.

While community knowledge is generated and taught intergenerationally, school knowledge is disseminated through reading and writing skill. Practice of reading and writing is not a part of   tribal culture. Therefore parents cannot help their children in learning outside school hours. Nontribal educated people consider tribal culture as inferior to the mainstream culture. Children come with many experiences and knowledge   to schools. The come with many languages learned from their home and society. Children like to sing, dance, play, listen to stories, draw pictures, travel to the forest and fairs, etc. In order to make the school culturally responsive, teachers suggested adopting these activities. 

After that the master trainers were trained on implementation process of SRUJAN in the following areas. 

1. Collection and documentation of cultural resources from the community: 

  Teachers    collected cultural resources from story tellers, singers, musicians, artisans from the community. Oral tales, songs, myths, legends, proverbs and riddles were collected and documented in the cluster to edit them and prepare bilingual and multilingual reading materials. This led the teachers to understand that oral tradition offers the language resources which are useful for     teaching of language skill as well as comprehension. 

2. Child Friendly activities:   

During 2007, six activities were adopted for the children: a. Storytelling festival, b. Workshop on arts and crafts, c. music, skit and dance, and d. traditional games, e. nature book (study of nature through direct observation) and f. village project. Each programme is represented by all the schools under the cluster.  Children were given an opportunity to take part in all the activities; 600 children from each cluster took part in six activities according to their own choice. Teachers helped to identify children with specific talents. These six activities were conducted in six national holidays in six different schools. Community resource persons like storytellers, musicians, artists, artisans, and knowledgeable persons took part in the above six programmes depending on their interest and expertise.

The process of enacting each activity varied. The storytelling festival is initiated by a storyteller with five to six children around him in a group. After the story is told by the story teller, children write it in their own language. Then they draw picture based on the theme of the story. Thus, one story narrated by the storyteller expressed in five to six variations in children’s writing, as did the picture the children drew to go with the story.

  The workshop on arts and crafts is based on the raw materials available in the environment. For art, children collected raw materials from their home and village. They knew the art of making indigenous colour and drawing the different art forms. Children taking part in crafts are very interesting.  There, raw materials from nature were transformed into cultural materials. The handicraft made of bamboo, clay, wood, rope, straw, leaf, fruits, flowers and roots were creative work of the children that they had learnt from their parents and elders. The shapes and sizes, mathematical calculations, higher skill of counting, and complex weaving were known to the school children.

Traditional dance and costumes, music and songs were performed by the schoolchildren supported by the musicians.  The most important aspect of the musical instruments is the craft of making them. Children learned from the musicians the techniques of making the instruments from the local sources and something of the art of music. 

Traditional games, both outdoor and indoor, for boys and girls, were played in the game festival. Physical activities, socialization, learning the rules of the games, and active participation were the outcomes of   playing games. In nature study activities, children were taken to observe the natural environment in order to understand the importance of the natural objects from the elders. Children prepared lists of such natural objects with its medicinal values. For the village project, children were taken to a village to do a simple survey of its geography, location, direction, institutions, household, roads and communications. They also prepared a village map with the help of the teachers and villagers who took part. This activity is discovery of the knowledge system of the village.

Through SRUJAN, teachers and educators learned to recognize the community members and parents as the resource for knowledge.  Since it is a state-driven programme, about 300,000 children, 14,000 teachers, and 12,000 community members took part in the programme in 523 clusters. About 15,000 community members took part in storytelling to 75,000 children, where the oral stories were written down by the children. 

This programme reveals that in a non-literate/ semi literate and multicultural society, linkages can be established between community   and school to reduce the differences of caste, class, gender and language and bring solidarity. More particularly, where the parents are also illiterate,   the risk is more vulnerable.

Impact of SRUJAN 

 After   introduction of SRUJAN children got back their childhood.

SRUJAN reflected on two major outcomes: building solidarity among the teachers, the community and the children for a common cause; and the learning potential embedded in the community knowledge (that has been historically ignored) in the school curriculum were   recognized and shared among everybody. 

Literate people’s involvement with illiterate people in sharing of oral knowledge is a major point of departure from ‘exclusion’ toward ‘solidarity’. Marginalized illiterates can create and share knowledge that can be the source of curricular knowledge. This gave the listeners a firsthand impression that any language has the power of expression, and that school education has recognized all languages that are spoken in the community. Many communities listened to each other’s expression.

Teachers explored the idea that tradition has its methods of learning and teaching which cannot be excluded from its context. Thus group solidarity of teachers   was established and they respected the community language. In the storytelling festival, Dalit elders, tribal elders and Muslim elders felt honoured while articulating their tales and songs.  While the children were amused with play, storytelling, music, dance, and arts and crafts, teachers and community members were breaking their respective myths of disconnections and were developing a relation of mutual understanding for wider learning. Teachers could know that anything can be treated as a part of learning since it has come from a human intellectual activity.

Before SRUJAN, community had little opportunity to take part in any intellectual activities in school system. For instance, a potter said that he is remembered only when tiles were required by the school teachers during rainy season.  But for the first time he is called as a potter to share the crafts of pottery, which gave him immense pleasure and he felt honoured. Another old man was invited to the school and given 10 minutes to tell a story. As he stood and started to tell the story, he became so energized to speak before a loud speaker that he elaborated the story. Thirty minutes later, when he is asked to complete the story, he was not ready to leave the loud speaker. He narrated the whole story which was full of ene

energy, eloquence, oral narrative style, and body language, making it enjoyable. This is a new experience for a man in his 70s to get recognition from a school to act as a storyteller. When the story is then written and showed to him, he could not believe that his story could be written down. Similarly women artisans, storytellers, dancers and musicians had a new experience. The whole set of activities conceptualized in SRUJAN had a web of connectivity which combined the creative activities of children, community and teachers.

SRUJAN transformed teachers’ perception of community knowledge. Prior to this programme, teachers from the target schools were almost ignorant about it. The storytelling programme was an eye opener to the teachers.  It was a transformation from the earlier teaching life. They changed their approach to language teaching. The oral formula of storytelling in the villages was revealed when the storytellers started performing in the storytelling festivals. Observing the storytelling, the teachers discovered that the community has its methods of storytelling that, although oral, are participative and interactive for the children. Teachers also found that children wrote down the story with a picture to create texts. Teachers found the text meaningful when the community discussed   as to why and how the story is important in their culture and how its meaning is embedded in their cultural context. Storytellers from different language groups knew each other’s cultural potentials. Other activities, like playing games, were also highly productive for learning since they had rules, socialization and physical expression. Music, dance, and arts and crafts were complex items of culture that were connected to their natural environment. The older community members and children, as well as the teacher, took part in dance, music and song. From arts and crafts workshops, children were able to prepare culturally meaningful materials out of locally available raw materials.

Teachers played their role as facilitators between the children and the communities in conducting the activities, showing awareness that the knowledge created by the community is as important as the school knowledge.  They came to understand that community knowledge acquired by the children prior to school should be connected to school knowledge. Community members irrespective of age and sex attended the school activities and took part. Teachers recognized and honoured them as the knowledge givers. The gap between the teachers, children and community is bridged. Teachers found that school has become a center for community interaction.

In the follow up programme of SRUJAN , teachers and resource persons were engaged in  preparation of bilingual materials like story book, picture – dictionaries, story chart, big book, small book etc. 

Inclusion of community  as the prime actor of sharing   knowledge from social domain to school domain, recognition of    community resource persons as the intellectuals in construction of child friendly   curriculum and materials is a small initiative adopted by the government. When the   success of this programme is manifold the threats of this programme is that since it is initiated  since last four years, and a lot have to be done to concretize and revising it, it is necessary in the part of the system to  experience it and construct it in a way to make it a sustainable in built programe of the school in their everyday activities. Further  the conflict of standard classroom texts and learning outside the classroom must join together in teachers professionalism so that  community knowledge in the early of children in primary schools can be contextual, meaningful and exploring.