Udaan - Education Resource Center

Programmatic Report of Udaan
2008-2009
Education and development are the two sides of the same coin . From the point of linking education to development it is essential that the emphasis should be laid on liberal, rational and secular orientation, political education and ethical or moral education based on the austerity, self restraint, and concern for others .
The religious and regional intolerance and insecurity has captured the psyche of people nationally, being a deliberate agenda of few and catalyzed by the communal violence of Gujarat, 2002. Rooting the reasoning and rational thought on the constitutional values of diversity, democracy, citizenship and equality in this scenario has become increasingly important for providing people a platform for rational thought to deal with intolerance.

Engagement of reasoning and rational thought with children on the constitutional values of Diversity, Democracy, Citizenship and Equality is necessitated by the need to ensure a socially just future, tomorrow. A resource center on primary education, the major thrust of the organization is to improve quality and access to education for children of disadvantaged communities with special focus on girls. Udaan engages in furriculum development and trains educators with a thematic focus on diversity, equality and citizenship values. It works on institution building and organizational development for orgaisations working on educationl It also focuses on advocacy and educational research work. Objectives of the organization are as detailed below:

• To improve quality of primary education for all with a special focus on issues of inclusion and diversity.
• To create, collate, contextualize, develop and disseminate appropriate teaching learning material, curriculum, pedagogy and training resources including trainers for education
• To look and act upon policy issues of quality and access to education
• To make ground realities visible through appropriate research.

Udaan has paved its way into conflict areas such as Panchmahal district of Gujarat. Udaan’s journey this year and until now has been through such areas of work which until then remained, untouched. This year Udaan largely engaged in ideation and implementation of new interventions with various target groups and organizations.

Udaan has responded and created inroads in following arenas.

• Work with children from manual scavenging community,
  
  Intervention for education of Dalit children living in urban slums of Ahmedabad was created in collaboration with Manav Garima. Udaan supported Manav Garima to setup educational centers in four slum pockets of Ahmedabad for providing good quality education to 112 children.
• Work with children from internally displaced families.
  Udaan created focused interventions for education of Muslim children. Udaan collaborated with Antrik Visthapit Haak Rakshak Samiti to set up educational centers to reach out 372 children spread across eleven colonies in Sabarkantha, Panchmahal, Chota Udaipur and Baroda districts of Gujarat.
• Jivan Talim
  Jivan Talim is a joint endeavor of Udaan and Jamiat- Ulema- I –Hind to reach most interior parts where access to education is not available or denied due various reasons such as teacher absenteeism. The intervention makes use of existing infrastructure of Makatib or the government school to provide mainstream education to the children. By using the current structure of Makatib, mainstream education is provided to children in the age of 6 till 12.
  Udaan builds capacity of the maulanas who are providing religious education in the Makatib for being able to engage with modern education or a local youth is trained as educator to engage with children. The Jivan talim centers run every day for two hours imparting math, gujarati and environment education to children. Special efforts for education of girl child are being made. Currently Jivan talim reaches out to 827 children spread across 28 villages and hamlets in Bhuj, Anjar and Nakhatrana talukas of Kutch district of Gujarat. Out of the 28 villages 10 villages do not have a school within a walking distance, 6 villages have schools but face problem of non functioning of school and in remaining locations the children when being enrolled did not know reading and writing in spite of the availability of a “functional” school.
  
• Meghdhanush
  Meghdhanushis one of the interventions of Udaan in Panchmahal. For the program Meghdhanush name has been adopted, to symbolize the value of diversity as different colors unify to become a beautiful rainbow, individuals, and communities unify to make humanity.
  The program has made an effort to translate its aforementioned guiding beliefs in all its endeavors, functioning and processes it engages with.
  The program takes forward its rationale by working with 18 government schools through its Meghdhanush centers on enhancing quality of education.
  The rationale of the program is implemented in the two model Meghdhanush schools at Halol and Kalol situated in the colonies of people internally displaced due to the communal violence of 2002, in Gujarat. The schools have not only provided access of education to children denied education due to their forced displacement but also is a place where the goals of the program are tested, reviewed and fine tuned and molded into effective practices.
  Libraries in all the centers and the two schools have been set up to address curiosity of children, encourage reading habits among children and the community people.
  Videoshala: Education through video- ICT program, i.e. education through videos, aims to make an outreach to maximum number of children with quality of education through video-kits on content that teachers find difficult to teach and children difficult to learn. The video kits, a combination of a video that translates content in video, interesting for children, contextualized to the reality of the child with values of democracy, diversity, equality and citizenship, inclusion of innovative teaching learning practices focusing on understanding than recall.
  Mobile Computer Lab is an initiative to demystify technology for the children of marginalized section by teaching of basic computer skills.
  The intervention aims at securing the participation of the Government in content creation process as well as in presentation processes. The long term aim being to integrate the video-kits in the classroom teachings as Teaching Learning Material for teaching concepts that are found difficult to teach by them.

In the year 2008-2009 the program has made an outreach to 91 schools in Halol, Kalol and Goghamba Blocks of Panchmahal District. Through 16 centers in government schools and 75 schools where the out reach has been made through educational videos. Cooperation of t e District Education Officer of Panchmahal has been secured in reaching out in government schools through education videos. A team of 50 young boys and girls from the community is involved in varied capacities such as educators, community producers, classroom facilitators and taluka coordinators.

• Improving quality of education by use of ICT
  
  The Videoshala programme of Udaan has been able to integrate educational concepts and values; it made use of community media as a means to reach out to children, government schoolteachers and parents. While Udaan itself engaged in creation of video-kits for Panchmahal region it supported Videoshala network partners Sahyog, Hind Swaraj Mandal and Navsarjan in creating 15 video kits on various topics of environment education, science, social studies and language for children of grades 2 till 9. The Videoshala network partners reached out to 102 schools and learning centers spread in Bhavnagar, Rajkot, Amreli, Mehsana and Ahmedabad districts covering 3624 children.
• Human Right Education Programme
  
  The Human Right Education Programme is initiated in collaboration with Centre for Social Justice (founded the programme in 2006). The intervention builds capacities of schoolteachers on human rights perspective and equips them to implement curriculum on human rights education for children of grade 5 till 7. The programme currently reaches out to 110 public and private schools in eight districts of Gujarat.
• Capacity Building
  
  During the year Udaan was involved in training and capacity building interventions for various direct interventions of Udaan, partner organizations and the network of Videoshala partners. It conducted trainings and workshop for more than 130 village level youth and 30 government teachers on the issue of education. Udaan was invited by the MHRD to conduct a three-day workshop for the state gender coordinators on issue of integrating gender in education.
  
• Udaan has also focused on content creation,
  it developed
  - Activity sheets for children to learn alphabets, simple words and vowels,
  - Video kits on varied topics such as respiratory system, addition, matter and properties of matter and communication and transportation for children of grade 2 till 9
  - Teachers’ manual
• Advocacy
  Udaan conduced a two-day national workshop on NCF, community media and values based education in Ahmedabad. Eminent organizations such as Vikramshila, Digantar and Education Initiatives, Oxfam, SEWA, BGVS, ISRO, CSJ shared their knowledge and experience on the workshop themes. Udaan and its partner organizations shared the impact and experience of Videoshala programme. More than 150 participants working on the issues enriched the discussions by sharing reflections.
  Village level campaign to create awareness on importance of education was carried out in the 18 villages of Panchmahal. Skits, rallies, village level meetings and wall writings were used a means by the team to communicate the message and initiate discuss with the village community on issue of education.
  Udaan approached Mr Yoginder Sikand, a well known journalist for documentation of the Jivan Talim programme. Mr Yoginder Sikand agreed to document the work of Jivan Talim. The report has been prepared and other than the report an article on Jivan Talim was also published in Economic and Political Weekly and Islamic Voice. Mr. Yoginder Sikand wrote the article.
• Diversity camps
  Udaan has ventured into few new arenas and is experimenting with varied approach to integrate and promote values of diversity, democracy and citizenship in education. Residential camps of 12-13 days spread across the year were designed. A group of 75 children participated in the first two residential camps.
  

  Udaan in collaboration with varied partner organizations reached out to more than 13850 children studying in 343 government schools and learning centers spread across 14 districts (Kutch, Panchmahal, Sabarkantha, Baroda, Bhavnagar, Rajkot, Amreli, Mehsana, Chota Udaipur, Anand, Dang, Palanpur, Bharuch and Ahmedabad urban) of Gujarat.

  All the interventions are developed by Udaan as a part of pursuit of equality, diversity, democracy and citizenship in society.

Outcomes of the interventions:

Meghdhanush:

In 2008 2009 the Meghdhanush centers made an outreach to 583 children, in which children from various religion caste are included. 50% of the children made an outreach to had a very less knowledge of the concepts. A total of 583 children began education with the Meghdhanush centres of which 544 carried out educational activities till the completion of one year. In the beginning of the academic year 198 children knew alphabets of Gujarati Language but did not know vowels (42 children out of 198 had some knowledge of vowels, these children were identified for group 2.) By end of year 189 children out of 198 learnt all vowels, words with vowels, sentences and paragraphs. 289 children started working with group 1 as they did not know the alphabets of Gujarati language (25 children had some knowledge of alphabets). In the end of 1 year 253 children understand and know the Gujarati alphabets.
In mathematics group 1 the children enrolled in the beginning of the year did not know ascending and descending order, simple addition and subtraction of 1-50 numbers. At the end of the year 307 children were able to develop complete understanding on the aforementioned aspects and 27 children were able to develop some understating.
In Group 2 the children enrolled did not have an understanding of ascending and descending order, carry forward addition and subtraction of 1-500 numbers. At the end of 1 year 212 children have been able to develop there understanding on the aforementioned concepts and 55 children have been able to develop some understanding on the same.

Impact in schools functioning
In the centres of villages Karkhadi, Bhojpura, Navakunva, Sarsva the government teachers were either irregular or they used to leave the centre early, after Meghdhanush initiated its work the government teachers have become regular.

Impact in communities
Villages such as Aeral, Malav had cases of rape and murder where the accused were from the same village. It was difficult to imagine if the elders of these communities would ever have any kind of relationship again. With the last five years of work in these areas parents form all the communities have started coming together and engaging in healthy discussion. It’s a great achievement to be able to hold meetings with the community members on issue of education in these villages and see the parents discussing issues about education of their children.

Impact in schools functioning
The scholarship was not awarded regularly in the school of village Bhojpura and Shivrajpur, the center teachers discussed the same with the village community and together they had a talk with the school principal on the same. The children who had not received the scholarship earlier received it after the aforementioned intervention.

Videoshala
Videoshala intervention was evaluated in April 2009. The evaluation was carried out by Centre for Media Studies and Nirantar. The evaluation encompassed Qualitative aspects such as behavioural changes in children, Learning gains, School teachers views and Quality of videos.

Learning Outcome Tests
The objective of the learning outcomes tests, carried out by CMS, with groups of 10-12 students in each of the selected Videoshala schools (experimental schools) and non-Videoshala schools (control schools, where students had not viewed the Videoshala films) was to make an assessment of the extent to which the videos had been helpful in facilitating and enhancing the mastery of hard spots. Two video-kits “Earth” and “ Respiratory System” were chosen for assessment. For the video-kit “Earth” oral assessments were made with children to gather base line data where as for the video-kit “Respiratory System” a written assessment was made hence for evaluation purpose base line data of “Earth” was not considered.
It can be clearly seen form the table that overall, the learning outcomes tests did show that the level of understanding, as projected by performance on the post-test (i.e assessment after watching video) as well as in comparison to a matched control group (non Videoshala school children), amongst the Videoshala students has improved.

Learning from Videos
The classroom facilitators shared that videos have not only been beneficial in knowledge enhancement in the students but other positive impact has also been observed in the children. The teachers and classroom facilitators shared that the children have shed their shyness in asking questions and became more interactive, and the children were able to infer and understand the content of the subsequent videos more clearly. The videos made the children more aware, thoughtful and proactive on the issues like pollution, environment etc. The teachers and classroom facilitators also shared that the videos have brought among them a sense of fraternity, equality and values and appreciation of the contribution of different people. Many students felt that the use of the local language in the videos as well as the familiarity with illustrations and examples, made it easy for them to identify with the content.
Almost 100 percent of the teachers were convinced of the effectiveness of the videos in teaching. A good majority of the teachers rated the content of the videos as very good and relevant; presentation of the videos as attractive; language of the videos as easy to comprehend; and overall quality of the video as very good and attractive. The teachers further added that their own understanding of the topics/subject matter got enhanced. For example, one of the teachers reported after watching a video on Vanaspati, that it came as a new learning to him that bamboo was a type of grass, and that it is the longest grass.

Jivan talim

Learning level achieved:
Out of 827 children only 175 children attend the government schools. Most of the children have learnt to read and write in Jivan Talim centers.

• 173 children have learnt to read and write sentences and paragraphs with vowels.
• 76 children have learnt to read and write words with vowels
• 35 children have learnt to read and write paragraphs with simple words
• 136 children are able to read and write simple words without vowels
• 84 children have learnt to read and write all the alphabets
• 134 children have learnt to read and write about 15-20 alphabets and
• 315 children have learnt 5 alphabets