Background
The project Rural Education Drive aims to provide a solution to the poor quality of education in public schools, which deprives students of good employment opportunities and a chance to move out of the poverty trap. Despite increased attention to school based learning, the learning levels of children in the Indian education system have remained consistently low and have, in fact, declined over the past 8 years.
Context
The majority of public schools use regional language as their first language and as the primary medium of instruction. Children in such schools usually face a problem in understanding the secondary language that is English in most schools. This results in poor academic performance by these students and they are also unable to clear board examination and get a degree.
Design Thinking
Standardised education came into being to meet the demands of growing economy. It was designed with industries and not people at it's centre. Which is why it is badly designed.
Integrating design thinking into the classroom gives students the opportunity to solve problems and take control of their own education, encouraging eagerness and innovation.
Integrating design thinking into the classroom gives students the opportunity to solve problems and take control of their own education, encouraging eagerness and innovation.
Pilot Study
After going through numerous number of education models, the initial approach chosen was to visit a public school in the vicinity, attend their classes to understand their teaching methods and simply sit and observe. These exercises were done to step out of the comfort zone and discover the ground reality. The objective was to find out the limitations of the existing methods of teaching, if there were any. To do contextual inquiry, teachers and students were asked questions to get insights about the teaching methods and the student performance and capabilities.
Idea conceptualisation
The objective was to evolve a new method of teaching English language through participatory method of learning. The first few ideas were to familiarise them with concept of sound and phonetics. Soon I realised that this method wouldn’t work for these students as their first language was Assamese and they will not be able to relate to the sound of English words.
The next approach was to teach them using psychology of relationships with regional adaptation. This involved listing down the words we see everyday, and then teaching them what it means in English. This way they should be able to understand a foreign language with the help of that language they use daily. The idea was to create a bridge between a foreign language and the mother tongue.
Research said that, the best way to teach children new words is using ‘The Dolch high frequency word list’. Edward Dolch created it in 1948. The list comprises of 220 words that occur most frequently in children's literature and cannot be "read", rather just recognised by sight. The Dolch list is often separated into several sections, categorised by the age or grade the child should be able to master these words. The very first list is called the pre-primer list. The pre-primer list consists of words such as I, as, and, is, said, come and for as well as several number and colour words. The complete list of pre-primer words can be found using an online search engine.
Now the objective was to teach students these words but with a regional adaptation. The idea was to bridge the gap through the medium of visuals. An inventory of 30 words was prepared based on the Dolch list, which the students encounter in their daily life.
A game was thought, where with the help of pictures and their mother-tongue, they were introduced to the corresponding word in English language. The next step after teaching them words was to help them create sentences which can be further extended to story writing.With a lot of brainstorming, this was achieved by designing a complete learning kit which was a set of two card games; to teach children how to spell and remember three and four letter words and the other was to practice combining nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. to make a sentence.
Now the objective was to teach students these words but with a regional adaptation. The idea was to bridge the gap through the medium of visuals. An inventory of 30 words was prepared based on the Dolch list, which the students encounter in their daily life.
A game was thought, where with the help of pictures and their mother-tongue, they were introduced to the corresponding word in English language. The next step after teaching them words was to help them create sentences which can be further extended to story writing.With a lot of brainstorming, this was achieved by designing a complete learning kit which was a set of two card games; to teach children how to spell and remember three and four letter words and the other was to practice combining nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. to make a sentence.
Game 1 : Word recognition and spelling game
The game uses an inventory of 30 words based on the Dolch list of words, which children come across on an everyday basis. The game consists of two sets of picture cards, one set of cards has the word written on the back in English language and the other set of cards has the word written in Assamese language. A set of scrabble tokens is also provided, each token representing an alphabet.
Gameplay
The game can be played in a group of 5-8 students. To play the game, the two sets of cards are laid separately with the picture side of the cards facing upwards and the alphabets kept in a pile nearby. The student has to first pick a card randomly from the Assamese set, recognise the picture, and then read it aloud. Then the student has to identify and pick the same picture card from the English set, read the alphabets individually first and then the word as a whole. Finally, the student has to identify and draw those alphabets from the pile and arrange them to write the word.
Observations
The pictures were chosen from the Indian context, which helped them relate and remember the word effortlessly.
The exercise of searching, identifying and arranging the alphabets was very effective in teaching and remembering the spelling of a word.
The children seemed very enthusiastic about the game and were very eager to learn and participate contrary to their usual behaviour.
Game 2 : Sentence formation
The game consists of 4 sets of card namely the helpers, the nouns, the verbs and the adjectives. Each set of cards is colour coded to distinguish them easily and also to teach different categories of words to students. The word is written on the planer side of a card in English while its analogous Assamese word is written on the coloured surface.
Gameplay
To play the game, the four set of cards are laid separately with the coloured side of the cards facing up. The student has to pick a card from each category and combine them to make a sentence. Multiple sentences could be made by trying different permutation and combinations. The game can be further extended to paragraph forming and story writing.
Observations
Writing the word in Assamese on one side of the card helped them identify and understand the meaning of each word in a sentence individually.
Colour coding the cards aided them to understand and remember a particular category of words easily.
The presence of a group improved the outcome of the activity, as the students were able to explain each other in a better fashion enabling learning while helping each other.
Conclusion
Th project led me to dig deeper into fundamentals of learning to understand the cognitive psychology of learning and to understand how children learn.
It led to break down of the old teaching methods and an evolution of a participatory method of teaching and learning.
Because of the small sample size, the results are not conclusive, but they are indicative of an improvement in the following students’ skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing.
Additional Reading
To read the published paper, please visit : http://www.waset.org/publications/10004403
To read more about RED, please visit : http://ruraleducationdrive.wordpress.com/
