“I am not a teacher but an awakener.” – Robert Frost This quote forms the basis of my pedagogy. I try to run a student-centered, discussion-based and project-oriented classroom. While in Bangalore, Indira gave us a lovely “ideabook” journal, riddled with inspiring quotes and lovely art, and I was reminded of this Frost quote from the book. At Brilliant Stars school, each teacher serves as an awakener or facilitator. The students know this and they take ownership and are happy to be here. Growth mindset is practiced here. They are serving the larger community. In many ways they are a progressive, model school for what education should look like for the future of India and in some cases, even America. Through many blessings, my placement here allows me to learn from these happy students and teachers. I came as a teacher, but I am leaving a student. Here are just a few anecdotes that have touched me. On my first day at BSS, I observed a grade 9 physics lesson. Anyone who knows me, knows I am not science-minded. I like words, ideas. I never did well at science, much to my medical profession parents’ dismay. The young teacher spent a few minutes reviewing Newton’s Third Law – for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. She drew a diagram on the board and asked for recall from the students. She then asked the students to get into groups and brought them each two balloons and a bouncy ball. The energy in the room immediately increased. The students’ proceeded to follow her clear guidelines to blow up one balloon and let it fall, let the other fall on its own, and then bounce the ball. Then they had to discuss how the Third Law applied to these situations. Then they wrote about it individually in their notebooks. I honestly wish my physics teacher had let us learn this way. I will always remember this now. When I was a student it was all conceptual, and my literary mind did not get this concept, which is pretty basic physics. To end the class, she had three students come up to the white board and draw the application of the law on each of the objects and explain it to the rest of the class. So many good things here – group work, reflective writing, kinesthetic learning, and teaching back to the class. Afterwards the teacher and I met and she so wanted me to give her feedback on how to make her lesson better, but I did not have any. Besides the time my chemistry teacher lit the room on fire in a marked line on the floor, this was my favorite science class ever. We did have a nice dialogue about putting kids in groups and those dynamics and how to best monitor that placement. In our professional development session on Tuesday, where we presented to more than 50 participants from here and neighboring schools – even the principal from a school in Argatalla (two hours away) came, we asked for questions to be “parked” or put on a piece of chart paper on sticky notes, so that we could address them during the break. Several questions and comments had asked how we incorporated “joyful learning” into our curricula. My partner teacher, Jane, bravely took on this question as I prepared for the next session by asking exactly what that meant. A participant answered something to the effect that joyful learning brings a sense of wonder and awe into the classroom, encouraging playfulness, community engagement, kindness and love. Apparently, there is a whole curriculum and yes, I plan to read up on it. This question threw both of us as high school English teachers. Yes, there are joyful moments in my classroom, but it’s not something I really think about in my lesson planning. It’s hard to think of my students who are often reluctant, sleepy, (sometimes entitled), distracted and cynical as joyful learners. However, these students are also creative, insightful, independent, incredibly talented and strong. I am responsible for setting the tone in my classroom, and I have learned so much from BSS in just four days about the whole school climate I would like to be a part of. Yesterday, I was in the principal’s room taking a break, and I looked out the window to see a group of children standing in a circle. I thought they were playing a game but as I continued to observe, they were learning a lesson. The children held cards with letters on them and at the instructor’s cue, they would move to the center of the circle. Today, I asked this teacher what he was doing. He teaches Bengali, which is the state language in Tripura, and some students were having trouble grasping the concepts on the board in the classroom, so he creatively found a way to engage the students through movement outdoors so that they could grasp the structure of the sentence in Bengali. These children looked like joyful learners. Two of the girls in the grade 9 class, which I have visited twice and to whom I will teach a poetry class today, came to the principal’s room and asked me to look through their project. They are competing in a nationwide contest where they have to come up with a local problem and design a presentation as to how they will solve it and serve their community. They chose the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #4 – Quality Education. As we sat next to the computer, looking at their presentation, I was blown away by their level of compassion, knowledge and engagement. Two 14-year- old girls had already researched the problem, collected data in their community and brainstormed creative ways to address the lack of quality education in Udaipur. Their plan, which is extensive, includes meeting with parents, teacher training and a reading festival. These are not my students, although I feel like they are, but I am so proud of the work they are doing. They have joy and passion about extending the type of education they receive here at Brilliant Stars to others. The majority of the school, grades 4-10 are working collectively on another Sustainable Development Goal in a Service Based Learning project. They tackle one each year, and it is a daily class, part of the curriculum. This year their goal is #5 – Gender Equality. I have always been passionate about this issue and spend a good time talking about it in my classroom, so I was so pleased when I visited two service classes yesterday to see the wheels turning in their heads. They are in phase 2 of the project and are designing survey questions where they will gather data in their community regarding gender equality. The division of labor in India is still mostly divided into the women doing household chores and caretaking, while the men work and are usually the head of the household. Most people live in extended family situations with their husband’s parents. While Indian women do have lots of options, the patriarchal family system and the dowry keeps many women from wanting to or being able to seek their independence. Single, unmarried women will live with their families and widows, who were burned with their husbands until about 100 years ago - I learned from a student yesterday, will live with their late husband’s family. Supria, who has been kind enough to cook our meals while we are here, lost her husband, and I am told she is the only breadwinner in the family. Many girls and women are not allowed to use computers or cell phones, and they are definitely not allowed out at night, alone, unescorted, here in Udaipur. Now, these are generalizations, there are homes where people share household tasks and women have more independence, but generally women are not treated equally within the family or societal structure. (They aren’t in America either, but that is a post for a different blog on a different day). Anyway, within this context, the children are designing questions to elicit responses from their community members and then they will plan how to increase awareness in their community. As one of the instructors mentioned, this problem is “invisible” in that it is not like pollution or clean water. You can see it, but because of its systemic roots in religion and familial and societal structure, it will be hard to fix. I visited a grade 8 class where the students were learning how to write survey questions. They had to brainstorm in groups 5-7 potential survey questions. The group I worked with had trouble getting started, but once they did they generated questions like – “Does your husband allow you to take decisions? What toys do you keep to a girl or boy during their different ceremonies? What are the expectations you keep for your boy or girl when they grow up?” The division of labor in that little group (one girl, three boys) was interesting in itself because the girl did all the work, while the boys contributed quietly one or two questions to her list. Maybe it was because I was observing that they were quiet? I also observed a grade 5 class, which was a treat for me, because I work with cynical but amazing teenagers. These students, for their service class, had prepared some skits – one was about how a simulation of approaching people in their homes to ask survey questions. The other two were about gender roles in the home, a wife asking her husband to take a job, and a girl asking her father to go out at night with a friend. In both skits, the man said no. The teacher then gave a reminder of how history had created such oppression and why and he made a web on the board with the reasons why girls weren’t allowed to go to school traditionally. He asked me if I wanted to comment, and I shared that 120 years ago, girls weren’t allowed to go to school in America, for the exact same reasons they had listed. In grade 9, the classroom I have spent the most time in, a Baha’i saying is posted, “Let your vision be world-embracing rather than confined to your own self.” In our online work for TGC, we read lots of scholarly articles and watched videos and had discussions on what it means to be a global citizen. Here, at Brilliant Stars School, I have seen young global citizens in action and it has finally clicked with me. I am inspired by these brilliant stars to take these ideas and connections into my own classroom and school. It is not a utopia, but they are making change happen on a small scale, awakening young minds to their role in the the world and their possibilities and the problems of the future. When I saw the other fellows’ urban placements, I worried about being insulated inside a small school community campus. Instead, I have been blessed by strong connections and surrounded by joy and enlightenment. These people and this place will always remain with me, as a teacher, as an awakener, and a learner.
2 Comments
Samantha Harris
7/14/2017 09:27:41 am
This was so enlightening to read. Thank you for documenting your time abroad. The school you are in sounds wonderful!
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Libbie Lowe
7/14/2017 09:52:34 pm
Once again, I am so impressed with the depth
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