Goemkarponn desk
PANAJI: Anjali Noronha, a Goan whose family has migrated out of Goa for four generations, is sharing her skills online this week in an attempt at “selling school education”.
She talks at the Collaborative Learning Cafe on October 12 and 14, 2021, from 6.30 pm, which is free and open to all. Registration can be done at collaborativelearningcafe.org
The talk will focus on roles for school teachers — as teachers, researchers, curriculum developers, education administrators, or even intervening in the policy. It will explain the challenges, preparation needed and opportunities in these fields.
“Education is like a microcosm of social life itself. There are interpersonal issues among students and teachers. If you can create and keep on developing a good atmosphere there, you also grow as people,” she argues.
Noronha will be sharing her experiences and data about education, and particularly teacher education. Noronha says there are about a hundred NGOs that she knows, “big and small” working across India in education.
She cites the example of David Horsburgh (1923-1984), the British-born educationist who came to India while working for the Royal Air Force and then returned to pioneer educational change through activity-based learning in initiatives like Neel Bagh in Kolar district (near Bengaluru), and elsewhere.
Noronha started her work in education “a lot by happenstance”. She was keen on rural development work, which led her to shift from Science to Economics. She soon got involved with Ekalavya, the NGO focussed on education.
Kishore Bharati, set up by the scientist Anil Sadgopal, was the organisation that gave rise to Ekalavya. Eklavya, the Bhopal-based NGO set up in 1982, has “no one person” who was setting up Eklavya, unlike other NGOs.
Ekalavya has been associated with the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme, curriculum research, and magazines (still run in Hindi) on science for students and the like. These include ‘Sandarbh’ (Hindi, for school teachers), Srote (monthly, news and features in science and technology), Chakmak (monthly science magazine for children), etc.
She calls it an experiment in “democratisation of education” and an experiment in “democratising an institution”. But she sees “limits” to how much change NGOs can bring about in the educational sector — what we can do and what we should do.
Now, most NGOs improve teachers’ knowledge, add sports to the school curriculum, or work with society to send students to schools. So the possibilities that existed for greater changes, in the past, are now closed, she feels.
