Bhoomi internship report by deepanjali

Internship Report Deepanjali

Internship Summary

BANGALORE STEINER SCHOOL

Duration: 15-Feb-2016 to 15-June2016

Philosophy & Vision

Internship Highlights

• Observation of classes

• Participation, if interested in Handwork (such as knitting)

• Discussion with the teachers

• A look into the children’s hand book

• A brief overview of the curriculum

• We were asked not to interact with children.

Key Observations

• Daily Schedule for Teachers : Morning Circle

Discussion on the day’s proceedings

Co-ordination among Teachers,if any• Daily Schedule for Children : First ½ hour free time.

Morning circle

Class hours• Parent – Teacher Community : Most teachers are parents• Classroom structure : Same teacher for a particular class throughout their

journey in school• Commitment of Teachers : Teacher are required to commit minimum for 5

years ,incidentally most teachers are parents also.• School Management : The school setup is mainly run by Student teacher

community and is organically managed, it could be because the school is still in its early stage.

First principles

1. Anthropocentric learning : More emphasis on ‘learning ways’ of a human being rather the ‘teaching techniques’

2. The 3 H’s form the main focus of the entire learning, i.e. Hand, Heart and Head

They belief that the learning is more effective when it starts from hand to heart and then to head.

3. Approach of learning is more of “Local to Global or Near to Far”

Other Observations

1. Most of the topic like Geography/History/Science is taught with this principle.’ Learn which is around first and this go farther’

2. Though there is no mention of any teaching methods, the practice like ALM, thematic learning for all intelligences is included.

3. Since the teacher travels with the class to higher grades he/she is also a learner.

4. Guided Hand book/text book bases on Rudolf Steiner's philosophy is available to the teacher to prepare lesson plans and activity around each topics

5. Steiner Handbook/textbook also addresses the child’s state of mind, and how a child sees things around him/her, which is helpful in preparing lesson for the class.

6. A great deal of attention is given to the aesthetics of any work, such as the board work, child’s class work etc.

Teacher’s Board work

A Third Grader’s Class Book

• Here a child is expressing his understanding of the season and the concept of time

• Children are free to express their understanding in a form of drawing/painting, prose or poetry.

Children’s work

Learning process

• Precursor to subjects:

Interestingly the grades are planned in such a way that there is a precursor to almost all subject e.g. Fairytales are precursor to History, Form drawings are precursor to Geometry, Seasons to Time and so on.

• Spiritual inclination :

There is an certain inclination to maintain a spiritual relevance to whatever is done in the school.

• Green Inclination :

The infrastructure and the surrounding is intentionally maintained by keeping the environment in mind.

Children also spend a great deal of time gardening and each class has it own small little garden space.

The School premises

Other aspects

• Food & Nutrition

1. Children are served pure organic,hygienically cooked sathvic food, there is a team of cooks and maids, who maintain the kitchen.

2. Children are allowed to bring only fruits from home to eat during their 15 minutes morning break.

3. Children are also served freshly made snack before the day ends.• Sports and Outdoor

1. There is dedicated sports teacher and the day’s routine one games period every day.

2. There are lot of outdoor activity such as carpentery, gardening etc

Hand Work

1. Knitting, Stitching, Carpentery, Painting, Carpentery and playing music are part of the curriculum.

2. Every child and every teacher learns to play flute, which they call recorder. This is a compulsory activity and everyone is expected to learn.

3. The above listed activity come under handwork and a good ½ hrs daily is scheduled for this activity.

Stuffed Elephants handmade by Children

Aesthetics in Work Books

Below is a hand made textbook of a 6th grader, the subject is astronomy.Most of the books have a lot of drawing, decoration and colours. These are promptly punctuated by some text.

Some more of children’s work

Grading process

• Teacher, the third parent : As the teacher travels with the child to higher grade, she is well aware as to where the child is.

• No examination: There is no obvious assessment that happens between classes. Rather children’s Handbook and the activity the child engages in, gives the teacher the insight as to what the child has achieved.

• The teachers are sure that the child is age appropriately prepared for the state-board syllabus.

GUBBACHI LEARNING COMMUNITY

Duration : 2 Months

GUBBACHI

Gubbachi is a NGO, started by a group of Azim Premji University graduates. This organization runs a bridge school for children, mainly the migrant labour kids, who have dropped out of school.

A bridge school is a school to prepare the school dropouts/unschooled children and mainstream them age appropriately in the govt school.

The NGO has signed a MOU with a Govt school of Kodathi village. The organization is also taking part in helping this govt school, to provide a better standards of Education apart from running the Bridge school.

The NGO makes an effort to create a child-friendly environment and is critical about the present system of education in the Govt schools and aims to bring in necessary changes.

Highlights of the Gubbachi, the Bridge school

• The school broadly has 4 stages

Early Child Care (ECC)

• The main cause of children not going to school/dropping out, is because they are expected to take care of the younger sibling. To address this issue, the school has early child care centre to take care of toddlers.

Bridge of Bridge, (BOB)

• As the children come from a background where is no exposure to print, these children need to sensitized to world of print, that is done in BOB

Pre-literacy stage

• The basic of reading and writing, recognizing letters/words w.r.t the pictures happens in this stage

Literacy stage

• A child has gone to school for some period and stopped OR has had a break between an academic year, belongs to this phase.

About the curriculum

• The school broadly follows the requirement of the government school and has a curriculum in line to the state board.

• The state government has come up with a Nalli-kalli curriculum, which is been adopted from Krishnamurthy school of education.

• There is an entire Nalli-kalli kit that the government provides to all the school in the state and Gubbachi is also one of them.

• As one of the teachers in the school is from prakriya, they also follow the curriculum developed by teachers in Prakriya.

• In fact, for Kannada the ‘whole to part’ principle is followed, that is the a new alphabet is introduced through a poem.

• English language is introduce through a Montessori method, emphazing on the phoenics

• The school prepares the children in 3 subjects i.e., English, Kannada and Maths.

Background of Students in Gubbachi

• Children who come here are from the poorest strata of the society, Children of farm labors from Raichur District-Karnataka, Bihar, West Bengal.

• Most of the children have been to school at some point in time, but had to drop out due to various reasons such as

1. Frequent migration in search of work2. Taking care of the household, as both

parents have physically straining work3. Nursing the young and the elderly of the

family.4. Illiterate parents and adults, not

understanding the need of regular schooling.

• These children are deprived of their childhood massively. • Most of the children conduct themselves as adults.• They are highly protectively about their younger siblings• They are steady-fast in doing any kind of work.• Their exposure to print world is nil.• They are fiercely independent.• There is a certain rawness to their behavior.• They are extremely innocent and simple in their thought process.• They are highly vulnerable to the dark side of our society.• They suffer from mal-nutrition and are mostly deprived physical form of

affection.• In spite of all the deprivation and hardship, they are most joyful and

cheerful.• Their capacity to respond to love and cherish the attention paid to them

is phenomenal.

Background of Students in Gubbachi - Contd.

Living conditions of Gubbachi students

Some moments in the school

Opportunity received in Gubbachi

• Teaching a group of students• Participation in Curriculum planning.

• Participation in lesson planning.

• Assisting teachers in the class related activities.• Preparing case study on couple of kids.• Filling in for other teachers in their absence.

• Managing the entire class for a day.

• Attending weekly hurdles in relation to the progress of the students.

• Interaction with volunteers and fellow-interns.

My Learnings

• Every child is unique and wants to do his/her best in any given condition and environment.

• It is fine to have a day that doesn’t go according to your plan.• Learning still happens, even if you didn’t execute your lesson plan.• It is best to sense the children’s mood and temperament for the day.• The best practice is to propose than impose, sometime the other’s idea

turns out better than yours.• One needs to have certain calmness within oneself and unconditional

love for children to enjoy the classroom.• One has to invest time and effort to win the trust and confidence of the

children.• Children are absolutely unpredictable and Emergent curriculum works.

My Case Study

• Laxmi and Sharada I had the opportunity to interact and tutee these 2 lovely girls and prepare a case study on the basis of my interaction.

They are named after Goddesses of Wealth and Education. Unfortunately, they have nothing to do with either.

Both these girls are around 10-12 years old approximately. They have lost the critical age of learning/grasping, that the Nali-kali curriculum is designed for. Hence they don’t seem to follow a instruction given to them in a group and are very much need 100% attention of the teacher.

Generally such kids are labelled as dull/disinterested/trouble makers in the class.

Laxmi is first-born among 4 siblings to a seemingly young woman. The mother doesn’t seem to be more than 25 years of age. As both parents are daily wage workers, Laxmi has been carrying out the responsibility of nursing her youngest brother, looking after her 2 younger sisters, single-handedly taking care of the household. There have been incidents of domestic violence in the family and as a result of which Laxmi has been burdened with responsibility of cooking and feeding her father and her siblings.All of this has taken a toll on the little girl. She speaks very less, doesn’t seem to share anything that happens back home in the morning circle. She deals with everything as if she were a adult. In the beginning, she seemed to have certain stiffness in her body too. She has been hugely deprived physical form of affection.I have seen this one girl change along the duration of 2 months. The other teachers have witness, what looks like not less than a transformation in the child ever since she joined Gubbachi 6 months ago.

About Laxmi

Laxmi shows a sign of schooling before. She writes her name in kannada and is pro in coping anything written on the board. The rout learning system followed by the government school give out such signs of mindlessly completion of chores and makes distinct differentiation between a schooled child and a completely out of school child.

Laxmi lacks math-logic completely, to an extent that her math teacher had given up on her and concluded that she must be having some learning difficulty. However her language learning skills are quite in place, she can effortlessly write alphabets to point of perfection and recognize them too. She also shows keen interest in reading.

I interacted with Laxmi in math class first as I sat with her to understand her level of knowing, I found that, the girl has difficulty in counting numbers.

Her Academics

As I started spending time with her, I realized that Laxmi doesn’t have a learning difficulty, but fails compute or doesn’t understand math language.

Her other talents like her drawing, patterns, use of colours says her spatial intelligence is phenomenal.

She understands maths in a different way, like when she draws, it is in proper proportion. Pictures she drew in one of the kannada class. Please observe the proportion of the drawing and use of paper effectively.

Her Academics – Contd.

I realized, with her I cannot approach maths the way I approach it for my understanding. The unability to understand maths made her totally disinterested in the subject. It was difficult to make her sit at one place and get her involved in math related activity.

I used pebble game to get her interested to sit in the class, Soon she took liking to it…..then we got along like house on fire and there was no looking back. I slowly introduced counting numbers through pebble game. She started counting up to 10 effortlessly. Then one fine day she also started doing simple addition.

Laxmi doing her math using sticks


Sharada

Sharada belongs to the Lambani tribe, like most of the children she too hails from Raichur district. She is the sixth child among her 7 siblings. She has never been schooled before, Gubbachi is her first experience of school. Her father passed away 3 years ago and her mother has come to Bangalore to earn some money. They have a couple of acres of land back home. The mother is very keen to go back home and start farming. Sharada has spent most of her time herding cattle back home.

She is quiet a cheerful happy child and has the most beautiful laugh. As she is elder to most of the children, she tends to bully others and has a mind of her own.

I always had a curiosity to know, what a child woud be like he/she is never schooled and she answered my question.

She has no fear of authority what so ever. She likes to decide what she wants to do for the day. She bring down the whole class to a halt, if she wishes to.

She is wild, raw, chirpy and also mal-nutritioned. She does a lot of work back home, first half of the day. she is usually tried and mostly just wants to lie down. She loves wilderness walks, she a naturalist.

She had problems coming to school regularly, she would turn up on alternate days and it had impacted her learning hugely.

As a part of my case study, I visited her one of the day she didn’t turn up to school and found her busy with household chores. We expressed concern over her missing class and showed interest in talking to her mother about it. She started coming to school regularly.

Her Academics

As she had lost the critical window of learning, the way Nalli-kalli curriculum is designed. She struggled a lot in the beginning to write. It seemed like her fine motor skills were not fully developed. Her letters never looked like, as though she wrote an alphabet. Added to this challenge, her irregularity was posing her problem in her progress.

The picture shows some of sharada’s work. The alphabet she did with clay. Her pencil work was worse than this.


As she became regular to the school. Her interest in participating in the class activity became increased and started showing interest in reading and writing.

Though her progress is slow and she is in preliteracy stage. The picture shows her understanding of letters.

Unfortunately she will be going back to her village for this academic year. I only hope that our interaction with her mother regarding her education will be fruitful and she will join school.
