The Challenge

Capacity Building of English Teachers in some remote villages of Rajasthan

 In March 2006, I was involved with a panel of eminent English language experts to develop textbooks for under-privileged children in some remote areas of Rajasthan and Gujarat. The project which took almost three years to complete, was the turning point of my career as a content developer, for it brought me face-to-face with the reality of English language teaching in India.

Most state governments in the country have decided to implement English from Class 1 without building the necessary infrastructure for its effective implementation. An alarming situation confronting most government schools especially in the remote areas is the non-availability of competent teachers to teach English. Some NGO’s operating in these states have therefore taken it upon themselves to conduct capacity building workshops for their teachers.

The NGO with whom I was involved works in the tribal villages of Udaipur and surrounding districts of Rajasthan. They run non-formal activity centers where they provide minimum levels of literacy in English to help children gain admission into Class 1 in the government run primary schools.

In order to have a firsthand understanding of the target population before settling down to preparing the manuscripts, my colleague and I decided to have an exploratory visit in the area where these activity centers were located. This would not only throw light on the potential of the teachers and the learners, but also facilitate greatly in developing appropriate texts for the target audience. During one of our visits, in addition to several things, this is what we experienced:

“We left the National highway leading to Mount Abu at a crossroad and took the narrower road to our first halt, a hamlet in Badgam block. Goats tied to posts and a few cows grazing nearby, greeted us. We parked our vehicle right in front of the hut that served as the NFE centre. A few children greeted us at the door with shy namastes, bending down to touch our feet in reverence. With expectant eyes and wide grins, they waited for us to begin.

We did not want to disturb their class, yet we had to complete our task. We made the children sit in a circle and asked them to name all the objects around them. We also showed them pictures that we had carried along, waiting expectantly for that magic English word that we were so eager to hear from them! Sure enough, very soon they named a few words as they had heard them before –firaak(frock), boll(ball), colour, diary, capy (copy), paper, boot, chaak (chalk), etc. Their vocabulary was good, eh!

I then said that I would give a few ‘commands’ in English which they had to repeat after me and follow. Every word that I said was rendered perfectly by the little ones and the actions done to perfection. I was amazed, for they seemed to enjoy the sounds of the new language and were able to repeat what they heard, as they heard it! Therefore, if English could be taught well, here we had a bunch of children who would benefit immensely! I was excited at the prospect of being able to prepare activities and modules for them. But how and who would be disseminating the language skills was something that bothered me. For, if we were to rely on the masterji, a young man of the same village who was a ‘9^th Class pass’, I feared all our effort would be wasted. It was therefore important to first train the masterji before proceeding further………”

 

Photographs - kind courtesy: The team at VBS, Udaipur

In due course of time, we conducted many workshops for the teachers of these activity centers. It was indeed a challenging task since the average academic qualification of most of the teachers was between Class 8 to Class 12. They had also not undergone any formal teacher training programmes. In the interior areas there was absolutely no scope to encounter English even on wrappers of soaps and biscuits and due to the lack of basic amenities, even radios were not available, a medium that could have helped greatly in exposing them to the English language (if they tuned in to cricket commentaries).

It was therefore left to me and my colleague to innovate novel methods to help them build their proficiency and in so doing, the foundation of our textbook series was laid.

In March 2010 the series was published by a leading publishing house and the latest feedback is that almost every school that has subscribed to it is appreciative of the content and the innovative exercises, an outcome of the exploratory visit we had one rainy morning in August!