Opinion
International Literacy Day: Kavita Sanghvi on Student-Centred Classes & Inquiry-Based Learning
On this International Literacy Day, a principal’s take on education, its meaning and the right kind to be imparted
The world celebrates ‘International Literacy Day’ by UNESCO on 8th September. This year, the theme is ‘Literacy teaching and learning in the COVID-19 crisis and beyond with a focus on the role of educators and changing pedagogies.’
Reflect and you’ll observe that the word ‘Literacy’ holds different meaning to Governments across the world. Its dictionary meaning ‘ability to read and write’ is what most countries adhere to but in OECD countries, it means "to work within the knowledge (information) societies that will dominate the twenty-first century" (OECD, 1997). In this view, once again, literacy has a clear functional role in the context of a globalizing world.
In the past 20 years, working as a teacher, Head and teacher trainer, I have witnessed teaching practices across the world that puts literacy in the new perspective region wise. Some of the pedagogical practices have inspired me to incorporate the same in my practice and train teachers for the same.
In 2013, I had been accepted by the British Council for their Global Teacher Accreditation program, commonly known as GTA. Around 100 teachers across India had been selected and the program necessitated that we conduct action research in school for any academic assignment that intrigues us with the help of a mentor and present the findings. My research topic was ‘Introducing Experiential Learning Theory in teaching Physics to students of Grade 9 to develop thinking skills.’ In the process of conducting the research, I had to study the theory of the pedagogy profoundly, revisit my lesson plans, design assessments, modify teaching practices and at the end, take 360-degree feedback to evaluate my efforts. The entire experience opened a new door completely as the classroom was no more teacher-centred but student-centred and also rebuff the theory of experiential being centred on experiments. Experiments are a slice of experiential but not the complete whole. Later, as I began visiting unique schools across the nation and world like MGIS, ISHA Home School, I could tell that one facet of their school pedagogy was entirely experiential in nature.
The journey of being offered a GTA opened new windows of opportunity to me. In 2015, British Council initiated a Core Skills program where they desired that 21st Century skills like Communication and Collaboration, Digital literacy, Student Leadership, Creativity and Imagination, Critical Thinking & Problem Solving was interwoven into academics. Through a strict validation program, I was selected as the Core Skills Trainer and began training teachers across India for the same. The program entailed that we first trained ourselves, trained teachers and study the impact of Skill education on students through Reflection sessions after 3 months of the implementation. The content was rich with immense scope of application. Over the years, I have trained thousands of teachers and assessed them and realized one thing, a passionate and hardworking educator does justice to a CPD in spite of all challenges but the best of knowledge fails in a teacher who works only for a certificate. Today is the era of skills and the New National Education policy stresses on it vehemently. Every known pedagogy needs to be reviewed for adaptation to the current scenario and teacher training is the first step to realize that dream. The policy to create teachers through a 4-year program is highly welcome as the Instructional Core vehemently speaks that classroom instructions revolve around three things primary – Teacher, Student, and Content and at the centre is the task.
In 2017, as part of the Varkey Foundation, Global Teacher Prize, I interacted with teachers across the world. I witnessed the Master class of the Top 10 teachers over three years and arrived at the conclusion that there was something common to all the sessions. All the teachers asked deep questions, they prompted you to answer, they involved you in creating a hypothesis and evaluate them to arrive at conclusions, from the beginning of the lesson to the end, you were engaged. Further, they asked you to take it from there and implement it in your countries to study the outcomes. I went deeper into the lessons and realized that they were all using the inquiry-based learning coupled with project-based learning.
IBL theory begins with deep questioning, could be a scenario, an event or an experiment. Ex: Why is the lemon black in colour? The student is prompted to examine, suggest a hypothesis, design experiments to test and evaluate and arrive at conclusions to validate their hypothesis. PBL allows you to take any problem and analyse it to seek solutions. Both theories make you think critically and re-impose that judgements should be based on pieces of evidence and not on hearsay.
As a Scientix Ambassador for the past 3 years, I have studied numerous STEM courses, conducted Teach Meet, designed lesson plans and conducted researches which I have shared on world platforms. I regularly interact with the teachers from Europe and comprehended that digital literacy is the first step and paramount to deepening your knowledge and network. Further, all their lesson plans revolve around students engaging, students assessing each other’s work and student’s presentation through e-booklets or e-posters or other digital platforms. The assessment is more on concept application and evaluation and this informs us that we, too, need a robust assessment policy to make the teaching-learning process more centred on skill-building. The New Education Policy dictates it and we await it eagerly.
Finally, given that currently under COVID-19 times where all teachers and students overnight moved from offline to online with minimum training but maximum determination and my personal experience over the years, the meaning of literacy can no more be basic read or write but a quest to develop an aptitude for research, hunger for new-found knowledge, competency to analyse information critically, the power to evaluate evidence and vision to create sound theories and judgements.
About the author
Kavita Sanghvi, Principal at Chatrabhuj Narsee Memorial School