If instead of the cover story in this issue of EducationWorld you first read the special report feature, you’ll appreciate that even the youngest children are endowed with natural intelligence from birth and their brains are almost completely developed by the time they attain the age of eight. But, children’s brains don’t develop automatically; they need to be built through encouragement, age-appropriate stimulation and learning-by-doing play activities.
Hence the critical importance of early childhood care and education (ECCE), whose cause your editors have championed — EducationWorld has convened five unprecedented Early Childhood Education Global Conferences during the past quinquennium. This sustained endeavour has borne some fruit. In September 2013, in its last few months in office, the Congress-led UPA II government at the Centre approved a National Early Childhood Care and Education policy draft of the Union ministry of women and child development, which is now awaiting implementation under the BJP-led NDA government which was voted to power in New Delhi last May (2014).
By a happy, not wholly intended coincidence, our cover story provides considerable evidence of the latent capabilities of children to innovate valuable socio-economic reform ideas, and in the process improve their academic knowledge and develop life skills.
After graduating from the highly and rightly acclaimed National Institute of Design in 1989 and promoting the Riverside School, Ahmedabad in 2001, educationist Kiran Bir Sethi ideated and launched Design for Change in 2009. DFC is a unique programme which encourages, rewards and celebrates primary-secondary schools, which prompt their students to undertake beneficial, even if small socio-economic projects in their neighbourhood.
Since then, the annual DFC I CAN School Challenge, under which students plan and execute reform projects through DFC’s feel-imagine-do-share (FIDS) framework and learn by doing, has enthused over 32,000 schools and 100,000 students countrywide, and has spread to over 30 countries. Every year, a growing number of class I-X children in India and abroad, with the support of their school managements and teachers, are addressing local social issues such as environment despoliation, garbage management, child marriages, gender discrimination etc, and are cooperatively ideating and implementing schemes/campaigns to ameliorate, if not abolish, them.
The story of the evolution of the DFC I CAN School Challenge programme and its positive impact upon students and local communities in India and a growing number of countries worldwide, is the subject matter of our cover story in this issue of EducationWorld. It’s an inspiring story of how children who are usually obliged to be passive recipients of knowledge and wisdom under traditional chalk-n-talk pedagogies, can transform into change-agents in their local communities, and in the process discover the joy and purpose of learning.
