Teacher-to-Teacher

Case for low-cost teaching aids

There is a paradigm shift in classroom pedagogies used by teachers around the world. Conventional teaching-learning methodologies are fast giving way to newer, innovative and efficient pedagogies. Chalk-and-talk though not fully redundant, has become somewhat obsolete and is considered pitiably inadequate in the contemporary educational scene. All over the world teachers are innovating new teaching aids to make teaching-learning processes more interesting and effective.

While in the developed industrial nations of the first world pedagogy innovations are centred around capital-intensive newly emergent information communication technologies (ICT), in capital-deficient developing countries growing attention is being accorded to developing low-cost teaching aids. As implied in their nomenclature low-cost teaching aids involve minimal or nil input costs as they are made from household waste and discarded items or from materials readily available in our immediate surroundings and natural environments. Developed and produced on campus, they help institutions become self-reliant and reduce costs of education. Incremental and selective use of low-cost teaching aids makes the process of teaching and learning more varied, interesting and effective.

Mary Anne Dasgupta, author of Low-cost, No-cost Teaching Aids (National Book Trust, India), has successfully used low-cost teaching aids in many charitable schools in Kolkata. Likewise Lalit Kishore — a science teaching expert of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan which runs the highly successful 928 Central government sponsored Kendriya Vidyalaya schools — has experimented with a wide variety of low-cost teaching aids while working with a KVS-sponsored project at the Rajghat Besant School, Varanasi in the 1980s. His book Let’s Put Things Together (co-authored with Anwar Zafri) is the result of his experience there. Moreover workshops on the use of economical teaching aids have also been conducted at Eklavya Institute of Teacher Education, Ahmedabad.

Another Bhopal-based NGO of the same name — Eklavya — has also done pioneering work to promote the use of low-cost teaching aids in schools. Its first school programme, the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme was started in 1972 and is operational in 16 middle schools of Hoshangabad district, Madhya Pradesh. Additional resource support is provided by Delhi University, TIFR, IITs and several colleges in Madhya Pradesh.

Arvind Kumar Gupta, an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur and currently employed at the Inter University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics Children’s Science Centre, is perhaps the greatest crusader and champion of low-cost teaching aids. "The Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme in India though inspired by the Nuffield philosophy, had to reinvent all the hardware to suit local conditions. This programme covers over 1,000 schools in villages in Central India. The idea was to critically look at local resources and find possibilities of doing innovative science teaching using local, low-cost, easily accessible material. The Matchstick Mecanno is used successfully to learn geometry and three-dimensional shapes. It also used little bits of cycle valve tubes and matchsticks to make an array of 3D structures. Likewise, a Film Can Balloon Pump was made using a piece of old bicycle tube, two film cans and bits of sticky tape for valves. With this pump children can inflate and pop a balloon. This pump is low cost, fun and exhilarates science learning," writes Gupta in a web article ‘Learning Science through Activities and Toys’ (http://www.iucaa.ernet.in).

Low-cost teaching aids can be used in nursery, primary, middle, secondary and senior secondary schools. Of course, the type as well as number of aids to be used in a given subject would vary from one class to another. But broadly speaking, primary and middle school students can be engaged in making simple items with rudimentary materials such as bits of paper, cardboard and thermocole using scissors, glue etc, whereas senior school students could develop teaching aids using metal, wood, plastic, rubber etc.

Low-cost teaching aids can be used for supplementary and illustrative education in the sciences as well as the humanities. However, they are most suitable for subjects like science, geography, mathematics and art and crafts.

In a resources-starved economy such as India where the masses need to be educated about how to properly dispose household waste and used items and huge piles of garbage and trash is dumped on roadsides and street corners, low-cost teaching aids made from household waste and trash serve a particularly useful purpose. With a bit of creativity and imagination, scraps of metal, wood, plastic, rubber, paper etc can metamorphose into valuable items, which can be used as effective teaching tools. System-wide use of low-cost teaching aids will not only boost teacher/student creativity and involvement, help institutional budgets go a longer way, but also serve to keep our immediate environments clean.