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On education seminars and workshops circuits in India and abroad, the new buzzwords are 21st century, new millennium, and communication and soft skills learning. Even in India, there’s been a sudden shift in favour of developing critical thinking, analysis and problem solving skills. In particular, there’s a new and welcome awareness that contemporary education requires more than academic proficiency which can also be absorbed in environments far removed from bricks-and-mortar classrooms.
With this in mind, the first assignment I set for a recent training programme was for participants to think of one stand-out moment in their journey from school to the present day, a turn-around moment when they discerned, ‘I am good at this!’ or ‘I am this sort of learner!’ or ‘Oh, that’s why we did that thing at school!’ My objective was to make them think about the process of learning itself, not merely the outcomes. Some of the responses are worth noting because they say so much about the type of education dispensed in India’s classrooms.
‘I was on an important business trip to the US when I lost my slides. I made the presentation ‘jugaad’ style in the awareness that if I had confidence in myself, people would have confidence in me.’
‘The car broke down on a dark road. I angled my make-up mirror to reflect the only light onto the chassis, to help me change a tyre. It was the first time I realised there was a practical application to what I learned in college.’
What struck me was that none of these reflective moments happened in a standard classroom on a normal day. Even now for the current generation of young learners in India, a normal school day is mostly about competitive achievement against a narrow set of markers set by others, viz, examinations that act as a barrier to high quality further education. Learning for exams doesn’t require any self-awareness, and more crucially, doesn’t stimulate the strong creative and adaptive instincts necessary for success in the world beyond school gates.
Hence the growing importance of out-of-classroom learning. Getting out of the classroom in essence means getting your nose out of textbooks! But unfortunately the time children spend not studying formally is often seen as educationally less important than the moments when they are working hard, copying and memorising facts and dates for tests.
One solution is to combine the two and connect the dots between study and exploration in children’s minds. For instance, if there’s a chapter on water pollution in a civics or biology textbook, teachers could take students to a connected institution such as the Sulabh Museum of Toilets in Dwarka, Delhi, where the latter can witness the operations of a biogas plant and learn about the history and evolution of sanitation in different parts of the world.
If an appropriate museum is inaccessible or logistics are a problem, there are other ways of getting out of classrooms to acquire on-site education. Take children on a tour of an arboretum, a post office, shop, farm or bank. Find a local musician, dancer, artisan or historian and ask them to explain their modus operandi, challenges and responses. The objective should be to initiate creative projects which help students forget about formal study and start to assimilate hands-on or exploratory learning. Last year, I met a group of class III government school students who were able to explain the structure of a leaf, the role of chlorophyll and the importance of photosynthesis in plant life after their teacher had helped them nurture a school garden.
When children explore the real world, the intrinsic excitement of learning is visible. This is probably the rationale of ‘flipped learning’ under which schools focus on delivering experiential learning and leave the reading of textbooks to children at home. Proponents of flipped learning argue that children who experience real, firsthand learning will retain textbook knowledge easily.
Walking down memory lane, I recall that I experienced an epiphanic learning moment at age six when I was in primary school in the UK. We were challenged to create a durable sculpture using only paper and fevicol. We were, in my memory, given days of curriculum time to mess about with paper and glue. Eventually, after expending many hours with sticky fingers and squashed paper, I created a foot-high sculpture of tight paper coils which to my sheer delight, my class teacher could stand on without crushing!
I believe I learned much about science in those days of ‘messing about’, and was later able to quickly relate with materials, molecular structures and forces. Understanding knowledge as presented in the textbook was easier once I had experienced application of the laws of science. More importantly, I learned something about my own learning style and capabilities. I learnt that I liked to experiment and became aware that I liked making things, and that if I kept experimenting, my subject knowledge would improve.
Having had plenty of opportunities to get out of the classroom, I have become a more reflective and capable learner. Opportunities for real-world experimenting and project assignments beyond traditional classroom learning are what teachers must create for young learners of today.
(Eliza Hilton is director of Flow India, a Delhi-based teacher training and education consultancy firm)