Category: 2020

Hema Jain
A simple question from her young son led this author and her family to the path of homeschooling. Ten years later, the family is leading a much richer life, living and learning together. They offer us a peek into their homeschooling journey.

Seetha Anand
Head, heart and hands – a concept that is familiar to all those who know about Waldorf education. This extremely child-friendly system asks for high levels of commitment from its teachers who invest themselves in producing critically thinking, sensitive and free spirited individuals.

Subha Das Mollick
Everybody loves a good story and if it is in the form of moving images, the joy doubles. In India, the idea of using popular media to teach came into being in the 1980s. Today with digital technology at its peak, teachers have the choice of not just using educational programmes to teach, but also make their own visual teaching-learning materials and use popular movies to instruct students in science, math, history and civics.

Geeta Dharmarajan
Stories excite listeners, invoke their senses and make them attentive and alert. Stories help relate, provide meaning and develop the imagination. Aren’t stories then the best medium to teach little children? How did this idea of using stories to teach develop? What is StoryPedagogy?

Meenakshi Umesh
Learning by doing, working in harmony with nature, using their hands, gaining knowledge from the everyday, this is how children at Puvidham Learning Centre seek wisdom. An amalgamation of ideas by several renowned thinkers and educators, the only thing that the author was sure of when she started the Centre was that it would not be anything like her experience of the mainstream school.

Fiona Vaz
For the children in rural Orissa, Anil Pradhan is a messiah. By founding innovative schools, setting up maker labs and training teachers in the villages of Orissa, Pradhan has made learning a reality, giving hope and impetus to the dreams of many boys and girls.

Prakash Iyer
Do we have revolutions in education? Can we point at a particular time in history to show an education revolution? Unlike the more visible political revolutions, revolutions in education are subtle and continuous. Every act of responding to a concern emanating from the existing system, every question raised against a particular practice, every time we reflect and learn from each other is a step towards a revolution.

Pradita Nambiar
One of the aims of education, lately, has been to raise sensitive, aware and critically thinking individuals. It finds prominence in the latest policy on education, NEP 2020 as well. But critical thinking does not come from mere discussions; these discussions should be about specific problems and finding solutions to those problems. Every day, the teacher comes across several opportunities to initiate such discussions and draw out imaginative responses from her students.

Arundhati Misra and Abhik Bhattacherji
Reforms needn’t always come from an outside authority, if we put our minds to it, even individuals can transform an existing system. Teach for India, as its founder Shaheen Mistri envisioned, has become a people-led movement that is transforming India’s schools from the grassroots.

Ardra Balachandran
Why is it that some countries’ education systems are considered better than the others? How did Finland and Canada come to have progressive education systems? What did Singapore or Poland do right to become education hubs of the world? While education in every country is influenced by its culture and community, we certainly can learn and adapt from systems better than our own.