Yours or mine? Whose English?

Surbhi Nagpal

English teaching in Indian classrooms is usually associated with grammatical competence. Since the globalised world demands competence ,teachers and educators must give due importance to culture and context when teaching English as a second language. The article highlights a recent initiative in this direction.

That unsettled feeling

Neeraja Raghavan

Teachers are a harried lot and have their everyday concerns. But it is the reflective teacher who stops to think about what she or he is doing who goes to become a happy and successful teacher. It is this process of reflection or action research that helps in teacher development. Three real cases have been cited here to show that when a teacher feels unsettled, it is then that her journey to development begins

The science of separation – 1

Avneesh Shukla

The science teaching-learning process becomes more interesting if a practical approach is taken instead of rote learning and an emphasis on drill. Students feel connected and there is a sense of participation if examples from their everyday lives are demonstrated and highlighted. The author of this article explains how a lesson on separation techniques using everyday examples found a chord within government school students.

An open letter to teachers

G. Gautama

Here is a passionate appeal from a renowned educator to all teachers to introspect about the new education policy that may come into being. It is an appeal to teachers to fight the government’s move to scrap the ‘no detention policy’.

Can you print out this…thing?

Ullas Ponnadi
The next big thing in technology is 3D printing. Over the next few years, 3D printing is bound to create a revolution of sorts. At the school level, this exciting area can be introduced to the children, provided schools are able to afford a 3D printer. Low- cost solutions are also available with contents that can be reasonably aligned with the school curriculum. Read up on this exciting technology.

Beware of schools!

Ashtami Rajan
Be wary of schools for they do not inculcate the spirit of liberty, fraternity and equality;be wary of schools because they operate on a model that inhibits freedom, encourages competition at the cost of cooperation and gives unequal opportunities to students; be wary of schools because they restrict movement of children, their ability to communicate and learn from each other in the name of discipline. These are some of the arguments put forward by the author. She argues that unless schools become sites where dominant frameworks are challenged and stereotypes are broken, they will remain spaces one needs to be wary of.

A sense of oneness

Arun Elassery
The Valley School, Bangalore, has been around for 35 years, and that itself speaks for its sense of oneness that prevails in the school.

How would you like to learn art?

Lakshmi Karunakaran
Anna Okrasko talks about her journey as a student of art, an artist and as a teacher of art in this interview to Teacher Plus. She talks about her experience in art education in Poland, Spain and the Netherlands and why she thinks teachers need to be more open to experimentation in the classroom.

Start, Camera, Caution!

Ardra Balachandran

CCTVs in the classroom, cameras in the toilets…. can this happen in schools in our country? Make no mistake. Slowly, but surely, Big Brother keeping a watch on teachers and children is becoming a reality. This idea of school surveillance is our Cover Story this month and our correspondent spoke to several teachers and students to get their view on this invasive mechanism. The use of CCTVs in classrooms and schools may have improved safety systems, but using them to monitor teacher activity has raised a few hackles. Is surveillance or monitoring necessary to run a system? How far can one go and when does it become invasive? The questions are many and the answers difficult to comprehend.