Bridging the Gap Between Home and School for Adivasi Children

As more and more children from tribal communities enrol in school, more complex and urgent issues confront teachers. One of the most daunting of these is helping Adivasi children adjust to the completely alien culture of school, which has its own language and culture. NGOs working in Adivasi dominated areas have been struggling to support both teachers and learners to address this pressing issue. CLR had the opportunity to be part of such efforts, in partnership with a group of NGOs from Thane, Nasik and Nandurbar districts of Maharashtra.

Resistance from Communities

A somewhat unexpected part of initiating this project was the resistance that was displayed by the parents over introducing home language in schools. This had to be addressed through community meetings, where parents expressed their very real concern: that their children would be kept out of the mainstream of education by making them learn in their own home languages, which the community had long been conditioned to regard as backward and inferior. Sensitive and empathetic explanations about early language learning, and assurances that their children would soon transition to school language and even English later, helped to get parents’ buy-in to the project.

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Building Bridges

Many teachers had developed a working knowledge of the children’s spoken languages – in this case, Warli, Pavra and Lamani – but there was little or no material in these languages available for teachers to use. CLR worked with community members, local artists and teachers to gather word lists, stories and poems, and created contextualised teaching-learning materials as well as books in various Adivasi languages in Maharashtra. These were used by the NGOs both directly with children as well as to build teacher capacity to bring into the classroom the children’s home languages and with it their rich and ancient culture.

Sustained Effectiveness

Continued observation visits to these NGO programmes in the tribal communities revealed that the teaching-learning materials and reading materials developed in the home languages were being used regularly in classrooms. It was gratifying to see that together with our field-level NGO partners CLR had made a small dent in validating and promoting home languages of marginalised tribal groups as a positive cultural and language resource. In retrospect, we also think that the processes we adopted in the creation of locale-specific educational materials have a wider replicability for programmes elsewhere that may share our objectives.

EXAMPLES OF PROJECTS - Foundational Literacy and Numeracy

Curriculum Development and Teacher Training for Government Schools in Nandurbar District, Maharashtra
Community-Based Support Classes for Vulnerable School Children in Pune District
Bridging the Gap Between Home and School for Adivasi Children