Community-Based Support Classes for Vulnerable School Children in Pune District
Students from educated backgrounds receive a great deal of support from their families, both in terms of a literate environment as well as direct support for homework, preparing for tests and so on. But first-generation school-goers often do not get this support, and are therefore at a disadvantage from the start. A frequently irrelevant syllabus and unsympathetic school environment adds to the ‘burden of incomprehension’, and they become vulnerable to failure and eventually dropping out. Field based organisations struggle to give these children the right academic support, with staff who are themselves not trained for the task.
CLR has helped many such organisations to build the capacity of their young field staff to run support classes, either in the school or in the community, to ensure that children achieve the foundational skills that will ensure success in school and increase the chances of school completion. One such organisation was CASP-Plan, which was running support classes for children in the villages of Maval block in Maharashtra’s Pune district.
Capacity Building
Most of the field workers who ran support classes had themselves come from traditional government schools in their villages, and many had obtained a teaching diploma. In both these levels of education, they had imbibed the traditions of top-down, rote-learning, and had no exposure to more progressive and effective teaching methods. CLR training sessions helped these young people to recognise and accept their own attitudes and misconceptions, and equipped them to change their teaching practice to one that was more suited to the needs of their learners. The training also included a deep dive into the curriculum at the FLN level, about which these support teachers often had only a superficial understanding.