Educational Innovations and Practices

Objective:

The objective of this panel is to highlight the role of effective workplace innovations carried out in the classrooms of public (government) schools by innovative teachers. By providing an international platform to such teachers we hope to engage mainstream, top-down and centrally-designed educational reform in a dialogue with an alternative decentralized, locally-driven vision of educational reform.

Presenters:

Six outstanding teachers from the “Educational Innovations Bank” (EI Bank) project of the Ravi J. Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation have been invited to write papers on their grassroots experiences and make a presentation of the relevance of their work to the broader context of educational reform.

This EI Bank is a clearing house for the ‘innovations that improve’ of teachers working in government elementary schools. It has identified nearly 9000 locally-developed innovations of government school teachers, and has networked them through a website and mobile technology. The EI Bank works in partnership with the state, mainly in the Indian provinces of Gujarat and Maharasahtra.

“District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) Innovation Cells”, each headed by a lecturer, have been established in all the 26 DIETs in Gujarat—for the first time, a decentralized structure focused on innovation, has been set up in the public system. Case reports of about 1000 innovations are under preparation. More important than these targets, however, is the project’s demonstration of a model for creating a culture of innovation in the public system, based on a formal memorandum of understanding between the state and an academic institution. The Innovation Cells are now planning to identify and study innovations in their districts, and will be responsible for some of the outputs, like case studies and decentralized teacher meets.

A second area of impact has been on peer-led discussion at the teacher level on innovations and their use. Though the project started with an online discussion forum, the focus now is on moderated discussion using mobile phones. Also, about 5000 school management committees have been reached out to through mobile connectivity. A third aspect of the project, in line with its dissemination objective, is the creation of innovation packages for scaling up in educationally problematic areas. The Innovation Cells are at present (end-2014) in the process of identifying scalable innovations each from the database, to be implemented in 2015. In parallel, work is underway to develop three kinds of material: for teachers to help children’s learning; material that teachers and children can use; material directed solely at children.

Overview of presentations:

The six presentations will cover innovations in language teaching, teaching creativity in a group of government elementary schools, the use of information technology to enhance learning, using IT to network teachers, addressing the concerns of severely marginalized communities, and the development of a decentralized peer-driven forum for teacher development. True to the spirit of ICCIG 3, the teachers, who are working at the grassroots of the education system, will be making their presentations in their own languages. The audience will be provided summary translations in English at the end of each presentation.

We invite the audience to come listen to stories of hope, possibility and success—stories designed, developed and implemented by self-motivated elementary teachers, who have depended on their own creative and physical resources to make a difference to the lives of children from deprived communities.