Learning is Everyone’s Responsibility

• In Event: Understanding Social Responsibility towards Teaching and Learning, Part 1: The role of Community Actors.

Proposal

Education programs in India have focused on improving learning outcomes through interventions situated inside classrooms. Few models have approached children’s learning in an ecological framework, connecting schools, families, and communities.
Doing so has several challenges. Literature suggests that school actors tend to view their primary accountability to lie with administrative and political representatives. Further, in developing country contexts, formal processes bringing school and community actors together are often relegated to paper structures with little real engagement. Low parental education and other disadvantages mean that parents often underestimate the role they themselves can play in children’s learning, both within their homes and through interaction with teachers.
This paper examines one initiative–designed and implemented by the NGO Pratham–that attempts to engage school, family, and community actors to support children’s learning. Implemented in 300 villages in Uttar Pradesh, the PAHAL (‘Pratham’s Action in Home And Learning’, which also means initiative in Hindi) intervention aims to improve foundational learning by raising awareness across stakeholders and also fostering individual and collaborative action both inside and outside the traditional classroom. Prior to school shutdowns due to COVID, elements of this intervention were also being implemented in thousands of communities across India where Pratham had a presence.
The paper draws on conversations with PAHAL implementation teams and is structured in three sections. The first part reflects on lessons learned from trying to build an atmosphere of learning in homes and villages. For instance, the intervention in communities intended to strengthen social structures that drove awareness, changed perceptions, and helped families take ownership of their children’s education. As part of the initiative, rapid assessments in foundational reading and arithmetic were conducted to create awareness and mobilise support. These paved way for volunteer-led camps for the most disadvantaged, as well as children’s groups overseen by parents or older siblings that facilitated habit formation around regular study. Over time, intervention teams identified important adaptations to planned activities enabling better targeting and engagement.
In addition, in a subset of villages the intervention also worked with schools, engaging teachers through demonstration of simple methods and materials and organising informal school-community interactions. This made the program highly susceptible to the kinds of disruptions to school systems that are endemic in many parts of the global south, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Given that their consequences are rarely addressed in the context of interventions in the education space, the second part of the paper discusses impact of external factors on program implementation that disrupted planned activities in these locations.
The final section of the paper briefly describes how the program evolved and adapted in response to COVID-19. In doing so, it outlines how simple and cost-effective solutions (both digital and otherwise) were harnessed to continue engagement with the community of volunteers, parents, and teachers during these difficult times.
In this manner, while there remain obstacles to helping local actors engage with children’s education, the paper will spotlight learnings from one such attempt to overcome this problem.

Authors

• Arjun Agarwal, Pratham Education Foundation

• Faiyaz Ahmed, Pratham Education Foundation