Creating stronger community engagement for children’s learning: Understanding drivers and limitations of sustainable and effective programs

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

Proposal

In India, children’s education is considered to be the primary responsibility of schools and teachers. Families and communities in rural India perceive themselves as incapable of contributing to children’s learning owing to issues related to poverty and low education. These issues are exacerbated further for women due to an array of socio-cultural and gender norms that restrict their mobility and interaction with members inside and outside the community. It is therefore crucial to understand how programs can enable or, conversely, create barriers for successful and sustainable community engagement for improving children’s education and learning.
This paper draws on discussions with 19 volunteers and 34 mothers as part of a school-community engagement program in Sitapur, India. The intervention included mobilising and training volunteers to conduct classes with children, organising village meetings on the issue of learning, and other activities to engage parents. The paper discusses volunteers’ motivations and mothers’ views regarding the program, their interaction with each other and the program staff as well as drivers and challenges encountered in achieving greater community engagement.
Volunteers in this program are youth from villages, largely though not always young women pursuing education or with at least elementary schooling. For most volunteers, this was the first time they were volunteering and working in their communities. These discussions reveal that volunteer’s interactions with program staff and the experience gained in trainings, conducting surveys, learning assessments and teaching children helped instil greater self-confidence, particularly among young women. But the motivation to volunteer appeared to wane after an initial period owing to challenges like the absence of monetary benefits, absenteeism among children and lack of support from parents. Female volunteers in particular found it challenging to surmount restrictive gender norms governing their mobility and interactions with community members. On the other hand, while all mothers interviewed for this study were appreciative of the program, particularly the additional learning support to children, their role in the program was restricted to sending children to classes. This limited role, along with religious, caste and educational differences between volunteers and mothers result in little to no interaction between these stakeholders as well as the absence of community ownership of the program. Interestingly, both volunteers’ and mothers’ interactions with program staff indicate the importance given to ‘outsiders’ in catalysing and motivating change within communities. Further, reflections from a parent-teacher meeting reveal the scope and appetite that mothers have for contributing to children’s education, and indicate that small-group networks may go much further towards achieving greater parental involvement among rural, poorly educated mothers than larger village-level activities.
By highlighting how community actors in this program engaged with each other, the program staff and the issue of children’s learning, this paper helps to think about how family and community interventions for children’s education can ‘stick’. Specifically, such programs should allocate a central role for families and parents, and take into account socio-cultural norms governing relationships and interactions in the community in order to circumvent the challenges arising from them.

Authors

• Suman Bhattacharjea, ASER Centre

• Purnima Ramanujan, ASER Centre

• Ankita Jha, ASER Centre

• Poorva Shekher, ASER Centre