Report on visit to the Timbaktu Collective, Ananthapur Disctrict, rural Andhra Pradesh.
Visit in Feb 2003 by Anita Balasubramanian

Timbaktu Schools - Discussions, follow-ups and comments

Timbaktu Collective runs 4 schools - 3 of which are non-residential and one which is residential. The schools caters upto 8th std. During my visit to Timbaktu in February 2003 for 5 days, I spent some time at the residential school, understanding the various aspects of the schools, their philosophy and work.

On the first day, I visited Prakruti Badi, a non-residential school near the office. This school has about 100 children. In one of the areas where the children were reading, there were some maps (mandal map, district map, India map) painted on the wall. We asked the children where Chennakothapalli Mandal was and they said - "Here", showing the school and the place they were in. We had to rephrase the question and ask them, if they could point to Chennakothapalli mandal on the map. Some of the children rushed to show it on the map. One of the children asked where I came from. I told them from Bangalore. They started identifying where Bangalore was on the India map and in which state. The children were very interested. What struck me was that after we visited other classes in this school, they were still exploring some other places on the map. They were working on something else, when we interrupted them and they continued with the map. The teacher also allowed them to continue with the map activity till they were satisfied. I do not remember anything else, since this was an extremely short and hurried visit.

There are about 40 children in the residential school. There are number of girls is more than boys in this school presently. There are 3 rooms with thatched roofs where the children as well as 2 of the teachers stay. There are 5 teachers - Padma, Subba, Kalyani, Ansy and (?). There are 2 open classrooms. And there is also a small structure that the children built themselves, which they use for various activities. They also have a playground. There are many other activities/workshops being organized at Timbaktu, and this causes much interference in the childrenís schedules. Hence a separate kitchen is currently being built. There is also a small room being built which will be used as a science lab, computer lab and a resource center, since so far these children have not had access to the resource center at C.K.Palli.

Many of the children in these residential schools come from very difficult family backgrounds. Some children are being parented by only their mothers or father since the other ran away with someone else. Some of the childrenís mothers have been abused. Some children, staying with their relatives since their parents are no longer alive, are being badly treated. Some have been treated badly by their parents. For all these children, this is one place that they are happy, free of being abused and for some the only family they have. The children come to the residential school in many ways. In some cases, the parents are willing to send them here. In other cases, once the Timbaktu School staff know of a child in need, they contact the parents to see if the child can come to the residential school. Sometimes the parents/guardians are unwilling to send the child to school, in which case a lot of convincing needs to be done. When the child is admitted into this school, it is ensured that the guardianship or parental rights stay with the guardians/parents. That the parents have consented to send the children to a residential school, that this is not an orphanage. This is very essential, since this provides a legal backing for the school. A lot of talking with parents needs to be done to ensure this happens in some cases.

Many of these children see a lot of violence in and around their homes. When they first come to the residential school, some of them are violent. Talking about violence, hitting each other, beating each other is taken up in the school assembly sessions and in person with individual children as often as possible. What is given stress is that whatever the provocation, beating/violence is not justified. Slowly the violent behavior decreases. However patting or hitting softly in jest, while playing continues.

The children at the residential school have a very busy schedule everyday with many activities. The children have assigned tasks and they take turns doing all these activities. In some cases, children who have just entered the school are not interested in doing work. They may have been so overworked that they want to take a break. They are allowed to and these children slowly start participating in various activities over a period of time. On Sundays, the children put up a cultural program, that is compeered by the children, the children go around requesting/asking other children if they would like to perform something. Since I was there on a Sunday that the program was happening, they were requesting us to sing a song in Telugu. I told them I will be a spectator this time and perform next time for them. The program was good, with the children singing (some French songs also that they learnt recently), dancing, etc. After the program, we had a moonlight dinner in the open. This was indeed extremely memorable.

The school starts with a session on maths in the morning. Maybe for two reasons - one the children are fresh in the morning and secondly, they donít have to dread math till the end of the day J After the maths class, there is assembly. Everyday there is a few minutes of meditation and reading of the newspaper. In the assembly, no songs related to any God are sung. This was a conscious decision, but some teachers started singing songs related to God. A parent complained about this and since then there are no songs related to God. There are various sessions each day, like singing, discussion on various issues concerning the school (maybe someone hitting somebody etc), storytelling sessions etc. The day I attended the assembly, it was story telling session. I also told one. While telling stories the children were telling the story without much action, intonations and expressions. I mentioned to the teachers that it would be good, if they are encouraged to be more expressive while telling stories and do some actions.

In classes, there is not much of stress on any method of teaching or methodology. The idea is that whatever way the child learns is the method that is used. Restricting teaching to just one methodology is too structured and limiting. There needs to be some structure, but there should not be only one way of learning something. The teacher should constantly improvise and customize the method according to each childís needs. For this it may be helpful to know of the various available methods and use the one applicable to the time, context and the child.

With the younger children, there is a lot of flexibility in what each child is working on. The teacher keeps track of what each child is doing. Once a child finishes a certain topic, they do a worksheet that helps the teacher assess the childís learning. This worksheet also gets the child ready to take exams at a later stage. For e.g. - Two children were doing worksheets on addition, subtraction, two were working on multiplication tables, few were writing numbers in numerals and words and so on. With the elder children there is lot of stress on self learning. Many of the older children take classes for the younger children or work with the younger children in languages, social sciences etc.

The morning sessions are for academics and the afternoon session for various activities like painting, knitting, crochet, stitching, building, gardening, clay work, feeding the cow, poultry, carpentry, etc. In the residential school there is more time with the children as they stay at the same place after school and hence many more activities are done with them, like the fortnightly cultural programs, poultry, farming, gardening etc. There is not much time for such activities in the other schools.

Since there are children of all ages in the residential school, staying together for most of their time, I was curious to know if they had to address various concerns with older boys and girls. Subba mentioned that a lot of their time is spent on this. Relationships based on attraction, notions of romance are not encouraged in the school for various reasons. These are not acceptable by the community for one. Children watch a lot of movies when they go home once in two weeks and are affected by what they watch. They often try to emulate what they see. Writing letters are very common. One girl got a letter from a boy and was beaten badly by her father when he got to know. A lot of time is spent counseling and talking with the children. The children are encouraged to look at their feelings from a practical perspective, to see that these could be mere attractions, that at this point there are more important and pressing issues in their life, like what they would like to do for the future, what they would like to study, what kind of life they would like to lead etc.

There is a resource center in C.K.Palli. This is a resource center for teachers as well as children. The main stress is on making various resources and materials available to the children to come and use freely and responsibly. Children from other schools have also started using the resource center during the weekends and during the afternoons or evenings. Children assume responsibility of various materials and also make their own material. For e.g. - on the computer - A child good at computers, organized a painting competition using paint brush for children. Similarly, someone good at using excel had pasted basic instructions for learning to use excel on the wall, so that children wanting to learn could do so. The hope is that the resource center and the materials available would help develop their abilities, identify what they are good at and encourage leadership in children. Similarly, there are some children who are good at clay work, typing etc. An activity or resource is introduced, basic instructions are given and children are allowed to take it up and they become good at it. Some classes of typing, computer, clay work etc for the younger children are facilitated by the older children.

The schools in the villages started in 1992. The residential school started in 1995(?). Mary started the school, and others joined in. Some teachers have stayed with the schools for a long time. It is compulsory for the teacher to stay in the village itself and be open to working with children from all the backgrounds. Housing allowance is provided. However finding teachers who would stay in the village is very difficult, even though Anantapur is just 50 km away.

The children here are extremely warm and full of energy. They promptly display all their skills to visitors. Cartwheels, playing with ëtopsí, chakkabajana(a folk dance) etc. The children are extremely good at singing and dancing. One girl had learnt songs from her home in her (tribal) language - a mixture of Hindi and Telugu. They are also very quick at learning songs. They picked up atleast 10 french songs within a matter of a week, from a French visitor at Timbaktu. These children are also very resourceful. One wanted to learn type writing and found someone to teach him the basics, rather than going to typewriting class. Some children help with much of the electrical wiring, solar equipment maintenance etc. One boy Ramu, now in his 12th, wants to do carpentry. Another wants to do B.A. These are happy children with wishes, aspirations and dreams.

Future plans and follow-up

• There are plans to have a vocational training center built, where there are opportunities to learn various things like carpentry, solar equipment maintenance, screen printing etc. This center could also be a place where low cost traditional wooden toys are made and knowledge about traditional wooden toys is gathered and disseminated. This is still in the planning stages, but the possibility exists.
• There are regular teacher trainings organized for teachers from their schools. Subba said it would be possible to organize teacher training programs for teachers from other schools Asha supports. These training programs can cover topics like science teaching, overall philosophy of teaching, any other specific topics etc.
• Workshops on the changes and development that happens in our body during adolescence and how that affects our emotions, our feelings. Timbaktu would like to organize such workshops for children and teachers to create awareness. This would also help children talk about various issues disturbing them to the teachers they trust. The teachers will also learn how to tackle such issues in the rural context.
• In the next year, the german group supporting Timbaktu Collective is undergoing some internal changes and so funding may be intermittent. Subba would like to request Asha to consider increased support during this period of time.
• The 3 rooms in which the children and the teachers stay need revamping with the roof and the overall structure as well. Subba was mentioning that a complete revamp of these buildings is something that needs to be considered for next year.
• They would like to get a set of the books that we are sending to some other groups through Tulika Publishers.
• There are plans to organize a childrenís camp at Timbaktu for children from other schools in AP. Timbaktu organizes camps for the children from the nearby villagers every year and children look forward to these camps. Such camps would be an excellent opportunity for children to learn, share and have fun.

Comments

1. The plans for the vocational training, also a place where low cost traditional toys can be made and sold is a very interesting one and if possible should be supported. There is much of a need for wooden indigenous and novel toys with the market being flooded with toys from all over the world, but indigenous low cost toys.
2. Since there is stress on making available various methodologies so that the appropriate one can be used by all teachers easily and quickly, it means that methods that are simple, easy to use, easy to introduce are the ones that would be more appealing than methods which require much preparation, cannot be improvised, are extremely structured, even if the latter do produce good results.
3. At the residential school, there are many activities that the children do. There is an effort to give equal importance to every activity. An effort to show that a dignified life is possible by taking up these activities as a profession. In some regular schools, though there are may be many activities, academic subjects are given more importance and other activities carry much lesser value. Taking up some of these activities as a profession is not dignified, not acceptable. This mindset needs to change if we want to see people choosing to take up different professions.
4. The other side of not much stress on academics is that there is not much pressure to increase the strength that schools can accommodate. Parents want a school which would stress on academics. Merit and marks are given more importance by parents. However this has reduced pressure on Timkabtu to increase the number of children in schools, looking for more teachers etc. Other improvements like making the resource center for all the children, building another one for the residential school, increasing the number of children in the residential school to 40 has been possible. However, the issue of what the parents in rural areas expect vs. what an alternate school offers is present in many other alternate schools. Thought needs to be given to bridge this gap, if the alternatives want to create a large scale impact to the existing way of schooling and education.
5. I was a taken aback a bit initially by seeing children hit each other. This seemed a bit more than normal. Later, getting to know about their backgrounds and the violence experience and see every day, I could associate this with what I was seeing. This was just my perception.

Anita Balasubramanian