Deccan Herald » DH Education » Detailed Story

Hand in hand with Sangati

Sangati, developed by a Mumbai based NGO, is a supplementary curriculum that attempts to make a connection between what children are taught in schools and what they see around them.

On a rainy August morning in Mumbai, the dilapidated building and sodden grounds of the municipal Urdu high school at Dharavi cut a desolate picture. The rains had kept several children away from school, and Saadiqua Harnekar’s 37-strong class was three-fourths full. Saadiqua, a bright cheerful woman teaching Class 7, was this morning busy preparing for her ‘sangati’ lesson. On her table were a beautiful, well brought out picture book and a teacher’s guide with a story and points of discussion.

‘Sangati’ is a supplementary curriculum that attempts to make a connection between what children are taught in schools and what they see around them. It provides children with a way of thinking, a means of interpreting the world and making sense of the range of experiences they face in their growing years. Developed by Abacus, a Mumbai based NGO, and monitored by their staff regularly, sangati lessons are currently being held twice a week for an hour in 180 municipal schools in Mumbai, and 120 government schools in Yavatmal and Chandrapur districts of Maharashtra.

Saadiqua began by recapitulating what they had done in the last sangati class. She spoke of family structures, how adults often impose decisions on children, discrimination against girls, and the story of the girl Maya who made her wishes known and insisted on being sent to school. Through all this, the children listened quietly. She then moved on to the topic for the day – a story about two adjoining villages; one Hindu, the other Muslim, and how children from both the villages bring its suspicious and fearful adults together. As she held up the colourful pictures of the story, children listened attentively.

The complementary nature of the sangati curriculum has made the teaching of regular subjects easier, she feels. For example, sangati speaks of social justice, and in civics they learn about the rights and duties of citizens.

Most children going to municipal schools experience problems such as domestic violence, squabbles over meagre resources, and discrimination against girls at home. Outside, they see communal tensions and riots, discrimination against castes, economic inequality and social injustice. Bewildered by these experiences and deeply affected by them, children, above all, need an opportunity to talk, express what they feel, offer opinions and clear their doubts. However, these issues rarely feature in a school syllabus, because they do not belong to any one “subject”. It is in bringing issues that affect children’s lives into classroom discussion that the strength of the sangati curriculum and approach lie.

Each problem is personalised by turning it into a story of a child. Teachers or facilitators are asked to elicit responses from children about similar experiences they may have had or seen around them, and how the situation could be resolved.

How it began

The Abacus team tells the story of sangati. Its genesis goes back almost 50 years and lies in the multifaceted personality of Shanta Gandhi – educator, dancer and theatre person. In the 1950s, while studying tribal dance in Gujarat, Shantaji began teaching children. She tried to answer the many questions they put to her using theatre, dance and the arts, and found that it worked well. Later, she experimented in a formal school in Ahmedabad developing a new curriculum. During her days with Bal Bhavan, she tried to turn it into a place where children could learn through play. This was a formative period for what was later to take shape as the sangati curriculum. In 1990, she strongly felt the need to form a group that would carry on her work. This team has now been through more than a decade of committed work. Actor Ratna Pathak Shah, artist Deepa Balsaver, law student and publishing professional Deepa Hari, and filmmaker-activist Simantini Dhuru – all of them were influenced by Shantaji’s ideas, and their personalities and skills in turn influenced the way the curriculum evolved.

The project began in 1991, with support from Ministry of Human Resource Development, in one school – the Mahalakshmi Municipal Hindi school. The curriculum was wider then. It was to run for five successive years, its progress monitored and impact assessed.

The Abacus team members who taught the curriculum were not trained teachers, and the open-ended sessions did not always go as planned, but it was a novel idea and the approach worked. For the first time children were given a voice, encouraged to speak up, discuss, criticise, and offer their own ideas. Ratna, who taught the lessons then, recounts a discussion on shelter and space. “When we said that space cannot grow, can it, Bharat, a student from the class retorted “paisa khilane se jagah badhti hai” (Space grows when you grease palms). From here, the discussion jumped to town planning. The floor was thrown open to children and they were asked to plan their town. They started off by putting in their homes. They soon realised that they had left no space for public amenities, roads, gardens etc. Then they began all over again!”

This phase of the project ended in 1996. The Brihanmumbai Muncipal Corporation (BMC) evaluators gave in a favourable report. Students who had been through the Abacus sessions showed an improvement in reading and speaking. BMC now opened 25 of their schools, and 35 other non-formal education centres decided to participate. With this, the project moved on to its second phase.

The decision to upscale necessitated many changes. The Tata Institute of Social Sciences had also done an evaluation of the project that found a distinct improvement in the students’ performance. However, their report found the elitist art material impractical and inaccessible for teachers. This invaluable criticism paved the way for the future. The information overload was reduced and the content trimmed to fit into three years. The sessions were better defined and printed versions made available to the teachers who would now take the sessions. The art material was shorn off its elaborate elements so that it could be produced as printed picture books. The first phase had also revealed that while many teachers accepted the merit of the methodology and approach, there was some resistance to the content, particularly issues of caste and communalism. Abacus developed a teacher-training course to sensitise teachers to these issues and build their skills so that they may use the material in creative ways. From 1997 onwards, this phase was monitored by the education department of the BMC and by the Abacus team internally. More BMC schools were added to the Abacus list.

Relevance

1996-97 saw some of the worst communal riots in Mumbai. In the sangati curriculum, environmental issues began to take a backseat, and social and economic issues were emphasised.

“The class we are addressing is often at the receiving end of social inequality. It is necessary to convey to children that it is not enough to blame, it is important to take responsibility and see what can be done to change things for the better,” says Deepa Hari.

The curriculum addresses many relevant issues: the story of Eklavya and caste discrimination in modern society, how things are almost never as they appear in advertisements etc. The lucidly written guidebooks, the almost non-academic and friendly language, the use of stories, real and fictional, made the sangati material stand out as different.

Classes of moral science, value education or work experience rarely attempt to address anything of significance, and remain loose periods that can be appropriated at will by anyone with an immediate need. Yet, the need to provide an education firmly rooted in basic human values is stronger today than ever. Done this way, through dialogue and discussion; equality, tolerance, dignity of labour, respect for nature, saving the earth’s resources – these are not mere words, but become ideas that should and can inform our daily activities and our interactions with those around us.

Sangati at work

The possibilities of what this curriculum can achieve are evident, however a lot depends on what actually happens in the classroom. Time has always been and continues to be a key consideration. Non-teaching duties and an unfavourable teacher-student ratio diminish available teaching time. Abacus has put in place a monitoring system, where their staff observes and records the classes. These weekly records form an invaluable source of information for the Abacus team and for independent evaluators of the project. “Initially we were scared whether the sessions would go as envisaged, especially those that depended on children’s participation. Teachers raised doubts about some of the topics, saying that children will never talk about these things in class, but the observations have put to rest all these doubts,” says Simantini, who co-ordinates the entire project.

From a jumble of exciting and ambitious ideas in Shantaji's head, Sangati has come a long way in becoming a robust curriculum that lends itself to wide use.

Swati Dandekar

Sutradhar Feature Service Copyright: 2004 The Printers (Mysore) Private Ltd., 75, M.G. Road, Post Box No 5331, Bangalore - 560001