Ref: DBT: Asha: 2004. Date:5.3.2004 Dr. Melli Annamalai, Asha Boston P.O. Box 391802 Cambridge, MA 02139. USA. Dear Dr. Melli Annamalai, GREETINGS FROM DEENA BANDHU TRUST Recently I have not reported to you much about the educational activities at Chamarajanagar. I hope you have had time to read the detailed report I sent to you of the workshops we conducted for our adopted schools. Whenever I meet some of these teachers they ask me as when is our next workshop. Actually teachers are compelled by the department to attend repeated workshops some lasting for week and even more. But they show a greater interest in our workshop. With the workshops conducted for the past 3 years we have given most of the inputs. Therefore I propose to provide one year of intense follow up support or the teachers. Mr. Nemiraj who left us in the previous year is again willing to take up the Vivek Asha Project, his communication skill was the best in the team and he is a science (Physics, Chemistry & Mathematics) graduate and his involvement will have more beneficial effect. Therefore for the period from June 2004 to Februar 2005 I propose to take up the following activities: 1. Follow up support for each school so that teachers take up more and more of activity/experimental teaching at the class room level. 2. Conduct of few workshops exclusively to produce teaching learning materials 3. Workshops for content clarification in subjects like science, mathematics & geography or any other subject. The details of this workshop will be decided based on the feed back by the teachers. The feed back will be collected from each teacher during the field visit. 4. Development of a teacher's manual is almost over and I want to have detailed discussion with the teachers themselves before going for printing. The new education minister is making a lot of experiments and giving more importance to activity teaching. He is planning to have consolidated text books with all subjects put together and providing them once in every three months. Therefore child has to carry only one book at a time. In the light of these changes we feel we should have teacher's participation before finalizing the manual. The NIAS people are also striving hard to bring about some changes but it has been difficult for them because of the base line survey report which turned out to be little negative. The department appears to have been affended by this and has some of it's own apprehension about the involvement of NIAS. But I am supporting them and suggesting to take a least resistant path in the process. The best is by really proving to the CRC members that the involvement means no fault finding but all positive with the children and the teachers being the ultimate goal. The NIAS are primarily working with the CRC. I will shortly write to about the ASHA conference at Chennai. It was very useful and I found very innovative methods and very sensitive and creative people working in their own small packets. I also propose to hold a workshop for the members of Learning net work. I will write to you the details. You can send the next installment of donation at your convenience With kind regards Jayadev