Asha for Education

Secondary Focus: other

Total = $983456.26377

Thiruvallur is one of the poorer districts of Tamilnadu. It has always been a water scarce region. Proximity to Chennai has its positives as well as negatives. While lot of people find employment in Chennai and auxiliary industries for Chennai (like brick kilns and sand quarrying), the local resources are taken away from the region including water in the form of Poondi reservoir, river sand, human workforce etc. All this has left the mainstay of this region agriculture in a bad situation.

The scenario as regards education in this district is similar to the rest of Tamilnadu. Government schools exist but with serious deficiencies. Private schools are coming up and eating into the student force of the government schools. But the private schools are often worse in terms of the quality of the teaching. Asha Chennai believes the revival and strengthening of the government schooling system is essential to the implementation of any mass education initiative in India.There have been several positive changes in the government schooling system including the following,

• Introduction of good quality text books under the Samacheer Kalvi. But in the process the ABL (Activities Based Learning) a good system that was introduced in 2007 has been abandoned.
• Regular assessments being done by SSA at every school and by NCERT through random sampling of the schools for the whole of India of the basic educational attainments (reading, writing and basic maths skills).
• Provision of computers and books to the schools.
• Introduction of English medium section in many schools.

While these are positive steps, for them to achieve their desired goals a lot more needs to be done. Rote learning without understanding of basic concepts is still the norm. Even the assessment conducted by SSA specifically tests reading skills without testing comprehension! While computers are provided they are not being used effectively in many of the schools. Further the introduction of English medium has been done purely to stem the tide of children going to other private schools. While it has been somewhat successful in doing that, they have not done anything to teach the children meaningfully in English.

Asha Chennai works with 68 schools in Thiruvallur District – 53 in Poondi block, 10 schools in Ellapuram block, 3 schools in Kadambathur block, 1 school in Thiruvalangadu block and 1 school in Sriperumbudur block of Kanchipuram dist.

While Asha started teaching basic computer skills to the children at the schools we support, we also have a lot to do in terms of effectively using the computers for delivering curriculum contents in other subjects.

Asha Chennai has been working with eight government primary schools in the Thiruvallur district under Project Sangamam-Poondi. The project was started in the year 2004-05 with support to three primary schools. This year we are adding support to two more schools to bring the total number of schools we are working with to ten. The following timeline shows the history of our support to these schools.

OTHER GENERAL INPUTS FROM ASHA:

1. Education material as appropriate for the class. This would range from crayons to atlases and geometry boxes.
2. Support joyful learning by supporting annual day functions, excursions etc. at these schools.
3. Bring the teachers from these projects to Chennai for training. The annual training would be covered under the budget for Project Rightstart. Further, we also have a monthly training program to improve the skill levels of the teacher both in terms of basic knowledge of English, Maths and Science as well as their teaching skills.
4. Computers for the schools have been provided both by Asha and the government. We use these computers to teach the children digital literacy and programming as well as deliver general curriculum contents over these.
5. Conduct assessments at these schools to identify learning gaps and provide detailed feedback to the schools about what can be improved at these schools.