Asha for Education

Ravi's fellowship has the following objectives:

Training government school teachers in multi-grade teaching
Only a small subset of teachers learnt his techniques and applied them. Others were either not interested at all or were just interested but relunctant to learn and use them. There were many challenges in this area due to various factors like:
* Indifference of government teachers to adopt new techniques.
* Difficult to build rapport with teachers due to frequent transfers.
* Insufficient interaction with teachers due to limited resources (Ravi can only visit two schools per day).

Research and develop learning material in various areas of primary education
Ravi has been instrumental in this area. He has developed various teaching aids like zig-zaw puzzle out of map of India, model of human skeletal system, Urdu/Hindi/Telugu alphabets, different geometric shapes, flash cards, geoboard and teacher manuals for regular curriculum using activity based techniques etc. He has also learnt various techniques from other partners (during learning network conference) and has replicated those techniques in his work.

Develop a resource center for teacher training
* Ravi has done various workshops and teacher training sessions by visiting various organizations and is always open for doing more.
* He has trained resource persons from other organizations in making teaching aids.
* He has developed teaching aids for other Asha partners and for the government teachers that he works with.

Facilitate teacher interaction from various schools to share knowledge, skills and experience
This has not happened much due to teacher indifference in the government schools that Ravi is working with but he has helped train teachers and participated in learning network conferences (Asha initiated network).

Organize art and craft activities for teachers and children to develop their creative skills.
Ravi visits two schools per day and organizes art and craft activities for children along with some activity based teaching. Children enjoy this very much which is completely evident from all the site visit reports. All his activities (like string painting, spray painting, seed collage, paper collage etc) are very cost-effective.

Initiate parental involvement in the school
During the school enrollment phase Ravi works with parents to make complete enrollment of children in the villages he is working in. But due to limited amount of time that Ravi can spend at each school it is currently not possible to have an ongoing parental involvement.

Organize simple science experiments for teachers and children to encourage experiential learning
Every thing that Ravi teaches is based on some activity. For example, use of paper toy to demonstrate food chain and life cycle of a butterfly, zig-zaw puzzle of country and state for teaching geography, model of human skeletal system for teaching human anatomy etc. Children take very naturally to these learning aids and they often enjoy practical activities that Ravi designs for them.

Based on the experience that he has gained over these past years and the challenges involved with the current strategy, Ravi devised a new strategy in 2005, which will be more effective to address all the above mentioned objectives in a more efficient way. He has started a pilot program without the need of any additional funds as a proof of concept. Asha Seattle and Ravi will determine the feasibility of this approach based on the results of this pilot program. We will also evaluate the best way to partner with Ravi to achieve the above goals with a scalable solution.