Pivoting through the Pandemic as an Edupreneur….
When our country went into lockdown back in March 2020, we at Varitra Foundation had just completed putting together a roadmap for the whole year. Being our third year, we were hoping that it would be finally a good time to look back at all that we have achieved, assess it and create some semblance of stability. Being a grassroot NGO working in some of the most interior villages on Yamuna-belt of Karnal district meant building access, dialogue and community engagement. Our work was intensively field-centric and overnight, everything came to a halt.
None of the rural schools we worked with were familiar with digital education or e-learning — the buzzwords throughout this period. Consciously enough, we decided that our organization’s pandemic response should not be in a=haste. Instead, we decided to slow down and observe for a few weeks. We reconnected with our partner schools and ground volunteers and assessed the situation on the grassroots and the support they required. We wanted to help our rural teachers and parents embrace e-learning, a phenomenon that was almost instantaneously thrusted upon them — quite helplessly given the conditions and our governments’ response to it. The government was switching to ICT and online resources — something that was a novelty for both rural teachers and children. For them traditional teaching-learning up until now meant a classroom, a textbook and physical presence of one another. Our experience of working in this space gave us the window to build learning content for rural children in Hindi, their preferred language. Next came building access to these resources through common, larger mediums like WhatsApp and YouTube. We named this initiative E-Paathan where all our resources could be accessible to all — at no cost.
While online learning may have become the primary medium throughout this year, we could not ignore and overcome the digital divide which is an unfair reality of our country today. For most rural parents, technology remains a pay-as-you-go facility. Secondly, a large number of children we worked with belonged to small farming to daily-wage earning families, which meant Iimited or no access to phones throughout the day. In July 2020, our team conducted a ground survey across 8 villages in Karnal district. Amongst the 211 children surveyed, we found that more than 60% children had little or no access to online-learning platforms. In August 2020, we curated “Offline Learning Kit” — a compact concoction of workbooks, stationery and drawing material for kids. Till date,3000 rural children across 27 villages have received our offline learning kits.
As we move forward in our mission of uninterrupted learning, we all need to identify and accept the ground realities. Going ahead, schools will be expected to be technologically savvy and there is going to be a lot of emphasis to adopt technology-based solutions. Making careful choices will be paramount to ensure a balance between technology, pedagogy and child-friendly learning.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much data or research on how school leaders are responding to the Pandemic. But what we can focus on is to build a mélange of moral and efficient leadership and create examples for others — now more than ever.
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