Day One in the Classroom

Friday was our first day in the classroom at C. Ramchand Girl’s High School. The school is located on the Ousmania University campus, and is part of the Andhra Mahilia Institution. This Literacy organization is made up of several schools, colleges and organizations for women, started by a woman and her husband who wanted to promote education and, therefore, mobility among women in Hyderabad.

,

Almost all of the twelve thirteen and fourteen year old girls in our class are first generation learners whose mothers are housewives and fathers are laborers living off of daily wages (exp. rickshaw drivers). The extreme individualism among students that we are accustomed to in the classroom has vanished among clover green dresses with white collared undershirts, black knee-high stockings, dusty, worn black shoes, and an unforgettable sea of matching double-looped black hair braids. This description scratches the surface of the students’ exteriors, but the conformity sinks deeper, revealing itself in the seemingly robotic responses to questions and the constant search for approval and/or conformation from the teachers for the correct response to every question and action. To pitch this in a tangible story: We spent the first half of our three-hour class playing some goofy name games to break-the-ice and shake out the nerves in everyone. Our initial game of “Say your name and do a movement” bumped along as each student began to copy the other’s movement, first looking to the teachers to make sure they were doing the correct thing, then waiting until the teachers nodded, pointed, and ordered the next student to continue around the circle. We had to insist that this was just a name game – a game, and nothing more.

There is some truth is saying that it was just nervousness that played a role here. Understandably. There is, also, a long and solidified history in the classroom, in the educational system, in which the student listens and obeys the orders of the teacher and admitting, “I do not know,” is just not an option. This became clear to us as we struggled to communicate to the teachers that we did not want the students to be solely reliant on them for the solution to our “birthday line-up” game – another “ice breaker” that aims to make the students work together in finding a way to organize themselves chronologically according to birthdates without talking. The students simply would not take charge and talk among themselves to work towards creating a strategy of communication other than their spoken voices. Instead they quickly looked to the teachers and the teachers swooped in, pointing and ordering the girls into neat rows and separating them according to birth-year and month.

OK, now that everyone knows the rules, how about “Round II.” We asked the girls to mix themselves up again and re-organize according to birthdates, but their gaze was still on the teachers. And the teachers, once again, directed the students into order. Then we tried to debrief by discussing the goals of the game, and explaining that there are several answers/ ways to communicate without talking, and that everyone needs to work together. Prodding further, one girl showed us that she was thinking about how everyone could have written the numbers on each other’s hands. Ah ha! Success.

Moving into the classroom, we first needed to rearrange the chairs from their orderly rows pointing toward the head of the classroom, to a large circle where everyone was facing each other. A big idea that we are working to introduce in small ways is the fact that there is no ultimate answer that can be discovered through one ultimate source. Maybe it’s “knights of the roundtable,” maybe not… you decide. We’re hoping to get the students to look to each other and to think independently – to trust in their own voices and keen observations (especially when it comes to doing news stories. Read on.). So, in a circle, the students wrote for fifteen minutes, in their project notebooks that we passed out, to the prompt: “My home makes me think of…”

Many of the girls shared how many sisters and brothers they had, what their mothers and fathers do during the day, what their dreams of a future profession are (several doctors, software engineers, computer programmers, and even a police officer), what their houses looked like, and when they began taking English classes. All were read in clear English. Some of the girls had one or two unique lines inserted, like their hobbies or key words like my house “only” has one room as opposed to “my house is beautiful.”

For the next step of the exercise we had them draw pictures of their homes, which everyone was intensely involved in coloring. On Monday, we will finish up this “home exercise” with an introduction to using digital cameras where the students will take photos of their drawing(s) and take portrait photos of each other to go along with their writing and drawing(s).

In order to give the students a general idea of what they will be creating over the next months, we finished class by showing two basic examples of multi-media stories that we had created to introduce ourselves to them. This lead to a general conversation about the basic elements of a video, and a homework exercise for each of them to write down five story ideas (ex. Feelings of home); five pictures they could take of home; five sounds they could record of home; five moving images they could record of home.

It’s silly for us to think that each girl has a bubble within her that is waiting to burst, and that we are the pin that will prick that bubble and suddenly reveal every hidden insight, desire, and restrained emotion of being an empowered individual. Unrealistic, to say the least. Yet, it is understood that we are hear to set the foundation for a project, for a way of learning, for a way of teaching, for a way of expression and self thought that is very new, and the lessons learned may not reach everyone directly involved within the next two months, but our initial work here will ensure that this type of self-empowered learning extends into future classroom projects. And, just maybe, watching Jyoti swing her hips with spice during the name game, we can honestly hope that some of what we’re teaching will actually sink in.