To support us, please click here (INR only)
Our Gratitude for Your Support to a Cause Close to Our Heart
You will be supporting Riddhi’s cousin, Isha Badkas and Eklavya Foundation, in their endeavor on “Education for Dialogue, Inclusivity and Equity” with children in peri-urban and rural parts of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
Continuous dialogue around gender and social identity equips children to understand themselves better, equips them to think about the consequences of their decisions, respect others’ boundaries and make healthy choices and decisions for life. It is a cause that we strongly believe will make our society a better place.
Supporting this initiative means contributing to a journey towards making our classrooms inclusive and dialogue oriented, resulting in a harmonious and respectful society through confident, empathetic, and democratic citizens.
We would love your support in this endeavor. Any financial contributions will be used for the following causes that will go a long way towards the initiative’s ultimate goal:
- Action research on the ground through classroom pilots (in Maharashtra or MP)
- Developing curriculum and educational materials on gender and social identities
- Creating framework for educators and facilitators to enable dialogues, group presentations and field visits
To support us, please click here or scan the code below (INR only):
International contributors can Zelle Riddhi @ +1-929-800-1068, she will personally ensure that your contribution reaches it’s intended recipients.
About the Team
Isha Badkas is a facilitator working with the Eklavya Foundation for creating safe spaces for dialogue on social education topics such as identity, inclusivity and equity.
Eklavya is a non-government registered society that was set up in 1982 to actively seed and develop academic programmes for curricular change in elementary education.
Education for dialogue, inclusivity and equity
With the students of Pune (Maharashtra) and Obaidullaganj (Madhya Pradesh)
Age group: Primary (4th-5th) and Middle school (7th-8th and 9th) students
It is the need of the hour to free education from the bondage of oppressive socialization, limitations of the binary and unnecessary urge to stick to the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’. Research* in the field affirms that continuous dialogue helps younger children to know their bodies better, equips them to think about the consequences of their decisions, respect others’ boundaries and at the least make healthy choices, decisions for life.
‘Education for Dialogue, Inclusivity and Equity’ is an area that requires more research and classroom implementation to make it more aligned with the Indian context. It ultimately strives to create a safe space for dialogue that can actually enable students to be more confident, comfortable with themselves, express freely and the possibility is that they would offer the same enabling space to those around them. We propose a study in this domain that will be conducted in government schools, independent small initiatives where there is hardly any space for such conversations.
More about the study:
Children make sense of the world with the help of their parents and immediate acquaintances. They keep receiving signals, clues and symbols related to different identities that they bear and the society makes sure that the process of socialization is shaping children’s responses to it. It is the potential of a classroom that can shapeshift the process of socialization and can enable students to question and understand themselves better through dialogue, active listening and free expression.
Keeping dialogue and expression at the core, Eklavya envisions an action research through a series of classroom pilots to study what shifts and results active dialogue can bring about. The endeavor would be for the action-research to work towards developing a curriculum that is spiral in nature and advocates that dialogue around gender and other social identities need to begin from the early years of academic training and built upon as the child grows.
Storytelling session with 5th graders, Aksharnandan School, Pune
Salient features of this study
- Creating a framework (involving literature, activities and prompts) for facilitators and educators to initiate dialogue around gender, caste, religion and other social identities inside classroom spaces
- Pilot this framework with students of different age group, starting from early academic years, to understand and capture the learnings
- Create a safe and secure sharing space for school students that offers information, skills, opportunities to explore-imagine and most importantly question
- Active documentation of the process
Guess the word with 4th-5th graders, Khelghar, Pune
Methodology
- Storytelling (involving narratives from the margins, stories that inspire, act as a prompt to question, unlearn and redefine)
- Film screening (as prompts to brainstorm, discuss and build understanding) along with theater and music to encourage empathy
- Guided dialogue on social themes with the help of prompts
- Group work and presentation to inculcate habit of respectfully sharing and accepting/ listening to opinions, actively practice perspective giving and taking
- Field visits, interviews with resource persons and project work to assuage curiosity
Group discussion on a case study with 9th graders, Aksharnandan school, Pune
For any further information, reach out to:
Isha Badkas
Contact no: 8879602453
Eklavya Foundation
Jamnalal Bajaj Parisar
Jatkhedi, Bhopal - 462026 (MP)
*Research in the field:
- What makes sexuality education comprehensive, a working paper by TARSHI 2009
- For sexual and reproductive health and right by Rutgers
- Evidence based approaches to sexuality education, a global perspective edited by James J, Ponzetti, Jr.