Hi Everyone!

I suppose the first decisive moment in my career as a teacher would be when I joined the B Ed. course. At that time I was still undecided about teaching as a career. I knew that I would like it but what I was concerned about was if I could sustain the interest I had in teaching.

Once I started teaching, I discovered that I not only liked it, but also enjoyed it, especially for its unpredictability – for no two days have ever been the same!

The next turning point came, now that I look back, when I joined a school to teach middle school students. Had I been asked then which classes I preferred to teach, I would have opted for high school. As it happens, there was no vacancy in high school and so I began teaching pre-teens for the first time and discovered what a completely different equation I could have with them. Their spontaneity and candidness is something I found refreshing.

Since then I’ve taught in a number of schools, each very different from the previous in terms of syllabi, functioning, and even size – ranging from a school with 350 students to a school with 350 teachers! Each stint has been a learning experience and I don’t see any possibility of my losing interest in teaching. Of course, there are the good days and the bad days, but each set of children that starts a new year is a group of distinctly different individuals. They respond differently and you respond differently. And it’s never the same old year.

timeline on teaching practice

Hi all,

I would like to share how the context of my teaching influenced my profession.

In the initial period of my career I had worked as a Secretary handling all secretarial functions and finance in a company. I would like to share my outdoor experience as an instructor and how I switched over to teach young tiny tots. I had to adapt a varied scale on content and contextualize to different learning skills.

It all started in 1995 where I joined my husband’s company as an outdoor instructor where the curriculum/content had to be taught practically. There were hardly any handouts/ lectures/ worksheets. It was challenging to transmit my own understanding to teenagers who use to register their names for camps with their own mindset i.e., as fun & adventurous trip. I taught them bird watching, trekking, outdoor ethics & soft skills (pot painting, tie &dye) etc. I realized that kids learn better with practical teaching. I decided that I would help my son with the same and started creating worksheets on LAR/MAT/ARTS and saw amazing changes and joy of learning.

My son’s teacher’s appreciation influenced me to teach in a traditional school. Initially there was limited chance to contextualize practically as I was teaching in a traditional school. However, I made my way to experiment new methods as I slipped into creating worksheets for slow learners which turned out be very effective learning. I had hands on classroom and outdoor experience, which helped me a lot when I flew to US where I taught back packing, planning the ration/clothing etc. It was a more challenging role, as most kids registered their name to the course to upgrade their graduation as they found it was cheaper than joining tuitions. Most kids were addicted to drug, depressed and had ADD kids basically teen members of 18 to 20 years of age.

I played a role as a mother/sister/friend to most kids and helped them come out of their problem to some extent. All they required was a good listener and to be affectionate where it involved building a strong student teacher rapport all along.

No sooner I discovered that they became fond of me. I decided to spend quality time and conveyed the message informally during evacuation/free time.
Back home in 2006, I worked as program leader for three months in Coorg and Tons in Uttar kashi, which basically involved practical learning, most aditi kids had registered to Coorg camp.

In Gurgaon in 2007, I got an opportunity to work as a mentor in a pre-school where in I actually got my hands on experience in multiple intelligence. Since it was mine as well as the school’s first year, I experimented on articulating/creating worksheets/making bulletin boards, record observation, planning lessons, reports, feedback on the lesson and also it was the first time I taught yoga to children like asana, calming their minds, working with emotions (social/personal) to rest their varied mindsets. This was the place where I recognized this kind of teaching, which resulted in effective learning. The school always eyeballed on my class room/kids. I got very good recognition by one and all
I have cashed on to good skills and learnt better in Gurgaon and during induction- as to how to cater to varied learning skills, I am enthusiastic to learn and practice as the years pass by and be one of the best mentor and supporter to the students to mould themselves confidently and reach their mile stone.

Sunitha Ravikumar

Looking Back

Contextual Changes in my Teaching and Learning practice.2000 - 2002
It had been nearly 3 years since I had begun working with children in a non formal school called Jeevana Kaushalya Paatashala. Children called it JKP and our team of teachers called it the Pre Vocational Programme. It was a programmed that aimed at connecting children who were found on the streets, loitering, of working, back to the world of education. Children came into the space in scores and we always found it a challenge “engage” them. Everything about the learning process was developed by us - curriculum, content, materials, etc.

My job there was not just one of being a teacher (which I realised by then that I enjoyed) but also one of a social worker. I travelled into the bi lanes of Gurappanpalya, Arasu Colony, Vinayaka Nagar, Gottigere and other slums of Bangalore, identifying places where children worked, locating their homes and talking to their parents about sending them to school – formal or non formal; or it involved us debating with owners of printing presses, bus body building units, loom owners and trying to pull children out of work places.

During the day I worked as a teacher with nearly 40 children in my classroom, and during the evenings I met parents, heads of masjids, and other local leaders trying to understand what we could do collectively to retain children in schools. The main focus for me in that role as a teacher was to see
a. What / how we could teach at school to see that children stayed connected to learning.
b. How did the role of the traditional teacher have to change in order to be responsible for such a consequence?
c. Who are the stake holders in this process?
d. What was quality of education defined?

I cannot say that the answers or even the questions were clear to us. The onus of the community in ensuring retention of children in learning processes became clearer with time.

In the meantime, I also developed curriculum (functional literature and Math) and supportive learning material for the children in school who wanted to learn but felt ashamed to do so because of their age, their learning level or their socio economic background and got into trouble either with police or because of substance abuse.

One question came back over and over again to me a thousand times if not a million – What were we doing? Why were we doing what we were doing? It was not that our organization did not answer these by means of vision or mission statements; I felt this was something that I had to answer for myself. We were dealing with children who wanted to learn. Every time I felt that a process sank deep into quick sand, I felt the compelling urge to go back to the basics and answer these questions. Some of the questions we asked over and over again were concerning community.
What was the role of the larger community?
Did the community we were working in relate to what we were teaching in our schools?
What could we do to see that parents understood the programme and sent the children to school, and ensured their retention?
Why was I even teaching what I was teaching?
I felt that as teachers/ educators, the process of reflection had to be inbuilt into the process of planning and executing.

These questions, addressed by my team and me, came back to me over and over again at the beginning of 2002, when I got involved with a learning centre focusing on self directed learning. Only this time, we were questioning teaching and learning as well. We could no longer deny that our teaching processes were not ok, and that we could retain children in schools through them. Out of school children were our main indicators. They knew the truth that something was not working, their own realities demanded that they take on stronger decisions and some left immediately as they joined the schools. I appreciated this process of reflection that the developmental organisation was doing as this meant that we looked at ever thing that was detrimental to the promises we had made and the vision that we had. I elucidate about this in detail because it was this year that brought in several new changes in my own understanding of teaching and learning and have since then become the foundation for what I have done.

The change in the way we looked at ourselves as teachers and at the learning groups of children (and later adults) came from a series of discussions and reading sessions that our own team started in 2002. This process introduced us to books of Miles Horton and Paulo Freire “We make the road by Walking” – conversation on Education and Social Change; or papers on Adult Education by Malcolm Knowles and Stephen Brookfield. I also remember papers like “A Nation at Risk”, books, papers and interviews by Howard Gardner. It did not matter that we were not reading about how children learn per se, our understanding of learning it self and the role of the community did let us see things differently. The benefit of letting self direction participate in learning became clear – it was not easy to practice but none the less it set the basis of all our work.

Presently, I sit down with my notes from 2002 trying to see some things that helped me change my way of looking at teaching and learning. I can see a lot of highlighted material, but some of the things that stand out for me are a couple of quotes and fast scribbles in my notebooks. I remember these notes particularly well for what they meant to me. There were cornerstones and guided me in my work at the centre. They are more postulates than just quotes. I would like to share them with you all.

1. Practice of learning is a great emancipator
2. The practice of education dignifies and respects people and their experience ( why not with children)
3. Miles Horton’s words “. . . you have to start (processes) from where people are, because their growth is going to be from there, not from some abstraction or where you are or someone else is” – this is the toughest for me at times since I see that I tell people what I think, but I have seen processes work really well when I pay attention to what the children are telling me, verbally and non verbally.
4. This statement by Miles Horton, resonated with my experience in the learning centre at Gurappanpalya, and I come back to this as and when needed – There is no such thing as just being a coordinator or a facilitator, as if you don’t know anything. What the hell are you around for, if you don’t know anything?‘We Make the Road by Walking’ (Horton and Freire, 1990, pg 154)

They may seem simple, but are to me very hard to practice since they penetrate into our basic value systems. This does not mean they are only theory – I have seen them work very well, but to keep coming to it is something of a task. However I don’t intend to stop.