JOIN USBridging gaps through storytelling
The moment one enters the bustling street of Bhumiheen Camp in south Delhi’s Govindpuri Extension, the colourful entrance to a building can hardly be missed.
Inside, there are groups of students playing, reading, writing on smartboards, discussing, drawing, learning computers and even making robots. This might seem like a usual scene in schools, but what differentiates it are the students. The children, who come from the nearby slums of Govindpuri, one of the largest slums in Delhi, are taught through cluster teaching and through story pedagogy. Katha Lab School, popularly called Katha Khazana in the area has been working with the slum for the past 25 years. Founded in 1988 by educator and writer Geeta Dharmarajan, the school started with five students and sees around 1,500 children every year from zero to 17 years.
Renuka Malaker, deputy director, development department, Katha tells Metrolife, “It is a space for the children of the underserved community to come and learn and get educated and for their mothers to be self-reliant. We believe that teaching through storytelling is the most effective way to teach and that is what we do through our own curriculum without textbooks.”
Priyanka Gupta, deputy manager from the development team mentions, “It is a theme-based integrated learning environment for children which enables a
holistic development.”
While many organisations have been working with the underprivileged community over the years, what distinguishes Katha is its multi-stake holder engagement with different partners which includes Delhi government and an innovative education model to mainstream education.”
Describing the various initiatives, Malaker points out, “It reaches out to students from the community as well as provides student support centre for first generation learners, IT training for members, spoken English learning courses and entrepreneur training courses as well as social work.
Divided into clusters on the basis of learning levels, the children always sit in circles unlike traditional benches where students sit one after the other. Nandita Sengupta, one of the teachers looks after few pre-primary children in the age group of three years. She explains, “This is the time for them to learn something new each day which involves activities like drawing, clay making etc.”
In order to sustain families once the children went to school, the mothers were taught skills such as tailoring, baking and cooking. “Many of the Katha students have gone on to mainstream colleges and many of them are now doctors, scientists, engineers and teachers in government, private and public sectors,” shares Malaker.
Quite a few alumni have joined Katha schools to teach. One of them is Subhash who is doing Bachelors in Computer Application from IGNOU and is also a mentor to some of the students of mechanical designing and programming. Currently designing for Clean India Campaign and relief in case of tragedies like Uttarakhand, he displays the concept of a ‘Wiper Robot’ that the group has made on the lines of a vacuum cleaner, but on a larger scale.
Accredited to the National Institute of Open Schooling, the school’s reading programme and school transformation programme have spread to numerous government schools in Gujarat and Delhi. With the government schools and even the corporate sector wanting to adapt their model, Gupta says, “The school is an innovation model where we experiment and do what we want to do and take it into more government schools.”