According to the World Happiness Report 2018, India ranked
133 among 155 countries and established it’s presence as one of the world’s
least happy nations. As per the report of National Crime Records Bureau, 8934
(6.7% of all suicides) students are committing suicide every year. Under this
extensive crisis, a greater responsibility comes to the education sector to
provide the students with a scope to by forming an adequate eco-system which
ensures the social, emotional, mental and physical development of a child,
while enhancing the cognitive faculties, simultaneously.
Due to my professional responsibility as a fellow to support
the school and the community in development of the educational eco-system by
capacitating principals and support them in appropriate implementation of
policies on ground to ensure holistic development of each child, I engaged with
the school and community stakeholders of the village Nesada, situated in the
block Dholka, in Ahmedabad.
During my one month stay at a government primary student’s
house in the rural village, I’ve closely observed the day-to-day lives of the
parents and their children. Utilizing participatory observation and survey as
primary research tools I’ve figured out that, in a village with the population
of 1956, only 28.5% of the parents were socially and emotionally aware about
their child, where as the literacy rate was 66.4%. This gap between the
official literacy rate and the social-emotional awareness exposed the core
problem with the education system, that is lack of focus on a child’s
social-emotional and mental growth, which urged me to look for scope to incorporate
‘Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)’ as a concept, at the implementation level to
enhance parent-child relationship and ensure holistic development of children
by bridging the gap between the school and the community.
With the support of the youth in the community, I’ve opened a
community learning centre, where the local students were taught using art as a
medium to improve their cognitive skills as well as to ensure their mental and
emotional growth. The curriculum I’ve designed was based upon the five major
pillar of the concept Social Emotional Learning by CASEL. The five major
pillar were self awareness, Self Management, Social awareness, relationship
skill and responsible decision making. The curriculum was divided into 8 parts
to be executed in four weeks, that is one month of a span, and included art
based learning sessions and events.
The sessions and events were organized and facilitated by 14
youth of the community, for which 5 capacity building sessions took place with
the youth. The curriculum included two major art forms- art and craft and
theatre (street theatre/role plays). The students’ ability to think, create and
comprehend enhanced with each sessions. The first event took place in the
community was around dustbin Installation, where collaborating with the Sarpaanch
and Talathi, the students painted colourful dustbins by mending waste buckets
and prepared creative posters and badges. By conducting a rally, the children
installed 13 dustbins in 13 village shops. The next event was a Nukkad Natak
prepared by children performed in three parts of the community. Three parents
workshops , also, took place sensitize the parents about the SEL components to
contribute to the overall school and community eco-system.
The one month of intervention brought joy, hope and a lot of learning to the yound children and strengthened the parent-child bond, to bridge the school community gap.
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