Hope all of you and your extended families are staying safe and healthy through the global COVID crisis that has beset us all. Good news is that our programs last year ended just in time before COVID hit India (except for one or two classes that we could not complete). We were able to complete 98% of our program content, had a very successful (and biggest to date) 3 day annual day event and also completed the certification exams and awarded year-ending certificates to all students. The schools closed early this year (around March 20th) than the usual April 10th close date. We spend the school holidays building brand new content for the new year to come:
Since we had used Shakespearean plays in our book of the month club for the last 3 years running, we got feedback from students and teachers alike that it was time for a change and also to make the books/plays more relevant to the Indian context. We decided to use Girish Karnad’s select plays and also write our own plays (yours truly that is) that are more relevant to the rural and historical contexts. We had to shorten and rewrite the 4 Girish Karnad plays we selected for this year (Yayati, Hayavandana, Nagamadala and Tuglaq), making sure that the mature content in these plays were appropriate for high school students. I rewrote these abridged plays in English and my partner in crime (Savukar Raj, our project advisor) translated them to Kannada. I also wrote 4 new plays of mine keeping in mind the rural context which have also been translated by Savukar Raj. We are thus totally poised for a great year ahead in terms of fresh content for the book of the month club and drama clubs. If you are interested in any of these plays for your own children, please do let me know and I can send them to you.
The activity based story books around MLLs (minimum learning levels) also needed some new material since students have been using the same books and activities that we had written over the years (~30). Since we got some extra break this year, we decided to write 20 new books amongst us all (my family and our staff) – brand new stories with pictures and 6 activities per book linked to a specific MLL (example of a MLL could be profit and loss in finance, or gravity in science or traffic signs in environment). We have completed writing 10 new books already and plan to complete the other 10 in the coming 2 months. If you are interested in any of these picture books we have created, please let know as well.
We hired a full-time drama teacher (Mr. Arun Kumar) to convert the drama extension of our book of the month club that we started last year, into a full-fledged program. We plan to run this program in 4 schools as a pilot this year, and if found successful, we plan to extend it to all 9 schools next year.
Our dear friend Hiriyanna (based in Bangalore) who has been helping us in an ad-hoc manner in the last few years (you might remember that he went on my behalf to run the annual day this year since I could not go due to COVID hitting the US first). Good news is that Hiriyanna retired from ISRO this year and has offered to be more involved in our programs. He will provide the much needed oversight and help us in content creation and dissemination as well as training and mentoring our staff. So welcome Hiriyanna to our organization and thank you from the bottom of my heart. Hiriyanna will be our India manager/liaison. He can be reached at +91 94490 51728 or isrohiri@yahoo.co.in.
Our schools did not report for the school year 2020-21 as expected on May 28th. Our staff have been staying at home helping us build content (as described above). The local Karnataka government has announced a tentative opening date of Oct 15. Since schools have not yet reopened in India due to COVID, we have started our programs this year using online tools (Zoom and Whatsapp) for a select group of students whose parents have smart phones (~50 out of the typical 1,500 students who participate in our programs yearly). We have trained our teachers on conducting classes using these tools and have had very good initial success since we started our classes 6 weeks back(even though there is scope for a lot of improvement). Subsequently, we also launched a full audio-based classroom (for Science, Book of the Month and MLL clubs only) using Eagle audio-conferencing service, for students whose parents so not have smart-phones. These classes are reaching an additional 60 students.
We are starting a pilot for a hands off version of our program in an area 100 Kms from the current area we operate in. In this hands off pilot, we will leverage all the content we are currently codifying online that can be accessed by anyone from anywhere. We will provide periodic support, training and access to online content as well funding to run this hands off pilot. Good news is that a donor couple – Mr. Sundip and Mrs. Sudha Gorai – have offered to fully fund this pilot. We will like to do this in two phases. In phase 1 this year, we will complete codifying all our content into online versions in Kannada and run the pilot in T Narsipur area for 4 schools where a BEO who had worked with us a long time back in Kollegal has offered to run this program for us with our support and funding. You can see V1.0 of our online learning platform already completed under Cafe Sensorium in the main page of this website. In phase 2, we will get the content translated into other languages; and also facilitate the usage of the online content directly by students in situations where teachers are not available. We would like to thank the Gorais for funding this project which will help us immensely in scaling our program to other locations over the coming years.
We have re-branded our initiative Project Terra Firma as “My Sensorium” which in Latin means “apparatus of an organism’s perception considered as a whole, the “seat of sensation” where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives”. This resonates very well with what our experiential programs are trying to do by helping students use their sensorium to develop skills that will help them in their future education and careers. The name is highly differentiated and is not used by any NGOs to date (even though some commercial companies use this name). We now call our main program that we run the Kollegal area as “Seed Sensorium” since this is where we have developed all our content and processes and will continue to do in the coming years. We have named the online learning platform and the pilot of our hands-off programs as “Cafe Sensorium” ala Cafe Coffee Day since it will be run as a pilot franchisee model.
Regards and Cheers,
Vasuki, President, ASHRAYA
