[Reader-list] Eklavya needs people to join their Science Education team

[Chintan Girish Modi]

If you're interested, pease mail Himanshu directly at srihim at gmail.com

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From: jennifer thomas

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From: कृति श्रीवास्तव <kriti1988 at gmail.com>

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From: Himanshu <srihim at gmail.com>
Date: 2010/12/10


'Eklavya' has been working in the field of education since 1982 when it was
formed with the mandate of carrying on the work initiated by Kishore Bharati
on an activity-based curriculum for middle-school Science. Since 2007, we
have also been working on extending this approach to science
teaching-learning in high school.

The issues in School Science Education are many, but can be broadly
classified into two major strands – what to teach and how to teach it.

What to teach is often decided by a top-down approach wherein a perceived
need for engineers / doctors / technologists / whatever is translated into
the school science curriculum as more and more topics being included.

Similarly, a simple answer to ‘how to teach it’ is the lecture method that
is so universally adopted. But research in science education has shown that
this way ends up with the children not only getting a very half-baked notion
of scientific concepts, but also a skewed view of what Science itself is all
about.

The Science team in Eklavya is currently working on developing materials for
high-school science. Since we have limited human resources, we are focusing
on making modules for various topics – and not trying to develop a whole
‘curriculum’. These ‘modules’ are meant to be stand-alone material which can
be used by teachers as resource material for teaching these topics, or by
children with or without some adult guidance. The topics for these modules
were selected after some intense discussion and reflect those concepts which
the group felt formed the foundations of Science.

In developing these materials, we have tried to balance the need to cover
the material at the level expected of that age-group (high-school students)
while at the same time conveying the magic of cutting edge research and the
latest findings. The sequence is based on the findings from research in
education that tell us how children learn and where they are likely to get
confused. And at this level, the focus has shifted slightly from doing the
appropriate activities to getting the children to think about the data
collected (either from the students’ experiments or from experiments
conducted by other people at other times) and leading them to the various
scientific models that try to explain the various phenomena around us.

Of course, the limited human resources to do all this work is worrying, and
we would like lots more people to join us full-time or part-time. All we
expect from anyone wanting to join us in this work is a thorough
understanding of their subject and a willingness to grapple with the
pedagogical issues – put in the time to read up on the research in science
education and the issues in history, nature and philosophy of science.

So, do contact us if you are interested in this kind of work, and pass this
on to anyone else who might be interested. You can also check out our
website <www.eklavya.in> to learn more about us and our work.