[Reader-list] Initiatives that strengthen links between schools and homes/communities/neighbourhoods.

[Chintan]

>From http://blog.prathambooks.org/2010/05/chintans-post.html

While in Hyderabad last week, I chanced upon a second-hand copy of Herbert
Kohl’s “I won’t learn from you” And Other Thoughts on Creative
Maladjustment<http://www.amazon.com/Wont-Learn-You-Thoughts-Maladjustment/dp/1565840968>
.

Kohl writes of exciting childhood weekends spent at department stores in
Manhattan, rummaging through stuff his parents would have never been able to
afford. By and by, he got pally with people at the stores. Not only did he
learn to play sheet music on a grand piano and got free chess lessons, he
was also allowed to try out almost anything as long as there were no
customers around. Kohl writes, “Those experiences overcame my boredom with
school and taught me how to find real teachers and places of learning, the
first time it occurred to me that I might be able to take conscious control
over my own education. To this day, my favourite sources of educational and
writing ideas are bookstores, toy stores and department stores. I learned
early on not to mistake schooling for learning, which takes place out of
school at least as much as it does within it.”

A core theme in educational reform is the alarming disconnect between what
children are taught and the concerns of their own lives. This theme has
struck a chord with me, and I’ve been reading up on initiatives that seek to
strengthen links between schools and homes/communities/neighbourhoods. While
my interest extends to a variety of projects, the chief sites of my
exploration have been classrooms that deal with the teaching-learning of
English, particularly what we refer to as writing or composition. This slim
area of focus owes to my current preoccupation with an M.Phil. dissertation
in English Language Education. This blog post is meant to chronicle some of
what I’ve discovered along the way, and to invite you to share
thoughts-feedback-more resources. I will try to resist the urge to waft into
academese, but pardon my slippages, if any.

***

One of my favourite resources is a book called The Freedom Writers
Diary<http://www.freedomwritersfoundation.org/site/c.kqIXL2PFJtH/b.2335915/k.D66F/The_Book.htm>

Here’s a moving narrative presented by Erin Gruwell, a new teacher at a
multi-cultural, multi-racial school in Long Beach, California. It is a
school full of young people who are considered troublesome, at-risk,
violent, worse still ‘unteachable’. Gruwell looks past these labels, and
begins to nurture her students with courage and love. She picks out books
about other children in violent circumstances -- Anne Frank: The Diary of a
Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo – and helps them
learn to see the parallels in these books to their own lives. Meeting people
their own age in other places and other times, Gruwell’s students are
motivated to pen down their own stories in the form of diary entries.
There’s pain, and there’s healing too. One of Gruwell’s students remarks,
“I’ve never read something in school that relates to something that happened
in my life.” Perhaps this is something that many kids (
http://chintangirishmodi.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/off-the-mark/) mutter to
themselves, unafraid to share it with parents and teachers.

***

In India, Kalam: Margins Write <http://marginswrite.wordpress.com/> , a
Kolkata-based organization has done some outstanding work with young people
in red light areas, on railway platforms, and in slum neighbourhoods. I
first read about them three years ago, and continue to be inspired by them.
Their creative writing curriculum for marginalized youth in urban India is
available at (http://writingout.wordpress.com/) and their Neighbourhood
Diaries project can be read about here (
http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/kolkata/)