[Reader-list] Stepping into students' worlds, supporting their learning

[Chintan]

Excerpts from http://blog.prathambooks.org/2010/05/chintans-post_28.html

Most teachers, like the one in Benny’s classroom, stay unaware of the rich
variety of resources that learners bring with them to school. As a result,
opportunities “that allow learners to share more of themselves and their
background knowledge” are lost. Bean has an important question to ask all of
us who care about children: “How can learners’ life experiences inform the
tasks of school, and why in the case of minority learners doing poorly in
school, is it important that they do so?”


One way of doing this is through home visits. Amy Baeder, in her article,
‘Stepping Into Students’ Worlds’, writes about the home visits programme at
Cleveland High, a small school in Seattle. “Through listening to parents,
grandparents, and others, we learned of these individuals’ talents,
experiences and dreams in ways that would later help us understand and
motivate our students.” In a multicultural setting, such home visits help
teachers gain first-hand knowledge about each family, rather than accepting
generalities or stereotypical images that are not based on direct
experience. Baeder writes, “We find it highly rewarding when we incorporate
information gleaned from a home visit into a lesson, warm-up question,
project, or assignment.” Home visits also help schools get a good sense of
how families can contribute to: by sharing skills, offering workshops,
volunteering at school functions, using their contacts and resources. One
may argue that home visits take up too much time, or are impossible given
the large numbers of students. Can we work around these constraints? Can we
appreciate the idea of home visits in principle, and look for other ways of
creating connections between homes and schools? The effort seems worth it.
“Each year, on the first day of school, I stand in front of a sea of faces,
with names swirling in my head. Some students remain a mystery to me until I
visit their homes and they unfold into real people. Teachers need to know
students in this way; every day we make instructional decisions that hinge
on what we know about our kids. We can learn so much if we just enter
students’ homes and listen.”


Interviews are a wonderful genre of writing, not widely experimented with in
schools. Last summer, when I facilitated a writing workshop with 10-14 year
olds in Dongri, Mumbai, I asked my students to consider interviewing people
they are used to interacting with on a regular basis, but don’t know well
enough. Two interviewed their maid servants, a third interviewed her
milkman, and a fourth one interviewed a boy working at a restaurant. I had
asked all the children to prepare a set of questions and run it by me. They
carried out their interviews in Hindi, and translated the responses into
English. The results were fabulous.


The children were compelled to think about several aspects of the lives of
their interviewees—how much they earned per month, if they had any savings,
the village or hometown they had migrated from, other people in their
family, everyday problems in their locality, the education of their
children, what they liked to do in their spare time, their dreams and
aspirations. Things that may or may not have crossed the minds of these
children earlier, but things they got to learn about on their own. All they
had to do was ask.

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http://blog.prathambooks.org/2010/05/chintans-post_28.html