Kathashala: Our Schools

Imagine a brick and stone building. Warm. intimate, resounding with the laughter of 1200 children, 100 women who come in to discuss issues of resurgence and learn, nearly 70 teachers, many volunteers. Imagine a community of 150,000 people many of whom keep walking into the school that is at the centre of its resurgence. Started in 1990 with five children, we have stretched out to 54 communities that live around us, each at the edge of many poverties.

And now imagine its curriculum and pedagogy. Specially devised for our students, ranging in age from 0-17. Each trimester, the flavour of the learning changes, and the excitement bubbles within teachers and students as they look forward to one more window opening ...

1. The Students
2. The Staff
3. Cluster Schooling
4. Family Room
5. Parent School Interaction
6. Our Vision

The Students

Children can join the school at the age of 0 years [in our creche] and increasingly spend 14-17 years in school. Kathashala children spend a minimum of three years in the preschool or Jhunjhunwadi. We believe these are very important years for the child when she learns to socialize, learn the MeWe culture of Katha , and learns to use both left and right brains for integrated and exploring work that is incorporated in Katha's C89.

We strive to have a maximum of 25 children to a teacher at any given point of time and each teacher knows her students by name, family and larger-community affiliations. The cluster schooling in Katha means that children learn with peers and with teachers, acting as responsible seniors at one time, and as juniors who need to be looked after.

Students choose their learning activities according to the vidduniya they opt for. This ensures the development of curiosity and creativity and critical thinking in our children, even as they learn to work on their own and in teams. Children with specific subject learning problems use the Student support centre time to bring their doubts to their teacher/s for discussion and clarification. Sometimes, this task is performed by the Student Academic Mentors.

A Touch of Class is a kind of big sister big brother initiative that brings students from private schools across Delhi to work/network with our students.

The Staff

Katha has an excellent team of teachers, well-qualified, with their hearts in the right places. Most of them have been with Katha for the last ten years and more, and have been through intensive in-service training at least thrice a year since they joined us. This gives their caring a very special quality of academic excellence going in tandem with what each one of them expects from herself/himself - watchful expectation and masterly inaction - allowing students the freedom to decide for themselves.

The teachers are assisted by Kalpana Vilasam, the Centre for Creativity in Education, with its the teacher-training programme that goes back to 1990 when we started this activity in answer to an urgent need for teaching/learning materials; and the unit that develops teaching/learning materials (of the same vintage), researches, looks deeply at issues and areas, comes up with creative curricula and syllabi as well as teaching/learning materials that take forward Katha's commitment to democratic education as well as education for democracy.

Most teachers are involved in activities or classes in both schools and help in peer counselling, assessment and training. The school's various cells work in concert with the teachers combining their strengths to see that no subject is relegated to co- or extra-curricular status.

So whether it is Kala Nivas , the Four Arts Centre, or the Katha Information and eCommerce School (KITES) or ICCHA-KATHA, (the India Community Computer House at katha) or the Katha School of Entrepreneurship , each faculty team share responsibilities across the minimal school and curricular divides. Kathashala works gloriously as a single well-coordinated unit with that inner imperative to excel. Hamara Gaon and our women's cooperative and skill upgradation/reskilling initiatives of 1990, continue to make an impact on the economic status of families, thus bringing more children into our programmes. Hence the major initiatives that take off from the humble beginnings of 1990 to actively move forward the community revitalization and economic resurgence initiatives of our community of 100,000 people in one of the largest slum clusters in Delhi .

Katha's Challenge 2010 Pledge is taken by all at the beginning of each month, at the Faculty Club and in the Monthly Joint Assembly.

Mentoring and volunteering are a special attraction at Kathashala. And teachers too work with mentors and senior teachers who come in as volunteers to hone their skills. In 2002, we start TAQeED, the Teachers Alliance for Quality eEducation - a distance mentoring programme for teachers and professionals.

Our Support Staff handle the accounts and administration but also come actively in as teachers to handle the Purna Siksha and C9 leadership Club activities.

Cluster Schooling

As a concept, this is absolutely new in the world of education. The idea came to our ED from looking at the arches that grace our buildings at Katha. Each brick stands on its own, yet supports the other. Hence they are able to stand, a miracle of solidarity and ciooperation! "Arches provide the support by which they stand," says Geeta Dharmarajan. "And this is what we want for our school - for our students, our teachers and our communities. The ability to stand tall, ethically, professionally, in ways that will make our families and communities, our country proud!"

The Family Room

All of us in Katha are happy to take responsibility for the social and emotional well being of our children, whether we are teaching the child or not. And it is this commitment that sets Katha apart in our search of ways out of poverty and into self-determination for the children and adults of our community. From class 2 on, students taste the sense of being on their own, working in teams and learning the spirit of teamwork and helping bring out the best of oneself and others. By the time they come into the Class 4 Academy, the students are able to perform as good team members and as responsible and responsive members of the society they live in.

The FAMILY ROOM also takes responsibility for any kind of sickness. The community dispensary and health outreach is run by ASHA, another sister NPO. If a child should feel unwell after coming to school, she is immediately taken to ASHA. Of course, for serious complaints the children are taken, with the parent in attendance, to a nearby hospital.

KATHA STUDENT SUPPORT CENTRE

A prep system begins from class 5 for all children. Each child is assigned to a vidduniya tutor and she/he can come to the tutor as and when she needs help. Regular tutorials happen each week for two hours on Second Saturdays for students of the Katha Public school . The Tutor is different from the student's Family Room Teacher and participates in all meetings with parents.

Parent School Interaction

Situated as we are in the midst of our large 150,000 strong community, we welcome parents, grandparents and other family members to Kathashala, to share their stories and experiences, their arts and crafts and expertise, their entrepreneurship skills and leadership secrets.

Parents of children in the four Katha wadis can come in at 4:00 p.m. on designated days of the week to discuss the progress of their children. Second Saturdays are also kept for larger Ma Mandal and Bapu Mandal meetings where teachers are present to look at larger issues of schooling, careers and other related issues. The Danadini Club or the Grandparents-Teachers Association(GPTA) is a special initiative at Katha that forges inter-generational ties between children and elders in the community.

For more detailed discussions, parents or teachers can fix an appointment any day of the week. Besides this, teachers make Home Visits. And during these times, parents get an opportunity to carry their discussions forward.

Our Vision

We believe that quality learning can happen only when students and their parents participate equally in the process. Not for nothing did the African proverb "It takes a whole village to educate a child." Our hope is in continuing to hone our learning centre in such ways so that -

•  There's constant movement of the community in and out of the centre. To discuss personal dreams and community futures; to participate in the fun of lifelong learning; to hone skillsets and areas of economic growth.

•  Our students come in because they are compelled and impelled by an inner desire to learn and explore the world of knowledge and through this upward mobility for the individual and the community.

•  Teachers and students understand the deeply divided society we live in, are aware of the arguments that perpetuate and those that we need to address when looking at social inequity; and feel the urgency of change and devise ways to make that change happen in measured and measurable ways.

•  Our understanding of our children and their needs shape and inform our special curricula, syllabi and evaluation standards. And this understanding is (as indeed it is) constantly honed by the constant innovation or innovativeness that informs Katha's work. Passion for understanding the connections, the paradoxes, the deep stories will inform our work in Kathashala also.

•  And this is supported by excellent teaching/learning materials that come from a variety of sources - the newspapers, magazines, books and the Internet; from lectures and shared spaces with mentors and volunteers, from the stories and creations of students and teachers and other Katha staffers. We take a pledge that there will be no standardized textbooks for our children with the routine end-of-chapter dull questions and fill in the blanks.

•  As also by a library of books which has the best of literature from Hindi, and from other Indian languages through translations. This year, our hope is to add on 1,000 books - in Hindi and English, by some of the best writers of India and excellent children's writers from across the world. Each Cluster will have its own small Library. And the Main Library is for all.

•  The Teachers Resource Room is maintained for teachers to do their research and is a continuation of the Main Library - so students can also be encouraged to do their own research on topics of interest.

•  We take our vision of integration and inclusion forward in affordable, self-sustaining ways. Just as in a joint family where learning happens across age borders, so to in Kathashala that's integrated across the wadis through activities that spring from the whole school interdisciplinary curriculum. The Aangan of Kathashala hosts "exhibitions" and will also play host to painting and poetry reading sessions of Kala Nivas. And this is the space where Hamara Gaon will hold its Ma Mandal and Bapu Mandal meetings, thus bringing our community adults actively into the working spaces, enabling also students to participate in their deliberations. The aangan will bring students from All the wadis together. Laughing which is frowned upon in most schools is the heard sound in Kathashala, thanks to the natural exuberance of our children! And this shared laughter gresonates from each one of us!

•  Senior students (whether student mentors or not) will take the Family Room grouping seriously, share and care for children in the Jhunjhunwadi and the Creche, reading and talking to them and taking charge of them in trips and excursions.

•  Comparative Literature is the norm from Class ix on. And students can choose their own reading list in the syllabi. They are tested in these, on an individual basis. The mandatory texts for the Secondary examination of NOS are dealt with in the time NOS allots for such work - the 15 contact sessions.

•  Teachers offer "courses" each trimester, sometimes a class in her mother tongue [Bangla?] sometimes maybe a skill she learnt in her childhood, mehndi or rangoli ... Time has been set aside for this. This way a teacher's private passion spaces are fed and honed as well as her interest in personal research and knowledge seeking are given play.

•  Children's work. Students' work is collected regularly in portfolios; This gives each one of them a chance to feel the glow of pride that comes from a task well done. And it helps their parents recognize the talents in their children. Katha realizes that tests and evaluations are important. From Tamashawadi (Class 6 on), these Student Albums or files are examined carefully by our own teachers and those from outside. The appreciation, and the whole feedback is given to the student so that she moves forward in self-affirming ways. This goes in tandem with other evaluating formats in place in Katha like viva voces, group discussions, presentations, debates and defenses of issues and ideas etc.

•  We also believe in the need to make our evaluation system easily understandable to the community, through our associations like the Ma Mandal and the Bapu Mandal. Students have the curricula, syllabi and the stories of modules etc., easily available, so they enter fully and knowingly into these spaces.

•  Active Tolerance and the movement from mass to critical cultures is sought as active ingredients in all the schools we run. Our teachers strive for an understanding, a celebration of the differences in our very diverse community. And this active tolerance from our teachers brings out the same in our students. This informs all discussion and dialogue spaces - in the Faculty Room, the various clubs, and in student-teacher-community interactions.

•  Our teachers are the role models our students have. The caring and the sharing, the ability to talk assertively, and not aggressively, to be inclusive, not exclusive or seclusive ... these are Katha hallmark traits and these we want for ourselves and our children. Teamwork and the ability to make collective decisions is our strength. Imitation, we know, preceded creative new ways of thinking and being. And this important aspect of learning is what we shall give our children through teacher cooperation and synergy.