Hello!
Welcome
to the first issue of our e-newsletter. As a resource organisation,
Vikramshila has been involved in a variety of interesting
activities and our friends and well wishers have been urging
us to keep them posted about some of the interesting happenings.
All this while, we were doing it sporadically …and gradually
the idea of having a regular e-newsletter evolved. Every
month, we will talk about the most interesting experience
we’ve had. The theme of this issue is the Holiday Camps
we helped to organise in order to address the problem of
drop outs in formal schools. This was a massive effort involving
more than 3000 children, 17 NGOs and 200 formal school teachers.
A total of 17 camps were organised in 9 districts of West
Bengal – Bankura, Bardhaman, East Midnapur, South 24 Parganas,
North 24 Parganas, Nadia, Hooghly, Howrah and Purulia. The
Camps were the culmination of a year long preparation, in
which various other stakeholders such as the teachers unions
and the local-self-government members were included. I hope
you will enjoy reading about the Camps and I would love
to get a response from you.
- Basundhara (Editor)
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HOLIDAY
CAMPS FOR RURAL CHILDREN IN WEST BENGAL :
In India
out of every 100 children who join primary school, only
12 children are able to complete ten years of schooling
and more than half the children drop out before they are
able to complete their elementary education. The maximum
number of drop-outs happen between classes 2 and 3. Why
is it so?
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What
is the profile of the child who is most likely to drop out
?
Usually,
the first generation learner who is academically weak ,
the child who comes from a culture of silence and finds
it difficult to express herself or himself in class, the
child from a socio-economically deprived background who
is brought up on the belief that he or she is of very little
worth, AND the girl child who carries the additional burden
of being a girl in a society steeped in gender bias. In
a system of education which gives the socially handicapped
very little scope to follow a different pace, these are
the children who start lagging behind and finally give up
the effort to continue schooling against heavy odds. We
conceptualised the activities of these camps and trained
the volunteers to implement the ideas. These were woven
around three main subjects – Language, Maths and EVS - but
through quiz, role play and games. Within a couple of days
the transformation of the children was amazing – they opened
up and their enthusiasm was so catchy that their teachers
also got carried away. On the final day of the 7 day camp
when the children proudly put up an exhibition to show their
work, the parents, the special guests and all those who
were present were visibly moved. The Holiday Camps have
thus been able to create a stir – large sections of teachers
and parents have become aware of the problems of the academically
weak children and have also seen how they can be tackled
through simple means. We are confident that the Camps will
be able to avert many potential drop-out cases because we
could clearly see that the children have gone back to their
schools with much more self-confidence and are now keen
to learn and know. Vikramshila played a lead role in helping
17 organisations in West Bengal to organise Holiday Camps
for these children. The activities of the Camps were designed
in such a manner as to give these children back their lost
self-confidence and self-esteem – to be able to discover
their own worth and creative potential. Children who had
just completed Class 2 and had extremely poor academic grades
were selected by the teachers for the camps. In future,
our efforts would be to integrate this approach within the
teaching learning process in schools everyday and to organise
more such camps on a wider scale on a regular basis.
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