How to imagine a mindset shift in Education?
Value-based educational changes are a very complex area of work, that too when your context is a government school. Imagine the processes that have long been around achieving (or mostly appearing to achieve) the pre-decided learning outcomes and one fine day you are asked to focus on how many and what kind of questions your students ask you! The challenge is too layered to navigate through. At one level, the teachers (or the system) have been struggling to devote appropriate hours of teaching time in the classroom, and at the other level, the idea of integrating values in pedagogy seems alien. I have been knocking the doors of a government school in Uttar Pradesh for a few months (this is before lockdown) every day. Though it took some time to welcome my presence, it was finally accepted. All I wanted to do was create an enabling space where every child felt valued, heard, and accepted. I initiated with an experiment of creating a label-free classroom, where people don't call eac