When I was younger, my mom had the crazy idea
to homeschool my brother and me for a year in India to experience the culture
and to give us a chance to connect with our roots. As much as thirteen year old
me was upset at the idea of missing out on the all-important social events of
the eighth grade, it really was a life changing experience.
During that year, I volunteered at Olcott Memorial High School,
a school in Chennai that is funded by the Theosophical Society of India. To
quote their website, the school’s goal is “social change through the education
of the underprivileged.” I noticed while I was there how much the students were
struggling to learn English because they did not have any exposure to the
language outside of school, the teachers themselves were not very fluent, and
on top of that, they didn’t have many resources, like books, that were actually
relevant to their lives.
Not learning English is a problem because
while students can learn subjects in Tamil, and be good at them, students who
go to Tamil-medium schools have a lot of difficulty getting through college or
finding jobs without being fluent in English. In fact, a majority of higher-paying
jobs require a proficiency in the English language.
Since that trip to India, my goal has been to
come up with a solution that would help students get enough practice in the
basics of English at a young age so that they have a foundation that they can
build upon throughout their schooling.
Throughout my four years of high school, I
made many attempts (and failed many times) to come up with a solution to the
problems I saw in that English classroom. I wanted to create resources that
would be easy for teachers to use and could be used in underfunded classrooms
all over India. My first idea was online resources - easy to distribute, and
easy to work on remotely from America. I decided to use the students’
government assigned textbooks to put stories onto a website and include Tamil
translations, comprehension quizzes, and extra activities and animations to go
along with each unit of the book. I realized pretty quickly that this solution
wasn’t going to work out.
While on the right track, there were many issues
with this original idea. For starters, not every underfunded school in
Tamilnadu was lucky enough to have a computer lab. In fact, in villages in
India, it was rare that anyone might even have access to internet.
Additionally, after speaking with teachers I had gained a relationship with in
Tamilnadu, ESL teachers in America, and doing more online research, I found
that building a good foundation in English without translations, through topics
such as phonics and basic sight words, would be the best way to help these
students. This made me shift my focus from higher grades towards the first and
second standards, which resulted in my idea for a book box: a box that had
short stories along with hands on activities and games that helped with
comprehension.
The first time I went back to India in 2015,
it was with the first ever English Kadhavu “Book Box” - a set of books and
activities that are focused on a unit of the schools’ government assigned
textbooks. This particular one focused on the subject “Parts of the Body” for
third graders. The goal of these book boxes were to not only give teachers more
resources to use in the classroom, but be easy for them to use regardless of
their own English proficiency. I also wanted them to be interesting for students
to use outside of the classroom for extra practice by featuring characters who
look like them and have lives similar to theirs. It was hugely successful.
I took the book box to three different schools
and tested them in the classroom to see how they were used and how I could
improve what I had created. I learned many little things that made a huge
difference in what I developed. For instance that students from different
schools were at vastly different levels of reading comprehension, leading me to
change the rating system of the book boxes from the grades they were meant for
to just regular levels.
This year, thanks to the Blum Center grant, I
went to India with the goal of working on the teacher training aspect of what
I’ve been developing. As I mentioned earlier, one of my goals with these new
resources is for them to be as easy as possible for teachers to use. However, I
also want teachers to learn from them. Years from now, I hope that teachers who
have been using English Kadhavu resources will have developed a much more
in-depth understanding of the language that they can use to benefit their
students in the future. I brought the teacher guides that I had made and
observed classrooms to see if teachers were able to understand how to use the
boxes based on those guides alone. When they needed extra help, I recorded
exactly what they were confused by and what extra information they needed. I
also spent time testing out new English learning material, including a set of
phonics books, in classrooms to see how useful they were to students. I met
more teachers and other professionals who will be a great resource to me as I
continue working on developing our resources.
This trip really opened my eyes to what the
future of English Kadhavu might look like. After we finish development, I hope
to do more research and gain hard data on the benefits of using our resources.
I envision one day being able to partner with other organizations with a wider
reach to get our books and activities out to schools all over Tamilnadu, and
eventually all of India.
LINKS
Website
- www.englishkadhavu.org
Facebook
- www.facebook.com/englishkadhavu
Instagram
- www.instagram.com/englishkadhavu (@englishkadhavu)
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