Exploring the Educational Landscape of Andhra Pradesh: Insights from a Mentor Teacher's Visit
Divya Gupta
Most of us are familiar with the concept of student exchange programs wherein students from one country visit their partner country and live and study there for some duration of their program. They also host people from the partner country as part of these educational programs. The benefits of such an exchange are manifold and widely known. It may be a novelty in many developing nations but the concept has been very popular in the West for several decades now. The purpose of such visits is of course not limited to tourism and extends to learning from a deeper understanding of a culture widely removed from one's own, to developing an insight into the shift of perspective that comes from living in a different part of the world and to gaining applied knowledge of 21st century skills such as collaboration with the people one meets during these global events.
These reasons alone are sufficient to believe in the transformative power of these exchanges and exposure visits. The power of such visits increases exponentially when the exchange program is attended by a teacher who has the potential to cascade it to hundreds of thousands of his/her students. While the idea remains largely unexplored in most Indian states, it is the proud privilege of Mentor Teachers from the Department of Education, Delhi that they are given learning opportunities such as these by the SCERT and the State Government.
Being a Mentor Teacher, one received this opportunity to visit the state of Andhra Pradesh for 6 days as part of a 30 member delegation in the month of February 2023.
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During our stay in the scenic coastal state, we had the unique opportunity to visit schools in the city of Vizag, residential schools in the mountains of Araku and DIET Bheemunipatnam. One of the first things that we noticed was the landscape of the schools which is entirely different from our schools in Delhi. The schools are usually built in acres of space and have more open space than buildings, thus fostering a sense of learning in the lap of nature. All schools make delightful use of school buildings as learning resources. Walls are painted with socially relevant, thought provoking messages, with the process of evolution of education in the state, and the culture of the native peoples speaks to the visitor simply from the visuals drawn on the walls before they even step in. These schools are greener and more self sufficient than many schools in Delhi. This may be attributed to the fact that unlike Delhi, schools there are far and few and thus have plenty of space.
Children grow some of their food in kitchen gardens and all of the food gets cooked in the school kitchens. The mid day meal is well planned and offers great variety as well as nutrition.
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Secluded from the hustle and bustle of the city, the schools in Araku valley are not just schools but homes to girls from as many as 27 nearby villages , all housing tribal families with little to no means and resources. Interaction with these girls shall remain the greatest takeaway of one’s visit.
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Young women studying in these schools fight adversity, scarcity , poverty ,live away from their families for a cause as great as education while being first generation learners themselves and remain deeply grateful for all that they receive in their schools. One asks them about their lives, their homes, families , dreams and aspirations. A common and collective dream now seems to be a great desire to visit Delhi and Delhi schools!
We sit in the sun and talk about how they hardly ever get homesick because of how much they love living with their friends, how their parents come to take them back home once a month for a couple of days , how they celebrate their festivals, what they want to do when they grow up. The conversation ends with them singing a popular local song in the most melodious chorus - “bujamma...bujamma...” echoes in my ears long after our bus leaves the school campus to go to get another school in the mountains and follows me well into Delhi.
Experiences such as these do not only cause one to observe superficial or material implementations such as use of a certain technology in a certain state or use of solar panels to power the entire school. They in fact cause the visiting teacher to reflect on much deeper levels and question themselves on why learners in world class government schools in Delhi are not practicing gratitude like a tribal girl in Araku, what teachers can do differently to ensure learning and discipline like a small school in Andhra and so on.
It then moves from being a mere physical visit and grows into a meta analysis leading to observation and reflection, both powerful precursors of change. Such visits do not just mean to receive but also to give what is working successfully for oneself. In that spirit ,we presented to the schools we visited, copies of books that we use for teaching the mindset curricula in Delhi and paintings made by our school children as part of the business blasters programme.
More importantly, in a conversation with the teacher trainees at DIET, I presented them with a question that they probably had not had the occasion to ask themselves before. I asked them what they wanted to do as teachers. Since the question was new to them, all of them shared how they would teach “well”. One asked them again – “Every teacher goes to a classroom at the scheduled time and teaches out of the textbook. What is it that you will do differently?” , “That is what would make you a remarkable teacher and set you apart from the crowd.” I left them wondering and today I received an email from one teacher trainee who shared that she would inspire each one of her students to teach at least one person to read and write! What a marvellous thought!
Teacher exchanges have been seen through political binoculars and questioned roughly recently but it needs to be understood that an average teacher has the opportunity to interact with , and the potential to influence almost 10,000 learners in his/her lifetime. All that teachers learn through such visits can bring incomparable value to their teaching ,it can help them go beyond the text and bring the much needed acceptance towards multiplicity of perspective.
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