Inclusive educational innovations in India

by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin and Alfonso Echazarra
CERI Innovation Strategy, Directorate for Education and Skills


India has been hailed for being a laboratory of frugal and inclusive innovations. The Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world, the Aravind Eye Care Hospitals, which fight “avoidable blindness” by giving cheap or free state-of-the-art eye surgery to poor Indians, or the Bharti Airtel, which offers low-rate phone calls, thanks to an innovative business model, are often-cited examples of innovations that make valuable products and services affordable to deprived populations. Just glance at the Honey Bee Network database and you will find a plethora of interesting initiatives targeted to the Indian poor: from the Mitticool, a natural refrigerator made entirely from clay that requires no energy, to the Washing and Exercise Machine, a mechanical, semi-automated, pedal operated washing machine for clothes, the jugaad spirit is ubiquitous.

This drive for inclusive innovation is visible across all sectors in India, and education is no exception. The spotlight has often fallen on the USD 35 Aakash tablet, designed to improve the teaching process and end the digital divide, and on the Mid-Day Meal programme, a government programme that provides free hot lunches for children attending school. But there are also plenty of other initiatives trying to improve the educational outcomes of the economically deprived. These initiatives are particularly welcome in a country where, in spite of remarkable progress in education, one third of the adult population remains illiterate (EFA report 2012) and improving learning outcomes remains a huge challenge, as evidenced by Pratham’s Aser report, itself another example of frugal innovation.

The Education Innovation Fund for India (EIFI), the first competitive fund for educational innovation across India and a collaboration between Hewlett Packard and the India Council for Integral Education (Sri Aurobindo Society), funds and supports about 20 initiatives addressing such challenges. As part of new work on inclusive innovation in education started by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), EIFI grantees have piloted our new survey and shared with us how they help poor students access better quality education. Here are a few examples of innovations they are implementing.

One reason why low income students frequently have low learning outcomes is that they are offered an education that is irrelevant to their interests and daily life. Oasis, a social innovation organisation, notes that rural children are often trained for urban professions, while schools offering good programmes in rural development are located in urban areas. As a result, neither rural nor urban kids tend to use their knowledge, notwithstanding the fact that they are very likely to have dropped out long before they complete their education. The establishment of Gramodaya schools in rural areas is meant to address this mismatch. The schools will offer rural development education to rural students so that they can implement the practical knowledge and sustainable techniques that they will learn through peer-to-peer and community-based learning.

Another reason for low learning outcomes is that well-meaning teachers are often poorly equipped to provide good teaching, in terms of both pedagogical knowledge and resources. In deprived areas, pedagogical innovations will not be adopted unless they cost virtually nothing and are accompanied by some form of pedagogical aid for teachers. But several frugal innovations show that the cost of learning resources can be made almost irrelevant (though this does not imply there is no other challenge for their adoption).

Making better use of a school building may just require some good use of paint, as Building as Learning Aid (BaLA) by Vinyãs has shown. BaLA develops standards to turn school buildings into learning resources. Diagrams painted on the floors underneath doorways, for example, support children’s learning of angles. BaLA also maps its learning resources on the Indian curriculum, showing school principals and teachers how these new resources can be used in teaching and learning. The project now operates in 18 Indian states, affecting over 10,000 government schools and their communities.

Another programme, Learning is Fun and Experiential (LIFE) Lab provides low-cost, hands-on learning models to foster experiential science learning in underprivileged schools, hoping to boost students’ interest, confidence and creativity. The balloon car, used to teach Newton’s laws of motion, only requires a balloon, a straw, an ice cream stick and four bottle caps – not to mention, of course, a healthy dose of curiosity and craftsmanship. Science teachers across India can access the “LIFE Lab” as an open source platform of hundreds of resources by attending support sessions in its community centres. Life-lab is currently working with eight schools, two community centres and 3,000 children.

India is a laboratory of frugal and inclusive innovations. But how can these promising ideas and stories empower more teachers and students in their learning and be scaled up? Making these innovations visible and shared across school and teacher networks is the aim of two EIFI grantees, both making a simple use of technology to that effect.

By identifying Gujarati schools and teachers doing much better than expected, the Educational Innovation Bank at IIM Ahmedabad is building a repository of teaching innovations meant to empower and inspire other teachers looking for practical ideas to teach more effectively in India’s under-resourced schools. With a network of 4,000 innovative teachers, the web-based database already reaches out to 100,000 more.

Design for Change (DfC) proposes another way of making inspiring success stories visible. It shows that learners can be agents of change and be made more responsible for their learning and for changing their community. DfC supports teachers and learners in virtually all Indian states with a simple method based on design thinking. Drawing on the projects submitted to its school challenge, it displays its preferred ideas in a video database containing numerous inspiring “stories of change”. Design for Change now has sister organisations in 34 countries.

All of these examples show that making quality education accessible to poor students does not necessarily require many additional resources: it can just take a better use of existing resources, cheap additional ones, or the adoption of existing good ideas – generally with some form of teacher support. While frugal innovations alone may not be enough, Indian innovators show us that the jugaad spirit can improve the education of disadvantaged children at little cost.

Links:
CERI Innovation Strategy for Education and Training: Inclusive Innovation
CERI Innovation Strategy for Education and Training
OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
OECD report on Innovation and Inclusive Growth

“Creativity” is spelled with a “why”

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education

Here’s a science experiment for you: Take a standard-issue van. Equip it with household items – coat hangers, balls of string, maybe even a few potatoes – with which you could demonstrate certain basic scientific principles. Find someone who knows how to drive the van and teach that person some of those basic principles of science (or find someone who knows those basic principles and teach that person how to drive the van…). Send driver and van out into remote, disadvantaged villages. Observe how children react.

While waiting to amass the funds he needed to realise his dream of building a school in the Himalayas to develop creative leaders, Ramji Raghavan performed that little experiment – and discovered a way to ignite creativity. Thirteen years after the first van was sent out into rural India in 1999, the Agastya International Foundation, chaired by Raghavan, now dispatches 62 vans, most focusing on general science, but two specialising in ecology and one in the arts, across nine states in India, runs a Creativity Lab in the state of Andhra Pradesh, and reaches more than a million children – and their parents – each year.

“Creative people tend to be very good observers,” Raghavan noted during a recent visit to the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. “They are aware; they are able to associate different pieces of information, integrate them and apply them. These skills are all predicated on curiosity. But how do you spark curiosity?”

Raghavan, who was a banker in his early career (“when it was still a somewhat honourable profession”), found the answer to his question in hands-on, experiential learning. “People tend to remember things when they are personally engaged,” he says. That’s why the Agastya project also selects students with particular aptitude and interest and has them teach other children. Not only do these young teachers retain more of what they learn – some have even won special awards in national science competitions – but, through teaching, they also begin to develop other positive attitudes and behaviour – including, for example, empathy. “They begin to realise,” says Raghavan, “how difficult it is to teach.”

These unintended outcomes “can be more important than the original goal,” says Raghavan. “These children learn different ways of thinking and looking at the world.” For Raghavan, those different ways of thinking also need to be adopted by traditional teachers and schools. “We need a shift from ‘yes’ to ‘why?’ in school systems,” he says, “from looking to observing; from being passive to exploring; from textbook-bound to hands-on; from fear to confidence.”

Although the school in the Himalayas is still a dream, Raghavan has managed to change the reality for millions of young Indians who live a little closer to sea level. “There are magical moments in all our lives,” he says. “We may have found a way to deliver these kinds of transformational moments on a mass scale.”
Links:
Visit the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
See related blog posts:
The “extra” in extracurricular activities
Skills revolution will come from the grassroots
Photo credit: Mobile Lab / © Stephan Vincent-Lancrin

Skills revolution will come from the grassroots

Sanjit Bunker Roy figured out pretty early on that it does, indeed, take a village; in fact, it takes a village to keep a village. He founded the Barefoot College in India in 1972 on the premise that for any rural development activity to be successful and sustainable, it must be both based in the village and managed and owned by those whom it serves. The College, a non-governmental organisation, serves rural men and women of all ages, all of whom are barely literate (if at all) and have no hope of getting even the lowest government job, by providing training in such skills as solar engineering, water drilling, hand-pump engineering, masonry, architecture, and computing.

Marilyn Achiron, Editor of the Education Department caught up with Roy when he was in Paris to speak at the OECD Forum. He’s not one to mince his words:

“We are facing a disaster of monumental proportions,” says Roy. “We’re training people to leave the village, not to stay in the village. We’re encouraging migration at a colossal level from village to city. As a result, we’re losing all the traditional knowledge and skills that used to be in the village. Does anyone at the mover-and-shaker level have the courage and vision to turn this around? We’re already set in a pattern that we can’t break.”

According to Roy, whom Time magazine named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, the big international donors are part of the problem, and not enough of the solution. “People aren’t listening enough. The biggest problem with the big donors is that they don’t have the ability or the humility to listen to what’s happening on the ground. We need to respect traditional knowledge and skills; you cannot be educated at the expense of tradition. It’s a balance. There’s a real urgent situation out there and we’re not treating it with urgency.”

A dissatisfaction with policies designed in the relative comfort of developed-world capitals while more than one in five people in the world live on less than USD 1.25 a day comes across clearly. The OECD is not spared Roy’s frustration: “The OECD’s attitude towards education is outdated. In the non-organised, informal world, people have no access to water, electricity, formal education. The OECD’s attitude is dangerous. They have to revisit it and adapt it to the reality on the ground. They have lost touch.” Even the OECD Skills Strategy, released earlier this week already needs updating:  “There will be a skills revolution from the grassroots. The current thinking has to change. The question is: How do you recognise skills that people already have and apply them in the situation in which they live? The OECD is very backwards in its thinking.”

Between 2007 and 2011, the Barefoot College trained some 300 grandmothers, from 29 countries throughout Africa, in solar technologies. After their six-month training course—paid for, along with their air fare, by the Indian government—they went back to their villages and solar electrified some 15,000 houses. Says Roy, “These illiterate grandmothers know more about the repair and maintenance of solar lamps and installations than any graduate of any five-year university anywhere in the world. And if anyone wants to challenge me on it, I’d be delighted.”

Links:
Barefoot College
Watch the TED Talk: Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement
OECD Skills Strategy
Visit our interactive portal on skills: http://skills.oecd.org
OECD Forum 2012
Photo credit: Colourful feet / Shutterstock