Dnyandeep (Lamp of Knowledge)

Empowering and enabling teachers to create effective learning environments in their local context through transformative teaching practices.

The problem:

The 2017 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) and relevant literature on the subject reveal that access to basic formal education is no longer a major issue in India; access to quality educational content and good educators is. The age-old policies and practices, teaching methodologies and evaluation formats used, deter students and teachers alike. Our research shows that most students dislike attending school because of the rote-learning methodology adopted for teaching, and/or the incompetence of the teacher to answer queries and make the subject interesting and engaging. This leads to absenteeism and high drop-out rates, especially in the rural set up. 

The Solution:

‘Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn’, embodied in these words of Benjamin Franklin lies the gist of our proposal. 

We propose to strengthen the teachers-students-administrators community in a way that the thrill of learning is brought back into ailing primary and secondary government-run schools of India.

The Plan

We plan to adopt a three-pronged approach:

• Training and empowering teachers to deliver quality education through innovative and engaging teaching practices- Dnyandeep proposes to set up local ‘Teacher Training Centres’ (TTC) in schools/colleges in order to adopt and train teachers from under-resourced schools in the vicinity. Additionally, it will engage in empowering young adults to mentor younger children in their academics and in solving problems affecting the local community. Special care will be taken to include girls from poor families, children with disability and those living in remote areas.
• Developing and refining quality educational content and pedagogies in the local context, and maintaining a well-stocked, regularly updated resource database to achieve the above.
• Creating a common social interaction platform to connect: i) Learners with the empowered teachers, mentors, peers, governmental and non-governmental organizations for resource acquisition and technical guidance. ii) Teachers, their students and the school administrators with a view of kick-starting a discourse on issues that concern their day-to-day learning experience.

Assessing Our Impact

'Generating interest in learning' - will serve as the guidepost for impact assessment of Dnyandeep on teachers, students and the larger community. Suitably customized feedback and feed forward mechanisms will be devised in order to assess Dnyandeep’s programme implementation and the impact thereof.

How will the solution change the world:

Our solution has the potential to be replicated and customized on a global scale in other states and countries in accordance with their needs and priorities. The idea of local schools adopting other local schools makes it possible to manage the local dimensions, making it possible to individually dovetail training skills for a given region or ethnicity. This would help preserve community diversity, vernacular languages and local heritages while trying to bring teachers and students on par with their global counterparts. Helping teachers, students and administrators to communicate and locally solve their own problems can be used as examples by other school in their network to either a) implement the same solution or b) inspired to create their own solutions.

The simple and undermined elegance of connecting the dots and using India's huge demographic dividend to meet the challenge. By training school teachers and interested youth, especially the girl child and children with disability, Dnyandeep hopes to have an extended outreach, thereby creating an inclusive community of scientifically-tempered, empathetic problem solvers, holistic in their education and approach. Additionally, Dnyandeep aims to provide a simple, robust and sustainable platform to deal with current educational needs where all stakeholders (teachers, students, parents, administrators, community members) can contribute to add relevance in their local context.

Use of technology is integral at all three stages of development we propose to undertake – by empowering teachers with online and offline teaching-learning-evaluation opportunities, creating and maintaining a curated database of learning resources, and providing a common platform to integrate the above and making it accessible to all stakeholders in a sustainable fashion.

• Build a network of subject experts, trainers, NGOs and government officials.
• Recruit people to work on training programs and e-platform development.
• Develop, refine and curate e-learning and one-to-one learning material and resources.
• Conduct pilot training sessions to test the prototype and plug loopholes.

Scale up the model and transfer the know-how to village communities to increase our outreach. Make them self-reliant and sustainable, using our platform as an aid, but not dependent on it. Develop teachers who are self-reliant, critically thinking, scientifically tempered mindset, who will inspire future batches of learners to think for themselves, their people and the planet.

By visiting resource-limited rural and urban-poor areas either through our own team efforts, or in collaboration with governmental and non-governmental agencies already working in those areas, Dnyandeep will set up local Teacher Training Centres (take the solution to where it is most needed). By understanding and adapting teaching strategies and problem solving to the local context, culture and language, Dnyandeep aims to inspire a continued interest in education by all stakeholders involved.

As a team, our solution is still in the idea stage.

At the individual level, we have facilitated several teachers and learners to find requisite help and resources online and offline. They continue to reach out to us when in need of further help.

We hope to serve at least a 100 teachers in the next 12 months, increasing up to 1000 plus teachers over the next three years.

Both team members are educated at the foremost institutes of education in India and are well connected with academicians, researchers and industry experts from different fields in India and abroad. Having an actively teaching professional and a proactive social activist on board will help Dnyandeep tap the required experts and resources needed, and to further the outreach to include schools, colleges, governmental and non-governmental organizations in the education field and outside. Most importantly, there exists the strong common drive to dedicatedly work for and enhance the standards of transformative education in India.

We are seeking to build a self-sustaining community model that utilizes available infrastructure and resources at the community level. The initial seed investments will be utilized to build up a training platform/ programmes/ resources that can later be distributed at a small fee to sustain the programme.

The initial funding may come from ‘heartfelt-connectors’, ‘big bettors’, public providers’ and ‘national localizers’. We intend to reach out to people who believe in equitable education reaching all, impoverished communities included. We may tap into funding mechanisms already in place in the given locality, for instance local philanthropists. We are also open to tapping into any organisation, governmental or NGO or private companies that invest a part of their profit  towards social good. We will also research the possibilities of parental and community participation as customers for the services we provide. This will engender a feeling of ownership and responsibility among the stakeholders and help make the model sustainable.

MIT SOLVE will provide us with a global platform to bounce off our ideas, gain and share insights with people working in the field, learn from the experts and the experienced, and polish our social entrepreneurial edge - all to turn our on-paper ideas into achievable and pragmatic real-life goals.

1. Seed finance.

2. Building and sustaining meaningful partnerships (will happen, but will take time).

3. Customizing educational content in local dialects, especially tribal dialects.

4. Implementation might be hampered by the socio-economic divide and graft situation in the country, but we hope to overcome that with our dedicated and directed efforts.

5. In general, a low respect towards the teaching profession, especially in the digital age where 'information' is freely available.