What should your school look like?
If you were given a chance to build a school, what would it look like? We asked a few children, who had some pretty interesting ideas.
If you were given a chance to build a school, what would it look like? We asked a few children, who had some pretty interesting ideas.
What is spatial intelligence? The activities in this article give a whole new meaning to the way you look at space.
Music helps relax, concentrate, and unwind. Here’s exploring the idea of using music to enhance learning spaces.
Statistics reveal that more than half the number of children in India have faced some form of sexual abuse and every second child undergoes emotional abuse. It is, therefore, important that we provide children with safe and nurturing environments to grow up in and schools should play their part in helping out.
Everywhere everybody talks about the need to include ‘special’ children in regular schools to give a sense of normalcy to their lives. Although regular schools have started taking in these children, neither the schools nor their teachers are in any way trained to handle them. Therefore, despite being in a regular school, ‘special’ children continue to suffer seperation. Here are some ideas that a teacher from a regular school can adopt to actually start implementing the process of Inclusion.
While light is extremely important to life, darkness too has a lot to offer us. Darkness enhances experimental thinking, opens up communication, and helps us learn to trust.
There’s much more we can say about the nooks and crannies of a school, spaces meant for learning about and learning within and without. For instance… Boxed-in tiffins? Where do we eat and how does the atmosphere of the lunchroom affect children’s attitudes to what they eat and how they eat? Are there comfortable and companionable spaces where students (and staff) can share their meals? Drawn curtains Do you allow room for creative performances? Stages can be of various kinds – raised, sunken, under the trees or the sky. But they need to allow the music and dance to spread and reach the audience’s minds and hearts. Smelly spaces! Most children develop a phobia for toilets in school… does it have to be that way? What can we do to create and fulfill an expectation for clean, friendly washrooms? How do we get the school community to become partners in this? Time to assemble Are our meeting halls inclusive or threatening? Do we have forbidding slogans and stern faces on the walls that only serve to further wall in thought? Do they allow everyone to see, hear and participate in what goes on? Signs and symbols What does the writing on the walls say? Do they provide clear direction and instruction? How do the labels define the spaces? Are words and pictures used to encourage or control activity? Life in the Lab Are the science laboratories truly functional or do they only meet regulatory standards? Are they set up to encourage thinking and true experiementation? Are they safe as well as stimulating?
Most school buildings in India remind one either of a hospital or a prison, both places of surveillance and authority. Schools though should be welcoming places where children can freely explore knowledge. The Centre for Vernacular Architecture is changing the way schools are being built
Shankar Musafir The ‘neighbourhood criteria’ has environmental, economic and social ramifications Admission to the nursery classes in most schools in Delhi has been a controversial issue. Added to this, the B K Ganguly Committee Report on nursery admissions has also caused a huge uproar. The committee was formed on the recommendation of the Delhi High Court to review a petition1 against interviewing parents at the time of admissions to nursery school. The private school fraternity and many parents are not happy about it. But there is at least one important point in the report which will make environmentalists/educationists happy. A section of the report has to do with a child’s residence near the school as a criterion for admission – ‘the neighbourhood criterion’. Initially, the report mentioned 3 km as the radius that the school should consider. After protests from parents and schools this radius was increased. Nevertheless, this condition makes a lot of sense, environmentally. Every school invariably finds itself surrounded by vehicles both the school transport and private vehicles twice daily – when the school opens and when it closes. The reason – most students commuting to school use either the school bus or their private vehicles. With the ‘blue line fiasco’2, failure of public transport and increasing affluence among people, the number of parents dropping their kids to school has increased. The result is an increase in the number of traffic jams outside schools. As transport planners have been saying, more people should use public transport. A bus can carry more passengers than a car and occupies less space. This means that there will be less traffic and congestion on the roads. Not bad advice at all! More children need to use public or school buses rather than create traffic jams by using their own cars. But this is not merely a traffic problem. A study by the Central Institute of Road Transport, Pune, finds that a car consumes nearly six times more energy per passenger per km than an average bus. Hence, public transport makes sense even from the point of view of saving fuel. These days children travel enormous distances to reach their schools and get back home. Not only does the fuel spent impact the environment through emissions, there are many limitations unaccounted for. The time taken to travel eats into a child’s time to play. The child when he comes back home only has enough time to finish homework. This is stressful and has a negative impact on
Sanskrit does not really require long hours of study. It is also possible to use the language in everyday communication.
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