Rendering relevance through the arts
Lakshmi Karunakaran
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learnt in school. – Albert Einstein
It’s every educator’s quest to make education relevant and meaningful. However, the challenge of a rigid curriculum based system and the threat of information overload looms not only over our students, but also our educators. A significant disadvantage of the curriculum-based approach in education is its tedious uniformity. It fails to cater to the diverse needs of the children within the classroom and is either far removed from their immediate environment and socio-economical reality or its relevance and impact on the students is left unexplored. Arts education is becoming a medium to bridge this gap and is helping educators bring relevance and immediacy to the lessons they teach.
“Our school books have nothing in them that reflect our environment and everyday context of life,” says Ms. Arundhati Ghosh, Director of India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), a national, not-for-profit, grant making organization that supports practice, research, and education in the arts in India. ‘Arts education enables students to understand who they are, where they come from and what relationship they have with the world around them. It also helps them ask questions and challenge their lived experiences – make them not good citizens but critical citizens of this democracy.’
IFA’s Arts Education programme is one of their oldest grant making programmes, and probably the only one in the country that offers grants to government school teachers. In its initial years, the program made a series of wide-ranging grants on a national scale to artists seeking to promote arts in classrooms. However, by 2008 the program was revised to place the ‘school teacher’ at the centre of the program.
Ms. Ghosh reflects on this decision, “It was felt that teachers are key change makers in the school system. They are the pivots. Ask anyone who has been the greatest influence in their lives, or who has inspired them and the name of some teacher in their lives many years ago will emerge. Teachers are the door openers of our minds in so many ways. Thus we felt that if we were to make arts education work, we must focus on the teacher – with training and grants. We need to equip them to do what they do best – make learning a journey full of the joy of curiosity.”
This thought led to the birth of the Kali-Kalisu program, a pilot project that showcases good practices and the larger possibilities for arts education within the schooling system in Karnataka. Over the last five years, the programme has focused its energies and resources on arts-based training for teachers from government schools and has been enabling interesting work to enhance project ideas at grassroots level. “Arts education fosters an understanding of the self and the other by collective experiences of making art. Especially in government schools that lack infrastructure, facilities, teachers and all other amenities, arts education can provide a semblance of spirited explorations into learning,” adds Ms. Ghosh.
Apart from the grant, IFA conducts Master Resource Persons (MRP) training programmes across the state, covering 17 districts in South Karnataka and 17 in North Karnataka. “One of the main objectives of the program is to focus on local themes, folk art, and culture,” says Mr. Krishna Murthy, Program Manager of the Arts Education Program. “Interaction with their local community and the challenges the community is facing is another important aspect,” he adds.
Mr. Mallesha M, a grantee from Kalghatki, Dharward Dist, used the arts to create awareness about the social and cultural issues that surround the school and the community, with a particular emphasis on female absenteeism and child marriage. “While I worked with the children, I realized that it was important to get parents on board. In the previous years, we would go door to door and talk to the parents. We changed that. We brought all the parents to a common place. Through the grant and with the children in the lead, we started an awareness program in the village,” says Mr.Mallesha. He organized his students into a variety of art clubs, such as literature, drama, and cinema, and steered them towards gathering knowledge and information about school-related issues with the help of external resources. This was followed by the clubs working independently and with each other to shape art-based interventions, such as creating a script and staging a play, or screening a film, to directly engaging with the larger community through an arts camp.
Mr. Sadanand Byandoor, a teacher from Government High School, Kundapur, Udupi has been a recipient of the Kali Kalisu Master Resource Persons Training in 2010. Through the grant he took up poetry and through innovative modes, made studying poetry an experiential and sensory engagement that brings alive the essence and spirit of poetry. “I was always interested in working with children on poetry, but we government school teachers find very little financial support for such interests. This grant helped me realize this project.” In addition to the poems in the textbooks in Kannada, Hindi, and English which students have to learn, Mr. Byandoor drew up another list of poems in Kannada from across the years to give students exposure to the wide variety of and rich language traditions in Kannada. “We spent hours after school reading and discussing poetry. Initially, I realized that the children couldn’t connect or relate to many of these poems. The language was dense, the contexts were different. I then started to break them down into simple stories, connecting them to local happenings and characters that they could relate to. Soon, things changed,” says Mr. Byandoor.
He invited poets, writers, singers, and theatre artists to conduct workshops on discussing, reading, and performing poetry in ways never done before in the school. “I am not sure how much poetry my students will practice in the future, or how many of them would become poets themselves or retain interest in poetry. But one thing is for sure, they have learnt to ask questions. They have learnt to think about what they read, and that skill, hopefully, is for a lifetime.”
The challenges are many. “One of the biggest challenges is in the mindset of most educators, who see art as ‘extra-curricular’, as something that is threatening to ‘real’ education. Reaching out to government school teachers, especially the rural areas is no mean task. That is why the trainings conducted in the various districts are important. During the trainings we sensitize teachers to this approach to teaching and learning and the resources that are available to them to take it further,” says Mr. Murthy. The lack of infrastructure and support is another ongoing challenge.
What after the grant period is over? Do the teachers continue the practice? Ms. Ghosh says, “The challenge is as always sustainability of the work that these brilliant teachers do. How do we ensure more support from governments? How can their work influence and transform the archaic ways of pedagogy of our schools? How do we ensure that arts education plays a role in the training of teachers? I am reminded of the famous Pink Flyod song here – how do we ensure that arts education frees us from creating another brick in the wall through our education systems?”
Though the challenges are many, the applications for the grant have been steadily growing. “What amazes me is that with such limited resources teachers can transform learning and with that the lives of thousands of students. Their passion and commitment to their vocation will inspire even the most cynical. That understanding and learning about arts and cultural practices around us, in our communities, in our quotidian environment can be so enriching. That in the stories of our grandmothers and the songs of our ancestors, in our work fables and the ritual decorations of our homes, in our languages and our diverse cuisines – lay bodies of knowledge that can equip us to imagine our futures. That through arts education we learn to ask questions about our present lives, social injustices, economic instabilities and political motives. That through arts education we gain a sense of who we are, what our values are, the kind of lives we intend to live. We have also discovered that it’s a junoon once you get into the journey – there is no stopping,” says Ms. Ghosh.
Clearly, there is a need to take on board the fact that despite all hurdles there are government school teachers who are committed to their work, and want to enrich the lives of children that they work with. And that they are in need of support and guidance.
The author is an educator based in Bengaluru. She can be reached at lakshmikarunakaran@gmail.com.
