Tadaa! – how StoryPedagogy came to be!
Geeta Dharmarajan
In 1977 my naïveté broke cutting into me like shrapnel. Poverty that I had refused to see hit me when I saw rural India as a grown-up.
How do children learn? How do communities earn? How important is school education in the lives of all the millions of children in India?
I was deeply immersed in Bharata’s Natyashastra – the 2000-year-old treatise that many called the only living document of drama and dance. But I saw it as the world’s first treatise on communication. So, in 1988, when I was again dragged out of my smug “middle class-ness” by Delhi’s neglected and forgotten children, I went from frustration to tears to helplessness to outrage. We could not do this to our children! To any child! And out of this outrage was born StoryPedagogy™, an amalgam of Bharata, my skills as a writer of stories, and my experience with children in rural/urban poverty that I had been seeing since, at least, 1977.
StoryPedagogy grew out of a simple question I was asked as an invited speaker at the University of California, Berkeley: “What are the two most important things that children should learn for life?” I had said, “curiosity and creativity”. This was 1992. Katha was four years old. Our KREAD, Katha Relevant Education for All round Development, was in place. But the student’s question kept at me …, and by the time I came back to India I had the C9 for character building to add to our KREAD. The C9 skills comprise Me skills, Me+ skills and We skills.
Me skills: Curiosity. Creativity. Critical Thinking.
Me+ skills: Confidence. Competence. Commitment.
We skills: Compassion. Cooperation. Citizenship.
THE Katha “de-school” model was created based on the ideas of Paulo Freire, Gandhi, Vygotsky and many other thinkers and educators that I had read. Along with my readings were my own experiences, reflections and understanding of children. I had 250 kids from the slums that surrounded the school. And every time I went there, I learnt from the children. How they learnt. Why they learnt. And the struggles that I would never have been able to surmount if I had been in their place.
What brought the sparkle into Sonia’s eyes? What made the 7-year old Mitrapal who got up at 4:00 am match-make the one who needed a carpenter or plumber or mai with someone with the required skills – what made Mitrapal’s eyes shine?
Every time it was a story. A story about anything and everything. “What?” – he would ask me, “What whizzes up and down my head along thin black roads like teeny weeny Maruti cars?” He would wait giggling while I struggled to find the answer that he supplied – lice in his hair!
Every day there was a story. The Govindpuri stories were more difficult to find answers to than the Arabian Nights. And slowly learning wove itself around the stories the children brought in from their homes and into the Katha de-school’s “Family Room”. Every child’s story was heard and recorded by our teachers (women from our Govindpuri neighbourhood who were barely 8th class pass-outs themselves). The kids illustrated their stories and we had our first library of stories, which formed the foundation for our school’s curriculum. More stories were added from the Tamasha! magazine I was writing, editing, designing and then running to the printers to get printed. And slowly, I saw StoryPedagogy growing. It gave rise to a curriculum, the Bhavat or Earth Curriculum, The MeWe Ideology, The LIFE Principles and the C9s.
And there rose the special content in the form of storybooks for our children. Content became the second pillar of StoryPedagogy. Stories and storybooks! Storybooks that I hoped would turn our children into reader-leaders. Fantasies and laughter-filled stories about sarpanchs and queens, of men who married over and over again in the hope of having a son while their daughters looked after them. And lost Vedas that spoke of the “X” and “Y” chromosomes. Brahma himself came to Tamasha! to talk about the lost Veda – the Lupt Veda – and why a woman cannot and should not be blamed for not knowing if she were carrying a girl or a boy inside her.
Around these stories, I wove the classroom practices of ASBL – Active Story-Based-Learning that starts with the soul of all stories, and the questions: Why? What? How? ASBL became the third pillar of my StoryPedagogy. And along with it came continuous assessment. I called this PAR — Performance. Attendance. Retention. It was commanded to take children “us paar” and bring them “on par with the world.”
Then one day, I got into a discussion with some teachers who said, “Didi, bacchon ke liye [parne ke] ruchi nahi hai.” So I asked, “Where did ruchi come from?” We mulled over the question and the answer walked in. Ruchi arises when there is fun and meaning. It was pristine Bharata Natyashastra! And the continuous assessment matrix that arose from observations and something child-friendly and non-threatening was the fourth pillar or practice at Katha – RUCHI or Recognize. Use (as in read, learn, etc) and Comprehend Holistically and Intuitively.
People always laugh at me for the number of acronyms that Katha has. But our teachers remember the word/phrase and the practice flows from there. It is a habit inherited from my father who excelled in this.
Bharata Muni spoke about the first dharma of any art, which is to please. To bring joy. And that joy, he said came from understanding the deeper meaning of the performance. That was why, he said, it was important for the dancer to repeat his abhinay twice, thrice, four times, ten times if need be, till that jolt of electricity comes alive between the audience and the performer. He called this unfolding process, Sanchari Bhava: The repetition that builds rasa, the inspiration that flows between the performer and the rasika – the audience, and the co-creation of rasa.
So for me, it was back to design thinking, connecting of the various dots … what if the teacher is the performer and the students are the rasika? And alternately, when the student spoke, she became the performer while the teacher took the role of the rasika!
It seemed to make a lot of intuitive sense. But the challenge was just beginning! To implement the process, we had to help teachers internalize the idea that students too could take centre-stage. That our children’s voices needed to be heard! That the teacher could also say that she did not know.
Right from day one of our “de-school” (which was later named Katha Lab School), the women of our communities were important. I realized that when women earned – children could learn. By 1991, I had started the income generation programmes and the skills-based literacy programmes for our women (100 women participated every year) so they could bring home the Rs 600-800/- monthly family income that was the average family income for similar communities, as per the Delhi government statistics.
One of the skills that we imparted was teachers’ training. Within a short time, I created a rigorous one-year diploma course for our teachers. Thus, the classroom-community linkages and Creative Teachers’ Education programme became the fifth and sixth pillars of StoryPedagogy.
Exciting times with our teachers began. From 2000, we started holding “Educating the Imagination”, which comprises 160-hour training sessions with our teachers. We asked all kinds for questions, including questions, such as – What is the difference between learning and the formal British-type schooling that has been in practice for the last 40+ years? How can we valorize knowledge over language? How do we, as writers and editors, translate the best of Indian fiction, such that it can transform the lives of our readers? How do we help our children translate stories so they can transform lives? How do we help children link diversities, forge identities? How do we bring the story in its myriad hues and shapes and tensile strengths to weave their magic around sustainable quality learning?
StoryPedagogy gets a child excited about learning for meaning even as she is learning to read. It helps her develop her SPICE skills, which are the social, personal leadership, intellectual/imaginative, cultural and environmental skills. This enables children to learn how to take – what I call – the SPICE route out of poverty. SPICE entails a deep understanding of Social issues and developing Personal leadership to solve the wicked problems we face, with Imagination and Intellectual grounding, and with the underpinnings of the Cultural context and an overall Environmental awareness. StoryPedagogy is bolstered by building awareness of historical, cross-linguistic and vertical “culture linking” within society. It builds abilities in the child to break gender, societal and cultural stereotypes.
StoryPedagogy started with the story. Noam Chomsky said grammar was the foundation of language learning. I felt it was “story.” When children started to learn with a story they were learning to read with ruchi. Stories gave meaning to their journey of learning to read, which rote-learning letters and syllables, akshar and grammar did not. I am a whole-language aficionado and StoryPedagogy gives pride of place to whole-language learning, assisted by evocative visuals, kinesthetic learning and phonic awareness. Stories brought our children to school, every day. Stories excited our children to maintain regular attendance and honed their ability to retain knowledge and grow their knowledge-base.
When you work with children living in poverty, disruptive innovation is a given. From StoryPedagogy grew the Katha School of Entrepreneurship (1995), the Katha InfoTech School (2001) and the Robotics Lab. Our graduates stay till high-school and more than 70 per cent of our students go on to attend college while another section start their own businesses or entrepreneurial ventures. In 2008, when we conducted a survey, we found that our women were earning more than 10-20 times what the family was earning when we started. And our children had become doctors, computer specialists, hardware engineers, members of the civil service, artists, art teachers and professional bakers, and were earning more than 40 times what the family once earned!
Haha! The pudding and the proof! After 32 years of fun with story – StoryPedagogy was ready to be shared with others. It is a fantastic sweet that you just cannot eat alone. It begged to be shared and enjoyed with others. The spread into 1000 slums and into more than a 1,000 municipal corporation schools followed from 2004 onwards … to Katha running schools for the Corporation.
And since 2016, StoryPedagogy has grown wings. It flies to where the 300 million children are. It inspires each child who can read to help one child who cannot. It excites volunteers. We ask our volunteers to inspire just one child to pair and read with one other child who cannot.
Maybe the Citizens’ Initiative – the 300 Million Challenge – that Katha is taking forth, will give India the surge of fresh air that it needs? Come join us as we journey through magical worlds with the power of stories and Bharata’s Natyashastra!
Inshallah, we can all come together to bring all our children the joyful education and true learning experiences that they deserve, and not just what their parents can barely afford. I am strong. When I join other like-minded people the Me becomes We. We are free. Fair. Fearless! This is the underlying philosophy of StoryPedagogy.
The author, Padma Shri awardee (2012) and award-winning writer and storyteller, loves children and writing for children. She is the founder of Katha – a 33-year-old “profit-for-all” voluntary organization, which is committed to promoting reading for fun and meaning among India’s children and enabling children to become 21st century reader-leaders and dreamer-doers. She can be reached at geeta@katha.org.
