Reflection
Aligning with the state education system The journey of Organisation for Early Literacy Promotion Keerti Jayaram
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his article tries to capture the experiences of Organisation for Early Literacy Promotion (OELP) as an organization, of working in alignment with the public education system, to serve the educational needs of underprivileged and underserved children. The first section discusses the evolution of our interventions in the early literacy space, and the ways in which we have tried to learn from our context to serve our communities better. The subsequent sections discuss how the unfolding of this work has been tied with the governmental school system and provides a contour of the processes of collaboration with the state. The beginning and unfolding of OELP’s interventions in early literacy Beginnings in the early grade classrooms of Delhi’s state-run schools: OELP was registered as a not-for-profit organization in 2008. Our work, however, began in 2006 as the Early Literacy Project (ELP) within Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) schools in Delhi’s Najafgarh Zone. ELP was conceptualized as a sustained and ongoing engagement with the mainstream education system. Its work was grounded in classrooms. It included regular interactions with teachers, school management, education officials, and other stakeholders. The idea was to engage daily with the complexities of classrooms, learners, teachers, and contexts. This engagement
was to allow conceptually sound pedagogies and classroom practices to emerge in an organic and grounded way. We also wanted the work to be aligned to the contours of the mainstream education system. The selected MCD schools catered mainly to children of migrant, daily wage workers, and others engaged in petty economic activities. Our enthusiasm was, however, short lived. We encountered experienced teachers who were resistant, and at times threatened by our presence. We found that the prevalent rote learning practices were not effective in getting children to read. The general tendency of the teachers was to be dismissive and blame the children’s home backgrounds for their low levels of achievement. For most teachers, reading was equated with decoding the script. Their major challenge was that during vacations the children forgot all that they had learnt, and it meant going back to square one, each time. Through our initial engagements inside the classrooms, we identified a few motivated teachers interested in exploring more efficient reading practices for young learners with us. This became our entry point. We worked with these teachers’ active involvement, inside their classrooms, to develop innovative pedagogies for meaningful decoding, and corresponding practices, which engaged the learners actively and meaningfully. This gave a sense ownership to the teachers. Gradually, as the children began to respond
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