Story-telling elective for students
Client
Dolphin International School, Pulwama
Role
Course Facilitator (Internship)
Area of Work
Story-telling
Duration of Project
June to August 2020
About the Project
Education is the most important milestone for every person; its a mark of progress and opens doors to various opportunities to livelihood. However, there are immense challenges within the system impacting children's futures. As part of the mandatory internship to be undertaken for the Masters in Social Design course at Ambedkar University, I decided to locate my internship in Dolphin International School, situated in Pulwama, Kashmir. The aim of the internship was to learn the complexity that conflict adds to the educational journey of a student and the various mechanisms that educators have to bring in to ensure a way of navigation through the conflict.
While Social Design is an evolving field that aims to look at merging the practices of design thinking and social sciences, to be able to hone the perspective of human rights and re-imagine research practices and methodologies is a fairly new subject. As a student of a course that is part of this journey, it becomes imperative to see the existing examples of this practice.
Dolphin International School situated in Pulwana, Kashmir, is an independent co-education Institution, established in 2008 in a rented premise, and is driven to provide opportunities of learning to children impacted socially, emotionally and economically by various conflicts.
.png)
Process
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the immediate lockdown of the country, the design of the elective went through several iterations. The scope was increased to include some students from Ahmedabad, and create "Exposure and Exchange" program which would engage students in the sharing of experiences through various story-telling formats.
Keeping in mind the challenges of online learning, especially in Pulwama (as there was only 2G in Kashmir at that point), the elective used mixed mediums to ensure flexible learning for all the students.
There were several challenges that disrupted the learning processes of the children, despite attempts to engage them using different mechanisms. The elective provided an in-depth understanding of the difficulties faced by teachers and students, and what could be the different ways to ensure a continued learning of the children.
For more detailed understanding of the elective processes, you can scroll below.
CREATING A LESSON PLAN
The initial lesson plan was aimed at introducing the idea of story-telling to the students and equipping them with knowledge of various mediums in which it can be done. The elective was divided into four subject areas –
-
Stories of Objects around me
-
Stories of Nature
-
Family and Folktales
-
My stories
Various mediums such as writing, drawing, doodling, audio story-telling would be introduced, giving students a chance to pick a medium they feel most comfortable in.
ENROLLING FOR THE ELECTIVE
Before the classes began, students in both the cities were sent a video and a write up describing the elective and the first assignment that they were supposed to do. The aim was to create curiosity amongst the students and give them a sense of what the elective is going be like.
The video was created to showcase a theatrical oration of a childhood story that I had heard from my grandmother. The aim was to give an idea about one the mediums of story-telling. Along with the video, a brief write-up was created that would provide details about the elective and the first assignment.
CONDUCTING ONLINE CLASSES
The classes began in both cities in the month of June. The total number of students who registered for the elective in DIS were 22, and 4 in Ahmedabad. Zoom (DIS) and Google Meet (Ahmedabad) were preferred mediums of conducting classes.
Each class was for 30-40 minutes, with topics broken into smaller fragments to ensure students are not given too much information in one go. The initial weeks of the sessions were more technical in terms of creating an understanding of the structure of story-telling. Though the classes were accompanied by visual presentations, it was important to ensure that students had a way to go back to the various concepts taught in class. For this, recorded presentations were created and sent after each class.
The students explored various mediums of telling their stories. It ranged from audios to writings to doodling to video stories. One of the key takeaways was that the decision was taken by the students on what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to tell their story. With constant feedback, students were able to explore the different ways that made them feel comfortable to talk about their stories. For the students in Ahmedabad, I decided to introduce the medium of puppetry for story-telling to create curiosity and a sense of fun. We used one method of creating different animals for the puppets.
DESIGNING A WHATSAPP GAME
A consultation with other facilitators taking an elective at DIS provided an opportunity to create other ways to create curiosity amongst students in order to motivate them to join classes. All of us decided to use whatsapp as a medium to create a game as students were being informed about class through their respective whatsapp groups. The essence of the game for all was to create a sense of validation that the students would receive for their participation. Their participation would be a key indicator for the success or failure of the methodology. The process of the engagement specific to my elective was as follows –
-
Students would be asked to describe themselves in one word.
-
Those who provide those words would receive a ‘gift’ from their facilitator
-
The gift was a dedication of a story or poem based on that word
-
The facilitator would then ask all the students to come to class to discuss what they felt about the dedications and engage with their respective stories or poems
CHALLENGES AND LEARNING
-
The medium of teaching: A condusive physical setting is integral in a child’s learning journey. With the shift to the online space due to the pandemic, there were immense challenges and technical difficulties that hampered the flow of the classes and the elective. For a facilitation perspective, it was difficult to get a sense of whether students were able to grasp the information, making participation a tricky process. While various other methods were adopted to overcome this particular challenge, such as usage of whatsapp for feedback, creating separate videos for every session, it became a time consuming process.
-
Low attendance of students: As students are forced to learn in the isolation of their homes, there are chances of low levels of motivation to engage in the class. In the case of DIS, existing political conflict and low accessibility to the internet were major factors in the low level of attendance of the students. In the case of students from Ahmedabad, burden of their schoolwork and less motivation from their parents were impacting their levels of motivation, which eventually resulted in abruptly ending the elective classes mid-way of the internship. Despite of various attempts at engaging with the students in different ways (such as creation of a whatsapp game), low attendance also resulted in non-completion of assignments and tasks.
-
Logistics of the exchange: As students from Ahmedabad were unable to continue their classes, the premise of the exchange was then under re-consideration. The initial idea was to create a space wherein students could exchange each other’s stories and talk about their experiences. However, without one side of the exchange, other efforts to create some way of conducting an exchange did not work out. Another reason was the difficulty in setting up the logistics of the Ahmedabad side of the exchange as many students had already begun classes at their schools and couldn’t join the elective even at a later stage.