Interventions - Viveka Asha Yojane

Introduction

Vivekananda Foundation is a federation of individuals and organizations committed to social development and inspired by the ideas of the Ramakrishna Mission. Their goals are to establish a network of such individuals and organizations in order to share ideas and practices, and to promote activities for integrated social development. 

Presentation at the conference (Mahendra)

The aim of ‘Viveka Asha Yojane’ is to utilize existing government infrastructure (the schools) while providing motivated volunteers to improve the quality of education. This utilizes the current ‘Adopt A School’ scheme created by the government of Karnataka. Corporations and individuals are encouraged to adopt schools and improve it using a variety of ways ranging from teacher training programs to infrastructure improvements (toilets, drinking water, library books). India’s poorest go to government schools, and improving them is of critical importance if quality education is to be made accessible to under-privileged children in India.

Methodologies

We have started by adopting 52 government schools in Chamarajnagar district and now this has been increased to 72 schools, focusing on improving the overall functioning especially the quality of the schools. We are involving the CRC members, BRC members, BEO, DPEP members, SDMCs, people from the village and so on. We make teaching aids. There are 5 social workers working in the 72 schools. They create the teaching aids and then follow up with the teachers to clarify any doubts. We are giving training to the teachers and the SDMC committee members also.  We are focusing on the training aspects of science and math for the teachers. We want to teach science in a scientific way. They talk about various government programs in the villages and in SDMCs. We are also working on environmental issues. We had a plastic free campaign. We had a procession organized by the teachers and the children of the school they work in and had a yatra through the town of chamarajanagar and submitted a memorandum to the District collector and the MLA.  Sometimes basic things like painting etc can involve community involvement. They have programs where they tell the SDMC members and all the other villages how they can participate to improve the schools in their villages. After the start of this program, once a week the SDMC and the teachers are meeting regularly.  The key resource person for the math and science program is Prof. Baluragi from Dharwad. He has been helping with creating training materials. They are also thinking about how to create lesson plans to make teaching of science and math simpler. The government has not told how to function and what their responsibilities are. So they have focused on this also. When they find problems with the way textbooks are written they have complained about it to the textbook department and government officials. For eg, in class 5 English alphabets are introduced and by 7th std a lot is expected to be learnt in a short span of 2 years. In the 72 schools, they have learnt from Prof. Baluragi, various experiments to make science learning simple and interesting. This has been imparted to all these schools and there is a situation where students in these schools are making use of this. In addition they had a workshop at the Ramakrishna Mission on value education. Some sample science aids were shown (forced vibrations etc).

Contact Information

Mr. G. S. Jayadeva, Deenabandhu Trust
(also treasurer, Vivekananda Foundation, Mysore, India)Behind Forest Nursery, P.W.D Colony,
Chamarajanagar – 571313, Karnataka
Email – gsjayadev@rediffmail.com

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