Alternatives in Education

(Introduction to the conference and welcome by Jayashree Janardhan)

Welcome to the conference on alternatives in education

I would like to begin with a brief background on how this conference came to be.  This has been organised by Asha for Education. Asha is an organization working towards socio-economic change through the medium of education, with over 40 chapters worldwide.

Asha today works with 150 partners all over India in variety of efforts reaching out to economically underprivileged sections. These efforts include support schools for children coming from varied backgrounds, including rural, urban poor, children with disabilities and special needs, street children, children of migrant laborers, working children and orphaned children. Asha supports groups with many different philosophies on education. We have been partnering with many of you for several years.

A special area of interest for Asha, over the past several years, has been exploring different innovations and alternatives in education. Several of you have been working for many years in making education and schooling (a) more meaningful experience for children. Your work has explored new philosophies on education, different methodologies to make learning more effective and fun. Working with many of you has taught us that schools can indeed be a happy place of holistic learning, where children have an opportunity to learn not just skill sets, but also shape their overall personalities. Many of you have created environments that encourage values leading to a better society.

 In the year 2000, Shanmuga, an Asha volunteer undertook a study of the range of Asha’s work. One of the outcomes of his feedback is a deeper understanding of the importance of different alternatives in education. Shanmuga suggested that we could potentially explore creating a definite space for exchange of ideas and dissemination of good methodologies. Since then, volunteers from different Asha chapters including, Chicago, Seattle, Princeton, Dallas, St.Louis, Bangalore and Ravi Aluganti , Asha - Fellow have been discussing the possibilities. This conference is the first step towards initiating such an effort. A lot of thought and effort has gone into organizing this conference. We especially thank Ravi Aluganti for his organizational help and all of you who have provided an input into the agenda of the conference.

In our experience, we have found that many of these initiatives can be broadly classified into three categories, namely, alternative schools, community approaches to schooling and government school interventions. 

We hope that the conference will help in achieving the following

· Day 1 - Explore different philosophies of education. We hope you will share with us how you view schooling and education. We also hope to have some perspectives from different government departments involved in education. In the evening we hope to have a free format discussion on education and social change.

· Day 2 - Share your innovations, experiences, methodologies, things that work, things that you would like others to learn from. In the evening, we hope to have a discussion on role of religion in schooling.

· Day 3 - Discussion on how we can work together and in the evening the exhibition.

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