Pandemic’s challenge & Willingness to Make a Difference- Who Wins?

7am, winter morning in Bonei Sundargarh and Sabita has already reached to her neighboring village Jharasahi to teach 14 students from the nearest govt schools. All these kids belong to a fishing community that is isolated from technology, online education, the internet, and smartphones. Sabita who had studied till 10th, also a woman from a tribe community has loads of unique struggles in taking care of her family. Being the most hardworking person, handling farming works almost all by herself, she chose early hours to teach these kids to make herself available for farming in the day time as the workload is huge in the harvesting period. My partner in this journey Bideshini and me reached to see the newly run open classroom organized by Edifice foundation.

After eight months, these kids got a space to show their learning enthusiasm. This was a multilevel, multigrade open classroom with three groups. Groups were not divided as per age or classes, but as per their learning level of basic literacy skills. While few kids in 7th and 8th grades were super excited to have us in their class and few tiny kids were shy enough initially, but all of them were enjoying these punishment free, stress-free classes very much. Though Sabita isn’t trained enough to teach, however, she is willing to help these kids to bridge their learning gaps through her academic skill and new training she attended two weeks ago.

She is willing to learn and making children learn about their geographical conditions, their social status through literacy pedagogy. We hope after six months of this intervention, all the children who are struggling to read and write alphabets, or just know the alphabets are able to read and comprehend paragraphs. Not just these literacy skills, but learning about their rights and current societal positions, and what they can achieve.