Concept Note

The Citizenship Educator’s Collective - Connecting – Expanding- Reflecting

Rationale
The idea of initiating teachers’ collective emerges from the much desired need of teachers to belong to a professional community, to be able to share, to seek opportunity to advance mutual respect, cooperation, and exchange ideas for the sake of their students and for advancing the professionalism of education. While teachers are expected to be change makers, they are rarely in a position to change/influence spaces, which matter, in the larger educational and social concern. As a response to this need Pravah would facilitate a platform for like minded teachers with a shared vision and commitment towards active citizenship.

Vision
To build a membership based educators’ collective of school teachers, educators, and teacher trainers, who are committed to be catalysts for moving towards justice and equity in our communities, through their engagement with young people.

Goals
1. Maintain a network of lifeskills and citizenship educators to develop an environment of support and professional development.
2. Provide opportunities for self-transformation, leadership, and community building to educators in order to affect meaningful change in the classroom, school, community and society.
3. Sustain a membership that is engaged in a continuing process of critical self-reflection and growth.
4. A membership with a level of competency in creating empowering learning environments for citizenship action.
While initially, we believe that Pravah will play a key role in facilitating the formation and running of the collective, we also intend to do this such that, over a period of time, the collective is self driven. Processes will be set in place so that ownership for this is placed with the members.

Some possible ways of operationalising educators’ collective are as follows:
Setting up (2-3 months): Each year a group of teachers/ educators will be encouraged to become a part of an educators’ collective. Initially, collective will comprise of teachers who are trained through 'The World Is My Classroom' initiative and/or are a part of teachers learning center and have shown commitment to engage with social justice issues in their school and/ or with society at large. Later, membership could be extended to any educator, who may be interested to promote citizenship education. In the first year, the collective will be brought together through regular meetings and other processes facilitated by Pravah to enable them to develop their vision, agenda and strategies. Once the group is set up the members will meet regularly to plan, critique and evaluate the collective's activities.

a) Regular meetings: Members of the collective will meet monthly to share experiences, respond to readings, exchange ideas and develop plans of action. The themes (around social justice issues) of the meetings for each year will be decided by the members. These meetings would more closely resemble discussion groups, allowing educators to reflect on their own classroom practices from the perspective of assessing the way they make connections through their teaching with the real world.

b) Action groups: One of the activities of the collective will be to develop action groups of teachers who would design and initiate social action in schools around social justice issues. The group will be encouraged to document their action and ultimately a compilation of the action group’s projects and their outcome could be shared with other teachers.

c) Thematic Workshop (each of 6 days): Workshops and training sessions for members of the collective as well will be organized to further the development of curricula that help educators and students resist the social and educational injustices that are shaping out world.

d) Fellowships (6months -2 yr duration): The collective will support and promote action research undertaken by teachers around educational and social justice issues especially with regard to policies and practices that promote equality, justice and democracy across all sections of the society. Such initiatives may include developing and implementing curriculum on social justice issues, research on social conflicts and their impact on education processes, development of effective teaching learning practices to promote democratic values/ remove impediments to the practice of these values, or initiating projects in the school to promote citizenship action. To enable this we propose to support fellowships for 3 teachers per year through financial and non-financial support in forms of mentoring, training, access to resources. These fellowships will be available to collective members and the criterion of selection will be framed by the group. The modalities of selecting fellows, nature of engagement of the fellow teachers and the themes will be determined by the members of the collective. Once the selection criterion is decided by the collective the core members will manage the fellowships. The core members will be identified on the basis of their experience of running citizenship education, understanding of social justice issues and mentoring ability and time commitment.

e) Skill Development workshops ( 1-2 days duration ): The members of the collective will design and deliver workshops for colleagues on developing citizenship education as integrated with the study of social sciences and language.

f) Publication and newsletter: To disseminate ideas and reflections generated by the collective a quarterly newsletter for teachers will be published. Simple hand books and booklets with ideas for classroom activities to initiate citizenship action and promote social justice education in the school system will also be collated, published and disseminated among teachers.

g) Learning Fellowships (1 week – 6months): To help teachers to see themselves not only as teachers but also as life long learners and to become more self directed and learning oriented in their approach to development, we seek to institute learning fellowships for 12 teachers over the three years. Our objective is also to encourage educators in the field of citizenship education to become active seekers of excellence rather than passive recipients of training interventions.

h) Interface with main stream education: In the light of the new National Curriculum Framework where civics is redefined from the lens of citizenship education, teachers' learning center will actively engage in developing training modules for teachers to expose them 'to foster multiple perspectives as well as inter and trans-disciplinary perspectives in examining social realities, conflicts and concerns’. An outcome of this initiative will be a compilation of citizenship action projects that can be used by the teachers in the classroom to transact social science curriculum in an experiential way.

Expected Outreach: The core team (intensive engagement) will have 10-15 teachers and they will reach out to 50 teachers each year.

Role of Pravah vis-a-vis school based learning center and educators collective:
Pravah would facilitate the formation of the learning center / collective through including identification of teachers, developing systems and processes, supporting the envisioning and ongoing planning, developing monitoring and review mechanism and conducting the same. It would continue to lend its expertise in training and mentoring of the group for this period. The learning agenda of the members will be developed in partnership with the members and implementation will be facilitated.