Minutes of the Meeting held on 29th March 2008

Minutes of Educators Collective Meeting
29th march’ 2008

People who attended the meeting from Pravah: Ishani, Swati
Teachers who attended the meeting: Renu Patel, Anuradha Parashar( Army Public School, Noida), Anjali Sharma( Ramjas School), Kirti Iyer( Springdales School, Pusa Road), Naushaba( Kendriya Vidyalaya, Pragati Vihar), Anuradha Sinha( Delhi Police Public School), Anita Chowdhary( Bluebells School), Shakuntala

The meeting began with a round of introductions as many of the teachers did not know each other. It was felt that the members of the collective must know where each of them were coming from to be able to connect with each other

After the introductions, there was a PowerPoint presentation by Ishani. This was felt to be important as most of the participants of the meeting were attending the first educator’s collective meeting. It was felt that the teachers must know the context, have an understanding of the vision of the collective and know what has happened in the previous meetings.

Kirti Iyer from Springdales school proposed having a blog for the educators collective. She suggested that she couldn’t attend the previous meetings and if a forum such as a blog would have been available, she could have read the minutes and be better prepared for the meeting. Ishani mentioned that a blog is already in place, but it needs to become more functional. She mentioned that it was a great idea and worth exploring further

Anita Chowdhary from Bluebells School shared about the various clubs in her school such as Awaaz (the right to information club), the peace studies club formerly known as the conflict resolution club where children learn about the Israel Palestine conflict for six months and the Kashmir conflict for the rest of six months. In the club children learned about the cultures of the regions and in the end there is a validation ceremony to conclude the work. Renu Patel and some others mentioned how they were very interested in learning about what was happening in bluebells and in the other schools in terms of these clubs.

After this initial discussion on the vision of educators collective and the other interesting ideas that the teachers had, Ishani shared the agenda for the meeting. She mentioned that the two broad tasks for the day were to one do a collective reading of an article on secularism and other was exploring the learning and research fellowships. For fellowships, she mentioned that parameters needed to be developed as to how the fellowship programme should be taken up etc.

After sharing of the agenda, Ishani shared that how learning and growing together is an integral part of the collective. As part of that, it would be good to do some collective thinking and reflection together to build capacities. the educators collective group then read the article called,"the teacher in the time of patriotism" by Nalini Rajan.the paper was read in groups and then there was discussion on what our understanding of secularism is, whether it means refraining to talk about religion, or celebrating all religions. There was also discussion on how the debate on secularism would take into account issues such as atheism and non belief in any faith group or a divinity. After this, there was discussion on if secularism could mean acceptance of all these different point of view on faith and religion.

There was also discussion on how we do not question enough about religious practices of our schools. Practices such as breaking a coconut or lighting a diya are all Hindu practices, while each of us observes these in our schools and rarely question these and question how secular are our public places.

Fellowships had been explored in the February meeting, but since none of the teachers who were attending the meeting had attended the February meeting, the fellowships had to be explored from the beginning. Ishani began by mentioning that the fellowships are of two kinds which are learning and research. She mentioned that there were 8 research and 3 learning fellowships available.

Next, possible topics were explored. Teachers talked of exploring issues such as underprivileged children and their schooling, teacher professionalism, democratic classrooms, how citizenship education could be integrated in subject areas and finally what are the hurdles, impediments that stop teachers from having democratic classrooms. The discussion was not extended and the teachers were asked to think about possible areas they would be interested to explore their research in and come back for the next meeting.

Next, She asked Kirti Iyer to share the format of her research fellowship which she had taken up as part of the Delhi university fellowship offered to teachers.

Kirti mentioned how she had taken up a six month fellowship from DU to look at the inclusion policy in her school. She talked of how the fellowship was structured she mentioned that in the first month the 5 fellows did a literature review on their relevant topics. Next, they wrote their drafts and submitted them. If these were selected, they were called for an interview. If selected, they were then assigned a mentor. They worked closely with the mentor meeting every 15 days or so. In the second month, the research methodology was designed (such as interview schedules/questionnaires). In the third month, a midterm report was submitted, reporting on how much of the action plan has worked. Then, there was a group meeting of all teachers fellows along with all mentors. This was done to bring about a thread of commonality. Here, the group read and reflected on a set of readings compiled by the university. There were also film shows and presentations that the teacher fellows attended. Finally, the report was to be submitted and presentations made.

The meeting was concluded by finalizing that all the discussion of the meeting would be penned down and then shared with the teachers and then teachers could provide feedback on the same.