In the last 3 months of my work at SVYM, I have tried my hand in different things. Not academically eligible for any but I did manage to learn quite a bit. I plan to put some of my observations of various projects I have seen in last 4years in a series of articles here. Most of the projects I have taken interest in, work for improving educational standards in rural areas. This article is on Mobile Science Lab projects. Written for the group "All about science" it is a bit messy, I hope to improve the quality of writing slowly.
MOBILE SCIENCE LABS - Where do they start? Where do they stop?
For the last decade or more, mobile science labs have become a very popular idea for almost all NGOs and sometimes Government bodies. IViL took one to Natham! A simple Google search would give you several tens of news articles on the inauguration of a mobile science lab and even more photographs of the van / auto / lorry with some kids, and a celebrity! Though we are informed well about the inauguration and their plans, we are almost always left in the dark when it comes to the outcome of these projects. I am a part of a mobile science lab project myself, and this is an account of my experiences and unanswered questions - A hypothesis.
All mobile science lab projects aim at improving scientific temperament of students, providing infrastructure and human resource support to schools, primarily in the rural areas. Though the priorities and strategies might change a bit - the objectives and contents are almost always same. However, brain and beauty never go together! May be a bit biased but a comparative study of the two classes.
A couple of months back, I was at Agastya International Foundation, Kuppam, Andhra Pradesh. A 172 acre campus with 6 "BT lunch room sized" labs", full size cricket, football and basketball fields, a "Discovery" centre, in-house workshop, over 40 mobile vans and resource persons coming from Bangalore, Chennai and other places. Strategically placed where the three big southern states meet, it is a beautiful campus. The optical illusion display section in the "Discovery" centre was bigger than a couple of labs put together. Right from Guest rooms to the dinning plates to the office, everything shows crores of rupees being poured in. They claimed to have reached over 2 million children and 70,000 teachers. One of the striking features of the program is that they concentrate more reaching more students. A student will get a chance to visit a particular lab in the campus only once a year. Would that be enough? In sharp contrast is the SVYM project, Vignana Vahini. One mobile van, one coordinator, 20 schools, visiting each school once a month. Involving the local teachers to demonstrate the science experiments covered in that particular month, Vignana Vahini provides them the necessary equipment and raw materials. This is a model I believe in now (not necessarily the better). However, sometimes even the once-a-month visits aren't enough to sustain the interest of students for a month, what then? However, both models preach a hands-on experience and an experiential learning and though they have been successfully implementing these there is a large scope for improvement. The number of students being handled is a also a limiting factor.
Agastya has a very interesting concept of identifying the talented students in the sessions they take up and these students are made to participate in some science fair etc. However, the students themselves don't prepare the things for demonstration, they are only taught how to explain! With a workshop readily available in-house, Agastya prepares demonstration models with great ease. This kills creativity among the students and teachers - they hardly dirty their hands. In a couple of science exhibitions conducted recently, I had seen students explaining with ready-made kits. The concept works directly against Agastya's tag line - "Sparking creativity". Where do we start? And where do we stop? The kids selected in these sessions could act as the student-tutors and enhance peer-to-peer learning. Well the idea seems to be good, implementation presents a new set of challenges.
It is a fact that all the "best" B.Eds become government teachers (because they undergo a pretty tough selection process). However, the government post makes them good at counting money! Whatever teacher-force we hire outside or whom we have are all the second best. Be it the "well-trained" faculty at Agastya or the coordinators of our project none of them is as good as the government teachers. It is directly observable in the classes they take. However, well-trained someone is, only their vocabulary, body-language and methodology might change but their classes will be plagued with hundreds of conceptual mistakes. (A 'serious' common feature in most projects). They have equipments, they have resource persons but they are just not the best teachers. At Agastya, I had observed that the school teachers were alienated from the sessions going on (may not be the case always) and our project at SVYM involves the teachers too much. Both extremes are risky and will lead to a collapse of the whole mechanism.
How do me monitor the progress / impact of the whole project? How do we assess how a mobile science lab influenced a student's life? How do we calculate by how much percentage the student's scientific temperament has gone up? :P I wish we could just wait for a generation to pass by and then look at a possible change these projects would have brough about. Isn't enough to just be happy with the verbal approval of all students that these ideas help them? The answer is a NO. Improvisation is always possible, and we should be doing justice to the money that goes in. How is that money better spent on a mobile science lab and a health or sanitation programme? Justification, monitoring, feedback and reshaping are important, however no project I know of has these mechanisms in place and hence there is now news of a mobile science lab running successfully.
Intentions are right but implementation is never the best. The should be a blend of several mechanisms and a new system should evolve to best meet the needs of varied groups of children. Agastya is creating a spark in the fast-learners, SVYM keeps hitting and hitting until the moderate-learners pick up, what do we have for the slow learners? Should they continue to be the neglected batch? Several questions like these leave our projects severely handicapped. They need a deep thinking!
Questions to be answered -
1. Show up once in a year at some school do a couple of experiments and move on, to see as many schools as possible.
Show up once a month in every school, conduct some experiments, competition, give reading materials - just concentrate on this smaller group.
Which one is better? Which has more impact?
2. Monitoring, feedback and performance analysis of the whole project. How do we do these? How do we find out whether it is helpful for the students?
3. Other contributing factors - It has been observed that some schools with science labs are not really able to help the students. So just providing infrastructure won't help. Which are other contributing factors that could help the cause of the project?
4. Teacher's role is unquestionable in education. To what extent should they be made a part of our project?
5. Usage of ready-made models for demonstration - Yes/No? Till what extent?
--buddi
18 - 05 - 2010
