primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
The Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP) in Madhya Pradesh was
started by Kishore Bharati and Friends Rural Centre in 1972 with 16 schools in
Hoshangabad district and was extended to all middle schools in MP in 1978. Eklavya
was set up in 1982 and it took up a science-teaching programme in 1,000 schools; the
programme continued for 20 years until the government shut it down in 2002. As the
programme started taking root it became evident that it could not succeed unless the
teachers themselves were convinced about the need for change. This was indeed a
tall order because school teachers are isolated from the world of knowledge, the
world of enquiry and the world of science. The first challenge faced by HSTP was to
encourage teachers to open up, speak out and be uninhibited and natural even in the
presence of their administrative superiors. Teachers’ self-perception as government
functionaries at the bottom of the education ladder coupled with very little exposure
to science and mathematics was a big barrier. As in the HBCSE experience, once the
process was underway and teachers began engaging with the learning process, their
self-esteem and confidence grew and their self-perception changed dramatically
(Mukherjee 2007; Science Today December 1977).
Box 2.6: What HSTP was confronted with in 1972
The HSTP initiative was a response to the challenge posed by the conditions then
prevalent in government schools and which unfortunately continue to be true in large
measure even today. These may be summarised as:
⇒ A school, in a rural area or non-privileged area in towns and cities, is characterised
by the fact that its building is poorly constructed, that it has no library, no
laboratories, no equipment and no facilities. The teaching of science is usually done
without performing any experiments and comprises a body of received knowledge
being transmitted to children, validated by the authority of the textbook and of the
teacher, who brooks no questioning.
⇒ Teachers are often untrained in science. They have no resources and enjoy no
support from the system. They make no inputs to the curriculum and yet are
expected to be the repositories and source of all knowledge. It is not surprising then
that they adopt authoritarian modes of teaching.
⇒ Children are docile and submissive. This is almost a cultural imperative, one that
dictates that elders have to be respected and their authority is never to be
questioned. There are no rewards for showing initiative and independent enquiry
by children is suppressed in the name of maintaining discipline in the class.
(Source: Dr. Vijay S. Varma, available at: http://www.icrindia.org/?page_id=52).
Subir Shukla, who has been closely associated with teacher development
programmes of the government in DPEP and later with some state governments said
that a bitter lesson that they learnt in the DPEP days was that there is an attitudinal
hierarchy of learning. ‘When we work with teachers, the first attitude that changes is
about himself/herself. When they are able to break out of the low self-image, they
realise that children are capable of learning. They realise poor children can also
learn, children from deprived social groups can learn and they also come to believe
that girls can learn. Teachers do not always have the emotional security to learn,
therefore at each stage we have to give them the inner strength to move to the next
stage. Self-image is critical, it is an issue of identity and when we tell them they do
not know teaching they switch off’ (interview with Subir Shukla, July 2008).
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