XLRI Garden of Business & Human Resources

Happy New Year (XLRI GMP Class of 2011)

Elephant in the room

Article by Anurag Behar (92 BMD, XLRI Jamshedpur), Co-CEO, Ajim Premji Foundation

The policy of having a school near every habitation has built in a difficult challenge for our schools and teachers

I am writing this from Shorapur, a 10-hour drive from Bangalore, and I am admiring India’s achievement in the past couple of decades of having schools at accessible distances from habitations. In this truly remote block, every village that I have visited has a government school with a decent building.

This is not surprising, because by 2006, 98% of habitations in India had a primary (up to Class V) school within 1km, and 86% had an upper primary (up to Class VII) school within 3km. The numbers have grown since, with a clear focus on “being near every habitation”.

This means a staggering increase in the number of schools. At the time of independence, India had about 130,000 schools. Today we have about 1.4 million. About 7 million people work in our school education system. This is by far the largest education system in the world.

Factor in the cultural, linguistic, socio-economic and developmental diversity, and you also face the most complex education system in the world. This system has about 210 million students.

This massive expansion has not resulted in actual learning in those schools. We have lots of schools now, but precious little real education. The causes and challenges are many, this column is about a specific one.

The design of this expansion has inadvertently “in built” a difficult challenge for our schools and teachers. This is one of the hurdles in the path towards real learning and improvement in quality of education. As a result of this strategy of “being near every habitation”, the number of students in our schools (especially rural ones) is small. Each school has just about as many as can come from the nearby habitation. Within that small number, the students span all age groups. A school may have 115 children, but the children will span an age range across 6 to 13.

Now, even if this school were to have three teachers, which is more or less at the current national average of one teacher per 39 students, the teachers would need to handle multiple age groups simultaneously. This is called “multi-grade” teaching—in this case seven “classes” would have to be handled by three teachers.

If you talk to practitioners, they say this is much more difficult then handling a class of same age children. It requires special training, different methods and different skills.

And we have built this challenge of “multi grade teaching” into almost all village schools by the way we have handled the expansion. One of the most complex teaching challenges has become a part of the everyday job of most village teachers, who by general admission are inadequately equipped and ill supported to deal with academic challenges.

It’s not as though we did not have a choice of another model of expansion. China in comparison has about 700,000 schools, including vocational training ones, and spanning about 250 million children.

The Chinese system has about half the schools, and about 20% more students, compared with India. Roughly, the average student number per school in China is 2.25 times that in India. China has followed a route of consolidation; we have followed one of dispersion. The former leads to an exponential drop in the “multi-grade” load of teachers, as is the case in China.

Two factors played a dominant role in the choice we made.

The first was our policymakers’ single-minded focus on “literacy”, and keeping learning outcomes and quality of education on the backburner. The second was the pragmatic assessment that getting children to travel away from their habitations, with our kind of infrastructure, was not possible. There seems to have been an almost implicit assumption that “let’s do literacy first, and then we will see about quality”. The whole expansion got designed for that. I would speculate that things like “multi grade teaching” and its challenges were practically overlooked.

Those choices were made under certain circumstances. Sure, these could have been better, but they could also have been a lot worse. What matters is that there is now no way to unwind or reconfigure the system.

We can and must still deal with it. That requires significant teacher capacity development, improved classroom practices and appropriate curriculum. It’s these fundamentals that need to be worked on and invested in

In fact with a capable, well-trained teacher and appropriate curriculum, multi grade teaching can be a learning enhancer. In Machagondal Camp, 10km from Shorapur, I met Uma who, in her early twenties, is a government teacher in the local school. She has handled class 1 toV for the past two years, all on her own, and the children have learnt. She was the only teacher in this one room school till a couple of months ago.

I have seen this happen in other government schools in this block, alive with enthusiastic well-trained teachers, using the “nali kali” curriculum.

There is hope, but to truly address the problem, we have to first notice and acknowledge the elephant in the room, inadvertently let in by having schools in every habitation.

Anurag Behar is co-CEO of AzimPremji Foundation and also leadssustainability initiatives for Wipro Ltd. He writes every fortnight on issues of ecology and education. Comments are welcome at othersphere@livemint.com

To read Anurag Behar’s previouscolumns, go to www.livemint.com/othersphere

(source: http://www.livemint.com/)

Article by Anurag Behar (92BMD, Xlri Jamshedpur ), co-CEO, Ajim Premji Foundation

3rd National Conference on Social Entrepreneurship @ XLRI (Jan 28-30, 2011)

Time: Friday, January 28, 2011 at 11:00am - Sunday, January 30, 2011 at 2:00pm

Location:
XLRI Jamshedpur

CH Area (East)

Jamshedpur, India

This conference on the theme - Youth, Development & Social Entrepreneurship - aims to create a platform for the youth (young professionals and students) to explore social entrepreneurship, and to help them to understand the nuances, challenges and opportunities in this field. The conference design will allow the participants to interact wit social entrepreneurs, development professionals and those engaged in the various sub-sectors of social space, around the following themes:

* Youth, Volunteerism and Social Entrepreneurship
* Challenges of Being a Young Social Entrepreneur
* Creating Markets for Marginal Producers
* Promoting Livelihoods and Employment
* Leveraging Technology for Social Development
* Sustainable Models for Underserved Markets
* Options for Funding and Investments
* Supporting Ecosystem for Social Entrepreneurs
More information at:
http://3rd-se-conference-at-xlri.blogspot.com/

XLRI '85 batch Homecoming

Christmas@XLRI

Fr E. Abraham S.J., Director, XLRI Jamshedpur conferred Lifetime Achievement Award by NHRDN

Father E. Abraham S.J., Director, XLRI Jamshedpur was conferred with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National HRD Network (NHRDN) during the second day of its national conference in Gurgaon on 2nd December 2010.The award to Father Abraham is in recognition of his excellence in HRD and his several contributions to the subject of HR management.

At the award ceremony Fr. Abraham thanked his mentors as well as his students for this achievement at the NHRDN conference. “I wish to thank all my colleagues for their support and the mentors who helped me in doing my research work. XLRI has been the home of HRD research. I also wish to thank all the students of XLRI who are implementing the lessons learnt at XLRI in their respective organizations.”

Fr. Abraham is the Director of the same B-school from where he did his PGD in Personnel Management & Industrial Relations. Prior to pursuing his PGD at XLRI he studied Sociology at Hindu College, University of Delhi. He also did his BA in Philosophy & Theology from Jnanadeep Vidyapeeth, Pune. He did his Ph .D Psychology (HRD) from Gujarat University.

This is not the first time that Fr. Abraham is leading XLRI. He was also the director from 1989-94. He later joined XIMB, where he served as the Director from 2000 to 2007. Since 2008 Fr. Abraham is the Director of XLRI, his alma mater.

Fr. Abraham has authored several research papers, some of which are: ‘HRD Practices in Indian Industries’; ‘HRD Climate in Indian Organisations’; ‘HRD Climate in Banks’.

The Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony was one of the major highlights of the NHRDN conference, which was attended by over 1200 HR professionals and management educators.

National HRD Network, an association of professionals in HRD sector, was set up in 1985 and has completed 25 years of service to HR community. Presently the Network has 30 chapters across the country with total membership of over 8500. Recently the association took a series of forward looking steps to further improve its governance, engagement with HR community and strengthen its network.

more at

http://www.mbauniverse.com/article/id/3989/XLRI-Director-conferred-NHRDN-award

XLRI Ensemble 2010