The Pact
January to March 2012 were very special months for me. My friend Rohini Jakati and I did a series of Communication skills workshops for a group of teachers of Chennai Corporation's schools. These were teachers who were handling English language for classes 6 to 8. And I really mean a series - 12 half a day workshops, all in a row, one every week, for the same group.
I've always enjoyed doing workshops, but what really made these workshops special was the challenge they posed and the way the teachers responded. Rohini and I prepared a broad framework for our workshop series but kept it flexible enough to be dismantled and re-assembled according to the needs of the participants.
Which really turned out to be a wise decision on our part because, looking back, I can see that by the end of the series our framework had really come a long way from where we had first pitched it.
We had decided to keep it open because this was our first experience with teachers from schools for the economically weaker sections. We knew some of their problems - their students were first generation learners and did not have support from home, many of them came from emotionally disturbed backgrounds, and a lot of 'learning' that took place was mechanical and rote. Above everything else, was the teachers' own diffidence - they all came from a Tamil medium background and were just not confident about their own English, though all of them were English teachers.
We knew some of the handicaps these teachers worked with - we had been briefed by the Joint Commissioner Mr. Venkatesh, whose initiative had taken us to the Corporation School, Alwarpet for the workshop series.
But the real picture bloomed out that first day when we stepped into the audio visual lab of the Alwarpet school to find 30 half-anxious faces looking hesitantly at us. I could almost read their minds - who were these two women? Will they treat us with contempt? what sophisticated theories and impossible ideas will they thrust down our gullets? What would they expect us to do? How can we stick through 12 sessions?
What we carried with us was just our deep desire to connect to them and express solidarity. Our earnest desire to give them what they needed, rather than what we thought they needed.
The key we held was our openness and flexibility and I strongly believe that these made a lot of difference.
We started the series by asking the teachers to tell us their expectations from the series. What would you like to take away from here, we asked. It threw our bunch of 30 into something of a tizzy; some were cynical, but they all got into the spirit of it and finally drew up a laundry list. Now the list which ran into some ten points got us in a bit of a tizzy because we hadn't expected a list as long as this! We realized that we had quite a challenge ahead of us!
We then asked them to define what they would bring to the table if we undertook to try and meet their expectations. That took them aback but with a little prompting, they came up with a list of resolutions which more than matched our expectations!! Their list included points like 'we will cooperate/we will speak in English and not be hurt if we are publicly corrected etc.
And to their credit, most of them adhered to their own rules for most of the 12 days of the workshop. If they had not kept the pact, we really could not have done much.
That first workshop did much more than just tell us what they needed - it was the best ice breaker we could have imagined and it set the tone for the series.
The teachers warmed up pretty fast and learnt the hard way that in order to learn to speak English they would have to speak English.
January to March 2012 were very special months for me. My friend Rohini Jakati and I did a series of Communication skills workshops for a group of teachers of Chennai Corporation's schools. These were teachers who were handling English language for classes 6 to 8. And I really mean a series - 12 half a day workshops, all in a row, one every week, for the same group.
I've always enjoyed doing workshops, but what really made these workshops special was the challenge they posed and the way the teachers responded. Rohini and I prepared a broad framework for our workshop series but kept it flexible enough to be dismantled and re-assembled according to the needs of the participants.
Which really turned out to be a wise decision on our part because, looking back, I can see that by the end of the series our framework had really come a long way from where we had first pitched it.
We had decided to keep it open because this was our first experience with teachers from schools for the economically weaker sections. We knew some of their problems - their students were first generation learners and did not have support from home, many of them came from emotionally disturbed backgrounds, and a lot of 'learning' that took place was mechanical and rote. Above everything else, was the teachers' own diffidence - they all came from a Tamil medium background and were just not confident about their own English, though all of them were English teachers.
We knew some of the handicaps these teachers worked with - we had been briefed by the Joint Commissioner Mr. Venkatesh, whose initiative had taken us to the Corporation School, Alwarpet for the workshop series.
But the real picture bloomed out that first day when we stepped into the audio visual lab of the Alwarpet school to find 30 half-anxious faces looking hesitantly at us. I could almost read their minds - who were these two women? Will they treat us with contempt? what sophisticated theories and impossible ideas will they thrust down our gullets? What would they expect us to do? How can we stick through 12 sessions?
What we carried with us was just our deep desire to connect to them and express solidarity. Our earnest desire to give them what they needed, rather than what we thought they needed.
The key we held was our openness and flexibility and I strongly believe that these made a lot of difference.
We started the series by asking the teachers to tell us their expectations from the series. What would you like to take away from here, we asked. It threw our bunch of 30 into something of a tizzy; some were cynical, but they all got into the spirit of it and finally drew up a laundry list. Now the list which ran into some ten points got us in a bit of a tizzy because we hadn't expected a list as long as this! We realized that we had quite a challenge ahead of us!
We then asked them to define what they would bring to the table if we undertook to try and meet their expectations. That took them aback but with a little prompting, they came up with a list of resolutions which more than matched our expectations!! Their list included points like 'we will cooperate/we will speak in English and not be hurt if we are publicly corrected etc.
And to their credit, most of them adhered to their own rules for most of the 12 days of the workshop. If they had not kept the pact, we really could not have done much.
That first workshop did much more than just tell us what they needed - it was the best ice breaker we could have imagined and it set the tone for the series.
The teachers warmed up pretty fast and learnt the hard way that in order to learn to speak English they would have to speak English.
No comments:
Post a Comment