One of the integral parts of my even being in India in the first place is the completion of an entrepreneurial project and internship with a social venture organization. As you all know, I'm working with an organization named PremaVidya, which is a sub-project of the much broader Swami Vivekenanda Youth Movement (SVYM). Actually, to be even more specific, I am working on another project under PremaVidya called Project 1947. Project 1947 makes the videos that are distributed to government schools. The videos correspond with the state curriculum, and are designed to help more students pass the SSLC exam at the end of 10th standard. In India, this SSLC certificate is extremely important. It often becomes one's sole identification paper, as not all Indians have a birth certificate. Without an SSLC certificate, one can't apply for a passport or driver's license, and it becomes extremely hard to find a job. Many students in government schools drop out before they reach 10th standard, so you can see why this is an important issue to address. Without the SSLC certificate, these children, who mostly come from impoverished backgrounds to begin with, will probably not be able to escape from a life of poverty.
Actually, the whole GSE class had the wonderful opportunity to meet with PremaVidya's founder, Mr. Naresh Bala, via a Skype interview back in March before we left for India. We had this meeting before anyone knew which organization they had been assigned to, so everyone was anxiously waiting to meet the man who would potentially be our new boss in India. It was a very productive and informative meeting. I learned a lot about the organization from this conversation, and when I found out I was placed at PremaVidya, I was really excited, although I was also intrigued by the Hippocampus Learning Centres, another organization GSE students would be working with.
When we arrived in Bangalore, our first task was to find out where PremaVidya (PV) was located. Now, I hadn't even been in Bangalore for 24 hours yet, so I was basically walking around in a jet-lagged daze as Parisa asked all the random people on the street how to get to J.P. Nagar, the neighborhood in which PV is located. Professor Moledina had warned us that it was far away, and if we couldn't find it by 12:30pm, we should turn around and go home. Well, we found the office by 11:30, and discovered that we only needed to take one bus (G4) south to get to where we needed to go (for more fun bus-related adventures, you can browse back through my older posts).
So when we started work on Monday, we were given a PV orientation. Mr. Naresh was not well, we were told he was having thyroid problems, so he unfortunately couldn't be there to meet us, but we did have a really interesting orientation. We talked to members of the Human Resources department, and members of the Field Team. We even got to visit some PV schools that first day! We saw two different implementation models of PV intervention. One was the TASSS model. The SSS stands for Student Support Services, and the TA is of course, a Teaching Assistant. In this model, the videos are administered by a TA in a Bangalore school. Throughout the video, there are questions about the content. The TA pauses the video, and students answer the question (this technique is called question-pause-answer). We also saw the iSSS model, which meant that students sit in small groups around several different portable DVD players, and running the videos themselves. There's an adult monitor in the class to collect doubt slips (student questions), that will be reviewed and answered by a teacher later that day. One of the goals of Project 1947 is to empower children to take control of their own learning, and to take the fear and authority out of the classroom. Often, children will be too afraid of the teacher to ask questions when they don't understand something, and therefore they do not learn the material.
Anyway, we spent about a week learning about the video production, and working with the Tech team to create some mock videos of our own. I put it up the video Navee and I made on a post a while back. You all should check it out. Anyway, after that week, we were transferred upstairs to work with the Quality Team. The Quality Team is an eight person department that gathers and reports on all types of data from all of the 200-something schools with PV intervention. At this time, we had discovered that Mr. Naresh had been diagnosed with Leukemia. This was an incredible shock to the organization, and it was definitely apparent that the morale of the office was much lower than it probably normally was. Suman, who basically does a whole lot of stuff for PV became our big boss, but our immediate supervisor, and the person we answer to is Darsana, the head of the Quality Team. Darsana is really great, not to mention she's one of the sweetest people I have ever met. She does however, have extremely high expectations for our group. We balked at the list of items Darsana wanted us to accomplish. We were given the broad task of finding out how to retain the quality of intervention, as PV scales rapidly. Wow. How do you even begin to tackle a question like that?
Actually, the whole GSE class had the wonderful opportunity to meet with PremaVidya's founder, Mr. Naresh Bala, via a Skype interview back in March before we left for India. We had this meeting before anyone knew which organization they had been assigned to, so everyone was anxiously waiting to meet the man who would potentially be our new boss in India. It was a very productive and informative meeting. I learned a lot about the organization from this conversation, and when I found out I was placed at PremaVidya, I was really excited, although I was also intrigued by the Hippocampus Learning Centres, another organization GSE students would be working with.
When we arrived in Bangalore, our first task was to find out where PremaVidya (PV) was located. Now, I hadn't even been in Bangalore for 24 hours yet, so I was basically walking around in a jet-lagged daze as Parisa asked all the random people on the street how to get to J.P. Nagar, the neighborhood in which PV is located. Professor Moledina had warned us that it was far away, and if we couldn't find it by 12:30pm, we should turn around and go home. Well, we found the office by 11:30, and discovered that we only needed to take one bus (G4) south to get to where we needed to go (for more fun bus-related adventures, you can browse back through my older posts).
So when we started work on Monday, we were given a PV orientation. Mr. Naresh was not well, we were told he was having thyroid problems, so he unfortunately couldn't be there to meet us, but we did have a really interesting orientation. We talked to members of the Human Resources department, and members of the Field Team. We even got to visit some PV schools that first day! We saw two different implementation models of PV intervention. One was the TASSS model. The SSS stands for Student Support Services, and the TA is of course, a Teaching Assistant. In this model, the videos are administered by a TA in a Bangalore school. Throughout the video, there are questions about the content. The TA pauses the video, and students answer the question (this technique is called question-pause-answer). We also saw the iSSS model, which meant that students sit in small groups around several different portable DVD players, and running the videos themselves. There's an adult monitor in the class to collect doubt slips (student questions), that will be reviewed and answered by a teacher later that day. One of the goals of Project 1947 is to empower children to take control of their own learning, and to take the fear and authority out of the classroom. Often, children will be too afraid of the teacher to ask questions when they don't understand something, and therefore they do not learn the material.
Anyway, we spent about a week learning about the video production, and working with the Tech team to create some mock videos of our own. I put it up the video Navee and I made on a post a while back. You all should check it out. Anyway, after that week, we were transferred upstairs to work with the Quality Team. The Quality Team is an eight person department that gathers and reports on all types of data from all of the 200-something schools with PV intervention. At this time, we had discovered that Mr. Naresh had been diagnosed with Leukemia. This was an incredible shock to the organization, and it was definitely apparent that the morale of the office was much lower than it probably normally was. Suman, who basically does a whole lot of stuff for PV became our big boss, but our immediate supervisor, and the person we answer to is Darsana, the head of the Quality Team. Darsana is really great, not to mention she's one of the sweetest people I have ever met. She does however, have extremely high expectations for our group. We balked at the list of items Darsana wanted us to accomplish. We were given the broad task of finding out how to retain the quality of intervention, as PV scales rapidly. Wow. How do you even begin to tackle a question like that?
 |
| We count on or daily tea breaks |
 |
| Us balking at our "to do" list |
 |
| We have an idea!! |
Answer: It literally took us days (I may argue weeks) to figure how we were going approach this question. We decided that we simply couldn't address this big of a question in only six weeks. We could definitely try to pick out a piece of the puzzle and solve that one piece. Good. Well, we changed our "puzzle piece" about a million times before finally coming up with the current project we're working on. Basically, our project entails how to "establish a framework to assess the learning process occurring in PremaVidya video programs. Our ultimate goal is to develop a methodology that will determine the factors that improve and impact learning" (this quote was taken from the text of the draft of our final report). We've been doing a lot of research on focus groups, because we think this may be one of the better ways to collect good, nuanced qualitative data that can be used to determine whether PremaVidya intervention improves and impacts learning. We've run into many difficulties, roadblocks, and setback with this project, but our hope is, at the end of this space, to be able to give PremaVidya a truly useful document that they can incorporate into their scaling process.
To close with a random side note: if you love PICTURES check out the GSE flickr and see all sorts of different photos of the GSE and Lilly team out and about!
To close with a random side note: if you love PICTURES check out the GSE flickr and see all sorts of different photos of the GSE and Lilly team out and about!
No comments:
Post a Comment