Rural community don`t see any merit in sending their child to school as they have seen that education does not give any useful skills. Lack of coherence between what is taught in school and real life results in large drop out rates. Over the years this perpetuates into long standing cycles of poverty. Thus this innovation is created so that students and communities can find meaning in education.
Our proposed solution is to enhance scientific temper among rural children in
the age group of 6 to 14 years through contextual and hands-on curriculum.Our focus is on providing access to existing knowledge base and skills which helps children to work on implementing their ideas into action in our makerspace. This solution came when we were teaching about alternative sources of energy and how it enables us to generate electricity. Girls aged around 12-13 years questioned us, “Can it charge our mobile phones, as there is no electricity in the village". This question was the starting point of developing such an inquiry based curriculum where childrens can learn and solve community problems simultaneously.
The community not only liked such a model of education but later on actively participated in developing a curriculum combining local knowledge with mainstream education. This led to far greater number of children coming to Khoj-Shaala.
Our uniqueness is that we had integrated it with the traditional knowledge and contextual materials of the villages. In past years students had come up with multiple grassroots innovations like Matka Cooler, portable air-conditioner,Bicycle fodder cutting machine,Manual Washing Machine etc. Apart from it, children also opted for multiple career options like designing, nursing etc.This is a major achievement within a community non-inclined towards education.Till date we had set up 2 Khoj shaalas(Makerspace) in 2 villages and now our curriculum also runs in public schools.
In the next 2-3 years we want to set up more Khoj Shaala “centers of innovation” via sharing our frameworks, modules and methods to other individuals and organizations enabling more children to become innovators.
Understand things from the perspective of the community,Increase your understanding on traditional knowledge base and research on the contextual materials available. The last step is to analyze the community problems and iterating different solution in the khoj shaala (makers space) to solve it.
You can contact us at swatantratalim@gmail.com for a framework on co-creating Khoj Shaalas.
