Learning is nonlinear, and we believe that holistic learning opportunities that foreground embodied learning are critical for child development. As musicians ourselves, the team recognises the value of the tool in enabling self-transformation and community development. The living realities of performing musicians are quite depressing. The field is highly competitive and heavily dependent on trends. This means that many hard-working and talented artists are unable to sustain themselves and are forced to quit music and pick odd jobs just to survive.
Children, on the other hand, have limited access to music. The entry barrier is high for children from marginalised communities, making music the domain of the socially and economically elite. Often, children's expressive capacity is limited and gravely underdeveloped without opportunities for self-expression. Children are also deprived of the joy that coming form engaging with music. Schools are often spaces that are regimented and regulated, where it is hard to find the joy of learning.
We wanted to design a solution to this challenge most unconventionally. At the same time, we wanted to make it context sensitive and thus socially and emotionally close to children and artists. Engaging with the local community of artists and bringing their presence to schools regularly was something that felt context-sensitive and meaningful.
The APT Project is a three to five-year engagement with any partner school. A stands for Anubhav, P for Parichay and T for Taleem. Anubhav is the first step of the project, where we conduct intimate chamber concerts for children. Only 50/60 children attend the concert, get to listen to the artist from a very close distance, and then they engage in open questioning about the art or the artist. Anubhav phase introduces at least 8 different art forms in one academic year. The model is pull-based. If the feedback from all stakeholders indicates that children are seeking more of these intimate experiences, then we begin with the 2nd phase of Parichay. In Parichay, the batch of 50/60 students is split into two, and we organise workshops for them. The workshop is where children try their hands at some of the art forms they have seen in the Anubhav phase. After at least 6 to 8 such workshops have been conducted, we move to the phase of Taleem. Here, based on children's preferences, we begin a learning club at the school. Children choose an art form they would like to learn, and we form a batch of 10/15 students.
After every performance/session, we gather feedback from teachers, children, artists, and a team member fills an observation form too. We also conduct baseline and endline assessments, gathering data about children's storytelling skills, attention, concentration, memory and recall.
We annually engage with 160+ artists who earn between 50k to 1L in one academic year.
The APT Project has grown organically through word of mouth. We have been referenced by schools and teachers, and that is how we have primarily spread across 6 districts in Maharashtra, India. Until 2020, Baithak would actively reach out to artists to join the program, but post-pandemic, we have noticed a surge in artist applications. Currently, we hold two district-level MoUs that enable us to work in all the schools of those districts.
The APT Project began with at least two years of experimentation, even before it was launched as a program. We actively experimented to gauge which tools and formats were most effective in achieving our objective. Once the program was being run at scale, we revisited our monitoring and evaluation tools and, with the support of an expert agency, devised simpler, meaningful and actionable formats to gather impact data. Even today, the Baithak team reviews the field data every month together as a team to check for what can change in the field to better the outcomes. We have been able to identify gaps that could not be solved by the APT Project alone and have thus launched at least 3 new initiatives under the Foundation. We now have a card game that introduces 30 Indian Traditional Instruments to children through play. We have built a moving exhibition of Indian traditional instruments, and we have also created a series of workshops called Sound Box, which encourage children to have fun while exploring and learning about the medium of Sound.
It will be important to understand the local artist ecosystem first. Once you are aware of that, you can begin by finding schools that are interested in offering the time and support required for the project. If anyone does this, they will have a fair idea of the challenges to come if the innovation were to be implemented. Baithak Foundation has created a detailed playbook to help with every step of this work. The playbook also has guidelines, structures, process documentation and some caveats that anyone can follow.
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