Seeds of Change: From Margins to Meaningful Learning

Founder of the Early Literacy Project, Keerti Jayaram, has worked for nearly two decades to make learning meaningful for children from diverse and underserved backgrounds. This Teacher’s Month, Mentor Magazine features her story, and honours her quiet, persistent work in reshaping classrooms into spaces of respect, curiosity, and pride. 

Friday Library! 

A few decades ago, my family and a few friends began a weekly library in bags for the children in Haus Khas Village in South Delhi to share our love of books. What began as a trickle gradually grew into a vibrant hub of about a hundred odd children. We read; we shared books; we played games and lent them books to take home. The children waited eagerly for our Friday library! 

Gradually, Haus Khas village morphed into an art and crafts village. Many local families moved out and our little library in bags began to peter out. The seeds that it had sowed now searched for new pastures. My work in a Resource Centre for Teachers and later as Faculty on a four year Teacher Education graduate programme – the B.El.Ed, in Delhi had provided me with opportunities to engage with children from a wide range of schools encompassing the well-endowed elite schools at one end of the spectrum and resource poor schools catering to children from the marginal sections of the society at the other end. 

The contrast between these schools was mind boggling with no meeting point between them. It impacted and propelled me to search for ways to make learning more meaningful and enjoyable for children from underserved social groups.  This was the genesis of the Early Literacy Project in 2006, as a search to enable children to actualise their complete innate potentials, regardless of their backgrounds. 

Of Resilient Children 

My engagement inside elite school classrooms deepened my conceptual understanding of Early Literacy pedagogies along with newly emerging theoretical perspectives. I began to explore ways to apply them within resource poor schools. A majority of children in these State run schools were children of migrants or daily wage workers from low literate homes. The children struggled within highly structured, teacher driven classrooms which at times were pretty unfriendly or hostile. Correspondingly, we found overburdened and ill equipped teachers who seemed to view their engagement with the children as “hopeless”. 

Despite these odds, the children’s resilience, especially little girls, had a deep impact on me. They came diligently to school each day and went through meaningless drills in mechanical ways. They wanted “to become a doctor or policeman or teacher”. Some said they wanted to become “bade aadmi” (big people). I was struck by how these children had already internalised their place in the social ladder, and perhaps saw school as a gateway to mobility. Through their eyes, I glimpsed worlds far removed from my own. I met little girls who had never seen stars, rivers, or open fields. While I found the school cramped, for those from crowded, narrow lanes, it was “a big space.”

A Harsh Reality

My work also exposed me to schools on the southern outskirts of Delhi. Within this location I came across children who worked either before or after school hours. Some of them caught my attention. I noticed a little seven year old second grader who arrived late to school on most days. Each day she faced a barrage of abuse from the school authorities with downcast eyes, but she continued to come late. Since my conversations with her were met with stone silence, I decided to visit her home. 

I discovered that she lived in a cow shed and slept with the cows. Each morning she distributed milk in the neighbouring high rise apartments. Since she had no support for learning at home, she had been struggling at the bottom of her class. Despite these odds, she never stopped coming to school! I came across other children like her; each with a similar story that moved me. The school however, remained oblivious to the realities of their daily lives and continued to dole out pre-packaged curricula in a one size fit all, manner! 

Thus It Began 

The quiet resolve of these children inspired me to resonate with newer research based perspectives on Early Literacy which viewed literacy as social practice, and emphasised addressing the contexts within which young learners were learning to read and write. These new perspectives focused on issues of relevance and meaning for emerging literacy learners from diverse and low literate backgrounds. My journey with Early Literacy now began to deepen. 

The Philosophy of OELP 

OELP’s Early Literacy Project began as an exploratory search to make success achievable for every early grader. We focused on how reading and writing develop within the layered complexities of classroom spaces that, we found, were not neutral but often mirrored the caste-driven social world that children came from. Many had already internalized their place in this hierarchy by the time they entered school, becoming mute spectators afraid to risk mistakes. Building nurturing, inclusive classrooms grounded in mutual respect thus became our priority. 

After a year of sustained work within the urban contexts of Delhi, our project was relocated to government schools in rural Rajasthan, where it still continues. This is a drought prone landscape where low literate communities earn their livelihood through daily wage work, pastoral activity or petty trade. The contrast to the narrow lanes of Delhi was dramatic. Over a period of almost two decades of intensive engagement within this context; our key focus became “foundation building” for school based learning for children from diverse social contexts. 

Most members of the OELP team are from the local communities who bring a deep knowledge of their context and a passion to improve the lives of their children. They have a sense of ownership of the programme and now pride themselves on the confident little “thinking learners” that our children are becoming. 

A Shift in Beliefs 

Our work has focused on creating simple classroom practices rooted in mutual respect, cooperation,and making success achievable for every child. Such non-threatening spaces foster meaningful learning and shift teachers’ beliefs about children’s abilities. Correspondingly, children's self-esteem grows and they engage more positively with classroom activities and literature to their own experiences, and explore wider worlds beyond them. They take books home, read to elders, record village histories, and write down oral stories, gradually strengthening the bond between oral and written worlds while nurturing pride in their heritage. 

The Bottom-Up Approach 

OELP has worked in a bottom up manner to evolve our Foundation Building strategies. Our work seems to have found a reach of its own despite social media absence. Our strength, we believe, is our demonstration of grounded, low cost and high quality classroom practices. Over the years our work has got noticed by policy makers. 

In the year 2015, after a visit from senior members from the State education bureaucracy, the State invested in our resource material and shared it with 14000 schools across seven districts of Rajasthan. We supported the implementation of the underlying approaches through a formal agreement with some support from Ed Tech solutions. COVID19 however was a great spoiler for us and this effort could not be sustained. Subsequently, we have reinvented ourselves as a mentoring organisation, with both online and offline offerings for capacity building within the domain of foundational learning. 

This effort is currently receiving a positive response from stakeholders across eight or nine States of India and we are hoping we can build on it. 

Policy Makers 

OELP has engaged with policymakers at both State and National levels, presenting our work at the UNESCO South Asia Summit and building partnerships within the larger foundational learning ecosystem. Our collaborations span state and non-state sectors, with a focus on civil society and grassroots organisations across India. We are periodically invited to policy-level initiatives, though challenges arise from bureaucratic changes, frequent transfers, and lack of continuity in the system. Resisting pressure for large-scale expansion, we prioritise quality and aim for a vibrant “Community of Practice” of like-minded organisations. 

The Way Forward 

·       Recognition of the need to focus on home to school transitions so that each learner is equipped with the skills and socio-emotional competencies required for a positive schooling experience.

·       Recognition of the need to create classrooms as nurturing learning spaces which honour learner diversity and are based on the democratic principles of equality, mutual respect and cooperation regardless of learner backgrounds

·       Focus on creating love for reading and writing – on the How and not only on What

Conclusion 

I want to sum this up in a refrain which has emerged for me from Sonia Nieto’s work on culturally responsive pedagogy. This is not an exact quote but summing up of the spirit of her work:

“Meet them where they are; take them someplace else, while making them proud of who they are”.