COMMUNITY BASED ACCELARATED READING PROGRAMME
Calcutta
Foundation’s primary focus and activity in the years
to come will be accelerated learning of numbers and
vernacular. In this project CF has partnered Pratham and
Inspiration, both not-for-profit organizations
The
objective is to bring every child to school and help
every child to learn well.
The basic principle is to bring NGOs, citizens,
government and industry together to ensure
universalization of primary education. Wherever the
Calcutta Foundation-Inspiration-Pratham (C.I.P) team
works, it will work on a scale and in a manner that can
be replicated. The
team has been working with Government bodies to
strengthen schools and with communities to strengthen
their ability to support their children’s learning.
The funds to support this new initiative come
largely from Indian and multinational businesses,
industry, individuals in
India
and abroad, to some extent from the Government and from
CF’s own corpus.
WHAT
HAS THE C.I.P TEAM BEING DOING?
This
project is located in urban slums and villages, and is
community based. The team has been working with people
from the villages, people from the cities, and with
local Governments.
Children’s
Library:
Community-based libraries works like “reading
clubs”, and will foster a reading and learning
environment. Child friendly books in local languages
starting from pre-school level have been provided. The
space for setting up these libraries is provided by the
villagers. It is at these centers located in various
villages that the following programmes are carried out:
- As
a curtain raiser the team ran a mass campaign called
Pehla Kadam, involving local students and youth. In the month
long campaign the youth were trained to teach all
4-6 year olds, letters of the alphabet and numerals,
This was a block approach.
- Learning to Read :
Innovation in learning….for children who are
“left out” or “left behind” in the 6-14 age
group. A focused 2 month program enabling the
children to read with fluency in two months, and
work with numbers.
-
Reading
to Learn
: 2 cycles of 4 months each. Reading with
comprehension, writing independently, and basic
arithmetic, after the L2R programme.
The
pilot phase of this partnership started in the month of
June 2006 in 8 blocks of 6 districts (North 24 Parganas,
Bankura, Dakshin Dinajpur,
Darjeeling
,
Cooch Behar
and Murshidabad/ Jalpaiguri,) which have been chosen. In
the 8 selected blocks, 5 community libraries have
started functioning in 5 villages. The aim is to make
all 8 Blocks… “Reading Blocks” within 2 years.
Subsequently the objective will be to develop a
suitable model, which can be replicated in every Block
of every District of West Bengal, to make entire West
Bengal a “Reading State”.(This is being done by
Pratham and other NGOs in all the states of India.)
A
library is expected to have catchments of 250 households
and serve around 500 children in the age group 6-14. The
library is not only be a literary endeavour for
activities such as lending books, story telling and
writing sessions, but is also be an activity place where
children are encouraged to perform various art and craft
exercises, making them more creative.
Into
the fourth month of commencement of the community
libraries, a total village survey was performed to
assess the reading and basic mathematical computational
ability of all children between ages of 6-14. Depending
on the outcome of the survey, intervention-reading
classes (L2R – R2L) started in each village, with 25
children per class. In the first year not more than 3
reading classes per village will run at a time. The L2R
classes have a cycle of 2 months, at the end of which it
is hoped that most children will start reading fluently.
The reading classes have a cycle of two months, and
2,500 children in
Bengal
will benefit per cycle. By the year-end, we hope 10,000
children will have benefited from this project
Towards
the end of the fifth month, an evaluation was conducted
in the pilot phase to assess the success of Library
Programme. Depending on the success, an additional 45
libraries will be added in 45 villages of each chosen
block. This scale up will be done from the point of view
of covering the entire Block. However due to financial
constraints we cannot open more than 50 libraries at one
go in each block. Hence some of the libraries will
function as “Cluster Libraries” catering to a
cluster of neighbouring villages. The weekly schedule of
these “Cluster Libraries” will greatly vary from the
“Village Library”.
This
would increase the number of libraries from 5 to 50 in
each block and from 40 to 400 over six districts. By the
end of 2 years, the 8 blocks under the 6 districts will
become absolute reading blocks where all children within
the age group of 6-14, (approximately 4, 00,000
children) would have gone through the library programme.
The
libraries and the reading classes are manned and
conducted by community volunteers who have been offered
a token honorarium. They have been trained in pedagogic
methods by the Pratham technical team. A problem with
this approach is often the inadequacy of child friendly
reading material in most Indian languages. This calls
for a continuous process of development, translation and
publication of children’s books in different
languages. In addition, e-books and interactive
courseware stored in computers could solve this problem
to some extent where typically a huge repository can be
stored in a laptop and then several computers can
actually be connected to it. The laptop could also move
from one library to another, which would serve as a
strategy for community mobilisation.
Once
the project is complete, CIP will move out. The library,
the books and other teaching material will belong to the
villagers. Volunteers from the community, who would have
completed training under the CIP programmes, will remain
behind to carry on with the good work. ASER type of
survey will be done in these schools, and CIP will move
on to new areas
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