Holistic Initiative Towards Educational Change (HITEC), Hoshangabad

The objective of the Holistic Initiative towards Educational Change project is to bring long-term change in the quality of school education in Narmadapuram (Hoshangabad) district, Madhya Pradesh. This is being brought into effect by engaging with schools, teachers, education functionaries and also the community – to eventually reach the students and impact their learning positively.

The long term goals are:

• Working in the area of society and education and seeing how it impacts the school system to develop replicable models.
• Enabling and strengthening the teaching community and teacher-education processes through a multi-pronged strategy at the school, cluster, block, district and later state levels.
• Promote community based reading practices that enhance educational discourse and practice.
• Building networks and taking up campaigns and advocacy initiatives around education to build a dialogue with society, in general, and elected representatives, in particular.
• Engaging with the system and its institutions to incorporate learnings from field practices.

Areas where we function have large Scheduled Tribe populations, families facing multiple displacements and landless labourers. Currently, we are actively present in all the seven blocks of Narmadapuram (Hoshangabad) - Babai, Bankhedi Kesla, Narmadapuram, Pipariya, Seoni Malwa and Sohagpur

The three main dimensions of the intervention are:

• Support to teachers and schools and linkage with the government education system - Our aim is to create platforms of peer learning for teachers who are actively engaging in actual classroom teaching. The engagement with the teachers is on two levels: one, on issues related to the EVS, Language and Math textbooks that they use and how to make them more relevant and meaningful for children; two, to work towards building understanding and empathy for the educationally marginalized students with learning challenges and special needs. To achieve this we are working in tandem with the DIET and district and block education offices.
• Educational support to students in and outside of school- The core is to focus on the educational needs of children at risk who are educationally marginalized and on the verge of being pushed out of the school system. A major cause of this push-out is their inability to master the basic reading-writing and numeracy skills. Hence, the engagement with these students aims to categorically address this situation and also take up other creative learning activities that help build confidence and articulation in these students.
• Engagement with the community on educational issues- Building community linkages with education through setting up of libraries and reading rooms in community spaces as well as in some government education spaces like schools or Jan Shiksha Kendras. Building on these library-cum-reading rooms, efforts are being made to bring on board the village community, especially youth, women and elders to learn about their traditional skill-based professions and practices, oral history etc. By documenting some of these an effort is being made to build a bridge between this knowledge base and teaching-learning processes in schools.