IT for Change has played a crucial role in highlighting the education emergency in India caused by the unprecedented and prolonged school closures in India due to COVID-19. In July 2021, we catalyzed the creation of the National Coalition on the Education Emergency, bringing together researchers…
Education/Advocacy
2023
Teachers will ‘teach to the test’ and focus on ensuring that the student can write answers to questions related to the syllabus, rather than ‘teach the learner’.
The Karnataka Education Department recently announced common examinations for grade 5 and 8 students. The Schools Association…
2023
Towards the end of a workshop conducted for school teachers, a curious phenomenon is often observed; many women teachers become restless. They sit tight anxiously clutching the handbags on their laps, steal furtive glances at their watches (or phones) to check the time, and even pointedly look…
2023
Imagine you joined a course without knowing that the instruction was in Russian. You would understand nothing. In a poignant scene from the Hindi movie, Taare Zameen Par, the parents of Ishaan, who is dyslexic, are asked to read Chinese and learn. They struggle and…
2022
The Ministry of School Education and Literacy recently released the 2021-22 Unified District Information System for Education (U-DISE) report, which provides information about all schools, teachers and students in India. A whole host of information; student enrolment, teacher deployment and…
2022
Twelve years after the Right to Education Act was passed, public investment in schools remains abysmally low.
The Karnataka Commissioner of School Education on October 19 issued a circular, allowing school monitoring committees to collect Rs 100 or more every month from each parent as a donation…
2022
The Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education (CETE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) launched the Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) in 2015 with an aim to “improve teaching, teacher professional development and student learning through the use of…
2021
The government is fiddling, as children are losing foundational literacy and numeracy. The Karnataka government has opened schools fully for grades 9-12 and partly for 6-8. However, lower primary schools (LPS) consisting of grades 1-5 remain closed and may have a zero year (a year of no school…
2021
School closures since March 2020 have allowed students limited opportunities for structured learning, causing learning loss, and aggravating malnutrition, child abuse, child labour, school dropout and early marriage.
Online education is seen as a solution to the education emergency. A…
2021
The pandemic has exposed India’s ambivalence about scientific knowledge. While masking and distancing constitute scientific wisdom, we see mass disregard of these in festivals and polls. The pandemic has exposed another ambivalence — about beliefs on the purpose and processes of education.…