Every year on January 12, India celebrates National Youth Day to commemorate the birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda who was a strong supporter of education and empowering youth for the development of the country.
On National Youth Day, ThinkZone wants to highlight the work of young people in urban Odisha who have been passionately working towards providing quality learning opportunities to children in their communities.
Enabling young people to become education leaders
Kids start coming to Bhagyashree’s home from early morning. Bhagyashree, a college graduate from Cuttack starts grouping kids and explains animatedly the learning activities with them. Being a multi-age classroom, she divides her time with groups activities and individual activities for kids.
She is not the only one dedicating her time to support children. Debasmita, also from Cuttack is pursuing her post-graduation and is also teaching young children at her home. Debasmita alternates her classroom time for children with language and arithmetic activities and uses audio-visuals via the ThinkZone mobile application to engage children.
Debasmita and Bhagashree are part of the ‘ThinkZone Foundational Literacy and Numeracy(FLN) Fellowship Program’ which focuses on improving the foundational skills of children from low-resource communities. It is a unique 4-month fellowship program wherein young people are trained and supported to become education leaders. Youth become skilled & effective facilitators and implement intensive learning camps for children in their own communities by using ThinkZone’s data-driven mobile technology and activity-based teaching pedagogy. ThinkZone uses accessible technology to monitor and support the youth to implement various processes of the program.
The idea of the fellowship is to involve young people to bring about a positive change in their communities and promote a sense of ownership. Fellows like Debasmita and Bhagyashree are supporting children who cannot attend schools due to the pandemic-induced lockdowns and also have no access to electronic devices.
India’s Learning Crisis!
The ability to read and write, and perform basic operations with numbers, is a necessary foundation and an indispensable prerequisite for all future schooling and lifelong learning. However, various governmental, as well as non-governmental surveys, indicate that India is currently in a learning crisis: a large proportion of students currently in elementary school – estimated to be over 50 million in number – have not attained foundational literacy and numeracy, i.e., the ability to read and comprehend basic text and the ability to carry out basic addition and subtraction with Indian numerals.
India’s new National Education Policy has identified that the highest priority for the Indian education system should be to deliver universal Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN). For the same, the Ministry of Education has launched a national mission called ‘National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy’ (NIPUN Bharat), for ensuring that every child in the country necessarily attains foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) by the end of 2026-27.
Fit4Future Program
ThinkZone’s Foundational Literacy & Numeracy(FLN) fellowship program is being implemented under the Fit4Future program of Fondation Botnar, a Swiss-based foundation that champions the use of AI and digital technology to improve the health and wellbeing of children and young people in growing urban environments.
The fellowship program is directly based upon the inputs mentioned in the National Education Policy of focusing on ‘Foundational Literacy and Numeracy’ and also involving community members in teaching literacy and numeracy through holding learning sessions for young children.
ThinkZone’s Foundational Literacy Numeracy(FLN) Fellowship Program enables quality learning opportunities for children by supporting young people from low-income communities into becoming education leaders. These youth are not only invested and aware of the development needs of the children in their communities; they are also passionate and want to do something on their own. What they need is the right nudge. Youth who are a part of the fellowship program not only become better education facilitators but also develop 21st-century skills.
Under Fondation Botnar’s Fit4Future program, we have already worked with thousands of motivated youth in 2021 using a blended strategy of accessible digital solutions and instructor-led support. And what we see is young people like Debasmita & Bhagyashree who are passionately working towards supporting children in their communities. No flashy things, no beautiful classrooms but significant learning gains!
ThinkZone with support from Fondation Botnar would be on-boarding 6000 fellows over the next 3 years who would be providing quality learning opportunities to more than 35000 young children in their communities.
Learning can happen anywhere!
Debasmita and Bhagyashree, like many youths, had faced challenges when they were kids. They saw themselves in the children and have decided to make sure that they don’t go through the same hurdles as they did.
We often forget in our assumptions that while youth like Bhagyashree and Debasmita may not be from elite colleges or have fancy degrees to show for, they have skills that have allowed them to survive. If we provide them with the right nudge and support to continuously improve their skills, they can become significant sources of learning for children
As a society, we have been made to believe that quality learning for children is completely dependent on families’ socio-economic background, educational infrastructure, and formal education degrees of educators. But as we see from the stories of Debasmita and Bhagyashree, learning can happen anywhere, even without traditional educational institutions.
