One of the guiding principles for the Aditi-IIMB conference was the need to create interactive spaces and encourage conversations about key questions in the area of education.

We had chosen the World Cafe methodology as it best suits this philosophy.

As a conversational process, the World Café is an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. These conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people’s capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims. (www.theworldcafe.com)

The World Cafes were hosted by nationally and internationally recognized domain experts.

Session 1 - (6th December 2009, 9.00 to 10.30 a.m.)

Technology in Education
Manav Subodh - Head South & West India, Corporate Affairs, Intel.

• Track - Engaging With Young India

The new millennium has been ushered in by a dramatic technological revolution. We now live in an increasingly diverse, globalized, complex, media-saturated society, and for any individual to be successful in this global knowledge economy, he/she needs to develop various 21st century skills. The session on “Technology in Education” had explored what we define as 21st century skills and the use of technology to help develop these skills. The workshop had also looked to understand the challenges we face to build schools which can harness technology effectively as well as those related to implementing innovative teaching-learning practices in education and most importantly, the strategies we can apply to effectively meet these challenges.
The workshop had given benefit to educators and indeed all those associated with the field of education and interested in the application of innovative teaching-learning practices in the classrooms so as to enhance the 21st century learning milieu.

This session was facilitated by the global technology leader, Intel, which has been committed to enhancing lives of people by accelerating access to uncompromised technology for everyone anywhere in the world. To this end, Intel’s involvement in education has been long standing and profound, since the inception of the company in 1968.

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Theatre as part of the evolving school
Ashok Mandanna

• Track - Celebrate, Create!
  

The word ‘play’ is used in connection with the theatre. Yet theatre is used for therapy, serious exploration, propaganda, provocation, or historical re-creation, besides entertainment and relaxation. Why do we use the word ‘play’ unless we hope to let down our guard and open ourselves to new influences or ideas? Will it have a viable space in future schools or remain merely the safety valve? What is the potential for developing new ‘texts’, writers, or ways of using this malleable and adaptable medium? Ashok used a couple of exercises but mainly to start the process of ‘picking minds’ in the ‘café’ format this forum allowed.

Ashok Mandanna, a graduate of the National School of Drama, New Delhi and the Webber Douglas Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, London has worked in the fields of film and theatre for almost thirty five years. He has directed productions for several schools and has conducted a number of theatre workshops.

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Inclusion in our schools - Thinking and Process
Neena David - Head, Counseling Services - Mallya Aditi International School Bangalore

• Track - Enabling the Resilient School
  

The past two decades have seen the term inclusion appear with greater prominence in areas of educational policy and legislation. As signatory to the Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994), the Indian government has committed itself to the development of an inclusive system. There appears to be however, a significant gap in the understanding of this term and its translation in terms of present day classroom realities.
While global literature and thought strongly advocates for inclusion to be at the heart of educational reform, do we as a community of educators in India, have a basic shared understanding of it? How is this term conceptualized in our contexts? Drawing from Fullan’s reflection that ‘educational change is technically simple and socially complex’, this café encouraged participants to discuss the complexities involved, challenges presented and possible ways of responding to them. Through a process of shared perspectives, it sought to emphasise the need for personal and collective action in engaging with inclusion to create schools that evolve.

Neena David currently heads the Counseling Services at Mallya Aditi International School. A clinical psychologist by training, she has been instrumental in setting up processes for the school’s mental health programme, Learning Support Services. Neena serves on the Indian Association of Clinical Psychologist’s national task force on Learning Disabilities and is presently involved with providing research based, culturally relevant recommendations for assessment and intervention procedures for children identified with Learning Disabilities across India. Her ongoing doctoral studies in the area of school mental health from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai stem from her professional experience in school contexts and research interests with issues of inclusion and teacher perspectives.

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Reaching out and Reaching in
Dr Rukmini Banerji - Director ASER, Pratham

• Track - Designing New Learning Milieus
  

Leading questions: What are the learning partnerships that can be created by which your school can reach out and others can reach in?
The session had focussed on how to create learning opportunities in the community in which children live and go to school. First it was good to hear from the groups what they currently do and how their current efforts have been successful or difficult. Next, it took a set of different situations and saw what kinds of learning partnerships can be forged that could be productive for children from both kinds of schools and communities. These “learning moments” could be created for “pairs” of children or projects for groups of children in different communities.

Rukmini Banerji is a member of the national leadership team of Pratham, a large scale citizens’ initiative to universalize elementary education in India (www.pratham.org). Currently Pratham’s flagship program Read India has a presence in over 200 rural districts and has reached close to 20 million children. She is also part of the lead team that conducts the annual ASER survey (the Annual Status of Education Report) (www.asercentre.org). Rukmini loves to tell stories to children; she also loves writing about children and for children.

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Session 2 - (6th December 2009, 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.)

Schools of Tomorrow
Anshul Sonak - Head - Intel Education Programs (South Asia)

• Track - Engaging With Young India

21st century education is going to be very different than our current education systems. With globalization and talent crunch issues coupled with demographic dividends of India, we need introspection on what rules of the school education needs to be altered to provide every learner an opportunity to succeed in the competitive world. Technology plays a crucial role in moving education radar from traditional didactic instruction based education to enquiry based constructive education. Intel Corporation is committed to improve education around the world on these lines and in inspiring next generation of innovators. The presentation attempted to introspect some of the key levers like curriculum, assessment, teacher role, technology media literacy etc while building our schools of tomorrow.

Anshul Sonak is leading Intel’s Education initiatives in Schools, Colleges and Universities across South Asia. He is responsible for helping governments create a sustained education transformation environment required for the success of 21st century learners. To ensure systemic integration, he is also involved in helping various governments in framing appropriate ICT integration in Education strategies and policies. Anshul has 15years of experience in Education development sector.

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Creativity and the Classroom
Tara Kini- Consultant Education and Music.

• Track - Celebrate, Create!
  

Innovation, creativity in thinking and teaching, the role of the creative and performing arts in our classrooms.
Every learner, young or old, student, teacher or parent, is faced with a tsunami of information in the 21st century. Teachers, faced with the task of interacting with young minds that are as, if not more, capable of accessing knowledge as the adults around them, are no longer in a position to “impart knowledge”. In this situation, the most important skills that all learners need to acquire are creativity and critical thinking. Creativity is not the inborn right of a privileged few - it can be developed. As teachers, we need to teach for creativity as much as we need to teach creatively.

With these thoughts as a framework, many came with questions they liked to raise and issues for discussion. One question that one often come across is “How can we teach for creativity when we are ten months away from a board exam and have an extensive syllabus to cover?”

In this World Cafe session, many heartfelt issues in the domain of creative teaching and learning were addressed collectively by colleagues with different backgrounds, experiences and mindsets. What had emerged was a rich discussion that threw up ideas one had probably never dreamt of. The questions by many, the responses many and the take away invaluable.

As an independent Consultant in Education and Music, Tara Kini is currently consulting with eight reputed educational institutions in India, in the area of teacher professional development and curriculum development. Tara was Head, Teacher Education, in the Centre for Education, Research, Training and Development (CERTAD), Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. She taught physics and music in Mallya Aditi International School for 20 years and was the Administrator for 2 years. She has an MSc in Agricultural Physics from IARI, New Delhi, an MA (with distinction) in Education from Oxford Brookes University, UK and a BA in Hindustani classical music.

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Experiential Learning
Ashish Rajpal - CEO, IDiscoveri.

• Track - Enabling the Resilient School
  

Abstract will be added soon.

 

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Creating Safe Schools
Maya Menon- Founder Director, The Teacher Foundation, Bangalore.

• Track - Designing New Learning Milieus
  

The teacher as a guru is essentially an ancient Brahminical idea but it has survived the onslaught of colonization and globalisation to this digital age. This has far reaching implications in the classroom. The quality and language of personal interaction in our schools - teachers with students and students amongst themselves is often marked by harshness of tone, insensitivity towards others’ feelings and a sense of inadequacy in expressing thoughts, ideas and feelings. Authoritarianism and judgement pervade majority of teacher-student interactions in schools across the country. This archaic approach to teaching and schooling has thrown up symptoms of an extreme nature – shootings at school, bullying, suicides, depression amongst students. However there are also less obvious, but far more insidious symptoms routinely evident in all our schools. This World Cafe session invited participants to explore and debate over the idea of Our Schools as Safe Spaces.

Maya Menon is Founder Director of The Teacher Foundation, Bangalore (TTF), an organisation that provides a wide range of professional development opportunities and experiences for teachers, headteachers and school administrators.

Maya has spent 3 decades in school education in varied capacities beginning as a teacher, and moving on to school management, teacher training and conceptualising and designing training programmes.

She graduated from Delhi University and has an MBA (Educational Management) with distinction from University of Leicester, UK. She is also an Accredited Trainer for Jenny Mosley Consultancies, UK for Whole School Quality Circle Time and Master Trainer for the Cambridge International Diploma for Teachers and Trainers, of the University of Cambridge International Examinations.