One evening in November 2022, we, the Danish representatives from iiINTERest, arrived at AHEAD’s permanent office, ‘field station’, in Malda in South Dinajpur District in West Bengal, where a small branch of Ahead’s educational activities unfolds. Contrary to many of Ahead’s other educational activities, the projects in this area were not aimed at either the students, or the students who drop out of school without a final 10th grade test, ‘dropouts’, but at the teachers. The projects are about improving the pedagogy for the students who come to classes by integrating sound, images, and films into the lessons. That evening in Malda, we met 14 enthusiastic school inspectors and the first teachers who had been on a course to download pictures and films from the Internet so that they could illustrate passages from the textbooks in their teaching. They told us that they worked with short clips, which they then showed using the Power Point equipment and computers that the Indian software company, Embee Software, has made available to the schools as part of the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (SCR). Pedagogically, such that pictures and film passages were in close connection with the teaching materials and as very short features so that they could illustrate the texts without taking the students’ attention away from the books that structure the teaching.
Although the curriculum and approved teaching materials are central elements of the Indian education system, there is still a need to make the teaching materials more interactive, so that the teaching in the village schools takes the form of activity-based learning to a greater extent, as well as to adapt the content to local conditions that can resonate and local knowledge in the children: local traditions, memorials, nature and customs – all important when the textbooks are often written from a metropolitan and middle-class perspective with no connection to life in West Bengal’s rural areas. It is often difficult to find the good examples on the internet, so the teachers are taught how to find and record places, markets, and festivals themselves, with support from Ahead.
The course participants had already established their own network which disseminated the ideas to schools other than their own and we were delighted when the administrative manager (District Magistrate and Commissioner) expressed interest in the collaboration at the meeting: in fact there were already some computers and projectors in the school system, but his feeling had been that there was precisely a lack of ideas for how they should be used in teaching. In this way, we at the office witnessed the start of a new connection between the area’s teachers and the local authorities, which will hopefully improve education for lots of local schoolchildren in the area.