Everyday we hear about crimes related to gender, caste, class, ability, and religion. Yet little is being done in India to educate children about why these happen and what can be done to solve such problems. While policies suggest empowering students with knowledge, skills, and attitudes to create a more inclusive world, schools and teachers do not have the resources to offer such experiences.
Through ACT@ACRES, students start the year by engaging deeply in concepts related to prejudice and discrimination. This is then followed by seeing how these issues operate in their local/national context. Finally students participate in a social action project that allows them to address the issue. For example, last year a group of our grade 6 students noticed how some of the school textbooks were perpetuating gender stereotypes. They did a deep dive into the problem, redesigned certain chapters to make them more gender inclusive and pitched it to the school leadership to replace the existing chapters with new chapters designed by them. Another group of grade 5 students studied about challenges faced by people living in low-socioeconomic communities. They connected with a local low-income school and found out that the school did not have access to a library. Over a period of 2 months, they spearheaded a book donation drive and collected 1770 books to set up a library for them.
We first started this program in 2019 by piloting it with a class of 40 students in a single campus. In 2020, we rolled it out to a larger group of 120 students and 4 teachers via our virtual school program. Over the last year we have scaled the program across 2 campuses with 20 teachers reaching more that 1500 students from grade 2-8. Teaching this curriculum can be quite challenging for teachers as their education has not equipped them with the required pedagogical content knowledge. In the next two years we hope to make this an open source curriculum that is freely available on the internet for any school or teacher that wishes to help their students understand and act on social issues.
Any school interested in trying this program can reach out to us via email over the next two years. Post that this curriculum will be freely available on the internet for anyone who wishes to teach their students about social issues.
