| About
Us
What we do
The vision of the Rishi
Valley Education Centre was to establish rural education
centers as learning centers for the whole rural community:
children, teachers and the parents alike.
The aims of the rural education program are:
- To provide free basic education, nutrition and health
care for children from local villages
- To draw working children into the school system
- To train teacher trainers in multi-grade classroom
methodology
- To publish instructional material for village schools
- To create a green space around the school campus for the
conservation of bio-diversity in general and medicinal
plants in particular
- To establish adult literacy classes in the school
premises
- raise awareness of health, nutrition and sanitation
- To actively involve the community in the day-to-day
management of the school
Over the past twenty years, RIVER has been reaching out to
a wider base of disadvantaged children. They run a
Teacher-training unit, and a cell for creating instructional
materials. There is a model school on campus with a hundred
students – thirty in the elementary section, and seventy
students in classes six and seven. Of these forty board on
campus. The elementary school is vertically grouped. A rich
program in crafts, music, athletics and puppetry embellish the
academic program. Many graduates of these schools continue
their education through high school and beyond; some have
returned to become teachers in our village schools.
The experience of the first school has been scaled up to
achieve greater and long lasting impact in several ways:
- By establishing a network of "Satellite Schools" in
villages scattered throughout the surrounding countryside:
twelve such schools are established and currently managed by
RIVER
- By evolving a comprehensive education program based on
its experience within those schools: the vertical learning
methods have been made modular and developed using local and
innovative teaching techniques and aids
- By helping set up multi-grade schools in India’s
linguistically diverse states, training resource persons to
run these schools, on invitation by a range of Indian and
international donor agencies and development support
organizations; and
- By interacting with existing government schools,
training their teachers and providing the material as well
as adapting it to different contexts to improve quality of
education imparted through government schools, especially in
tribal areas.
RIVER’s training program began as a course for new teachers
in our Satellite Schools. Local youth with minimal education
learned how to handle children of mixed ages and varied
abilities in a vertically grouped, one room school. During
this course each teacher made a collection of study cards and
educational games to equip the school where he or she would
teach – materials that gradually evolved into our Education
Kits.
With the aid of a capital grant from the Government of
India we have built dormitories and classrooms to accommodate
external trainees on our campus. This has enabled our
teacher-training program to provide courses for teachers from
hundreds of independent NGO and government-run schools in the
neighboring states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and the
northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Demand for this service is
now growing rapidly.
Our training program is currently engaged in three areas.
We are helping train teachers, create multi-grade materials
& methodologies and set up schools in the Tsunami-hit area
of the Andaman Islands. In a three-way partnership with
UNICEF, Government of India’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan
(Educational for All Campaign) and ten State Governments to
create what UNICEF calls a Quality Package Project (QIP). The
program, which will eventually result in the setting up of
1000 schools in one district of each state, is basically aimed
at improving educational standards across ten states of India
with the help of the multi-grade, multi-level learning
methodology. RIVER is working in southern Ethiopia on a Rural
Education Project modeled after the RIVER design. The aim is
to educate children in Afaar Oromoo, the local language, and
bring them to a level of permanent literacy. The joint
collaboration is in partnership with Western Wollega Bethel
Synod of Ethiopia.
Our Satellite Schools, Training Schemes and Educational
materials have evolved jointly as parts of a systematically
integrated program. The Satellite Schools are resource centers
for their villages, where they provide adult and elementary
school education as well as nutrition programs and centers for
reforestation. At the same time, the Satellite schools provide
us with an extended laboratory for testing curricular
materials and with a network of opportunities for trainee
teachers to serve a hands-on apprenticeship in the use of our
RIVER methodology and to gain direct experience in managing a
multi-grade classroom. By integrating these schools into our
training program, we can provide effective training for more
than fifty teachers at a time. Finally, the Satellite schools
have served remarkably well as model schools to demonstrate
the effectiveness of ways in which education and conservation
can work together.
The involvement of the community forms a vital aspect of
our program. We have formed Mothers' Committees in each of the
Satellite Schools. The Committee looks into the functioning of
the schools, holds the teacher to his or her responsibilities,
hosts village fairs, and identifies children at risk.
In addition these schools give us access to the rural
community, and as we build trust we plan to use them as
centers for additional programs in health, sanitation and
bio-diversity conservation. In this way the schools have
provided an entry point to build a relationship of mutual
trust with the local community, which then forms the base for
jointly addressing issues of natural resource management,
sustainable agriculture and other initiatives for rural
development
We have created a comprehensive Education Package that is
economical, enjoyable and academically sound. Several years of
experience with this program in actual classroom situations
has demonstrated its potential for marked improvements in each
of these problem areas.
Our Education Package is now available in Telugu, tribal
variant of Telugu and Hindi. We have also worked with groups
from Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to create multi-grade
kits in three south Indian languages, Malayalam, Tamil and
Kannada.
Several districts in other states are actively exploring
with us its potentiality for their schools. UNICEF, Catholic
Relief Services, State Education agencies and programs under
the Government of India, have sponsored these projects.
To sum up our achievements, the main innovative activities
have been: decentralized schooling suitable for the needs of
villages, curriculum development, creation of
teaching/learning materials for such schools, teacher
training, viability of large-scale replication of this method
of elementary education, and finally community involvement in
the functioning of the schools.
Almost all of these innovations can be said to be
internalized and/or brought into the mainstream. The concept
feasibility and curriculum development phases were finished
several years ago. Various local versions of the teaching
materials for classes 1 and 2 have been published, to enable
large-scale distribution. This model of schooling has been
replicated with fairly good results, both by Government
agencies and by voluntary organizations in different parts of
the country.
- Be a school free of fear, full of color and joy inside,
and green and beautiful outside
- Have a Learning Ladder, made up of small learning steps,
that enables self-paced individual learning
- Promote cooperative learning through peer support
- Stress on activity based experiential learning, through
craft, games, song and drama, hence no burden of carrying
heavy loads of books by children
- Practice multi-grade multi level teaching learning,
which enables the teacher to give individual attention to a
child when needed most
- Integrate local culture and values of conservation into
the curriculum
- Encourage the teachers to design creative teaching-
learning material, and share it with other teachers
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