I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this past week in a 5th grade classroom in Narayan Peth, Pune, India. Artists Striving to End Poverty (ASTEP) works with Teach for India (TFI) to partner artists with teaching fellows to incorporate arts education into academic education. Students learn in many different ways, whether visually, orally, kinesthetically, etc, so it only follows that teachers should teach in a variety of ways to reach as many students as possible.
Education in India is in a state of crisis. 4% of Indian children never go to school, 42% drop out before they finish primary education and 90% drop out before they finish 10th grade. TFI hopes to combat these dire statistics starting classroom by classroom, then involving the school’s local community, and ultimately nationally through their alumni network that moves on to jobs in media, government and business.
I spent my first three days getting to know the classroom norms, observing the students’ behavior, and assessing education and artistic skill levels. On a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 being the highest level of achievement, some of my students are at a 0.2 english reading level and others are at a 3.5. This vast span of skill level makes it hard for my fellow to bring the below grade level students up to grade level while still challenging the top students.
On Wednesday I had a 1.5 hour session with my class to introduce them to my artistic discipline, dance, within an educational context. TFI stresses the teaching of values, such as kindness, compassion, courage, and respect in the classroom, and since Sneha, my TFI fellow, has divided her classroom into the Superman team, Batman team, Captain America team and the Hulk team, I decided to ground my lesson within the framework of values and make it relatable to the students through their superhero teams.
Objective: SWBAT (Students/superheroes will be able to) create their own movement to communicate an intention or motivation
Vocabulary Words:
-Intention
-Synonym: Motivation
-Values
-Abstract
-Antonym: Literal
-Imagination
Opener: energetic warm-up to get students’ muscles warm and to provide them with movement ideas
Hook: Discussion of the Dandiya Raas dance we did the day before for a school festival (a traditional Indian dance done with sticks) and the reason and meanings behind the dance
Activity: Gather in a circle and inform the students they will be doing a series of call and responses
I. Name + Movement - For the first part tell the students to think of their name and what it means to them and to then create a movement to match. Start with your own example: say your name and do your movement and have the students all respond back with your name and movement. Then go around the circle to each student. There will invariably be hesitations due to fear and vulnerability, so remind the students “first thought, best thought.” It is often helpful to go around the circle a second time once the students have gotten over the anxiety of the first round.
II. Superhero + Movement - For the second part tell the students to think of their favorite superhero and a movement to match. It is helpful to introduce the ideas of abstract versus literal representations and encourage creativity. Then once again do a call and response around the circle.
III. Value + Movement - For the third part have the students think of the value they most identify with and a movement to match. At this stage students tend to imitate the movements chosen by students before them, so it’s helpful to discuss abstract representations again and that there are limitless possibilities for movement choice.
Follow up: Discussion of having intention and motivation behind movement choice and how intention and motivation play a role in other aspects of the students’ lives.
At the end of our session, Sneha asked the students to write a reflection to the question, “What is your intention behind coming to school every day?” Since retention and roll-over are such problems in India’s education system, it is important to stress the benefits of returning to school day after day, year after year.
During our debriefing of the lesson, Sneha shared some encouraging observations. For example Sneha has trouble getting one of the boys, we will call him A, to actively participate in academic lessons and can be a bit of a bully as he is quite a bit bigger than the other students. During my session, though, he was volunteering to start off the different movement call and responses and was going around the circle helping the other students to understand the exercise.
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