A Primary School Teacher Who Wears Many Hats
Teacher: Tahira Khan
School: Govt. Primary School, Danda Jungle, Viksanagar, Uttarakhand
By: Ankur Madan and Vartul Dhaundiyal
In envisioning a primary school teacher in a government school in a remote village in Uttarakhand, there is little chance that one would imagine the teacher to be a published author, a celebrated master trainer, and a person whose classroom videos are shared widely for teaching purposes among teachers across the state. Ms Tahira Khan is all this and more! A bundle of energy but shy in demeanour, one has to spend only a few hours in her company to understand why she has earned these unlikely epithets.
The Context
Ms Khan teaches in the Primary School, Danda Jungle, in Vikasnagar block of Uttarakhand, located about 30 km from Dehradun. As the name suggests, Danda jungle is a forest belt, with just about 30 odd families of the Jaunsari tribe residing there. Accessible by a narrow, winding road that often gets cut off from the rest of the world especially during the rains, the Primary School building is among the few structures that one can spot as far as the eye can see. All the children attending the school belong to the Jaunsari tribe and speak their own Jaunsari dialect. The Jaunsari tribe is a small community that traces its origins from the Pandavas of the Mahabharata and reside in the Jaunsar-Bawar region. The Jaunsaris in Danda Jungle are mostly employed as agricultural labour.
The school building is a modest, single-storey structure in need of serious refurbishing and repairs. The two classrooms, a toilet, a small storage area, and a little courtyard in front with a fading sign announcing the name of the school can all be captured in one wide-angle camera shot. During winters when the weather turns inclement for most parts of Uttarakhand, the school shifts for about three months to a nearby, open-air location to get some sunshine. A Headteacher (HT) who is responsible for classes III-V and Ms Khan, who is collectively taking care of classes I and II for this academic year, are the only school staff besides the bhojan mata (Midday meal cook). The HT informs us that Education functionaries rarely visit their school due to its remote location. The two classrooms nevertheless are packed with children. Each of the small-sized classrooms seats about 20-25 spirited, energetic children, causing enough chatter to interrupt the tranquillity of the verdant forest!
The Classroom
In Ms Khan’s classroom, the children greet us with a ceremonious Good Morning followed by recitation of some well-rehearsed verses and poems. The walls, otherwise chipping off and in need of plastering and repairs are covered almost to the last inch with colourful charts and picture cut-outs. The extremely print-rich environment is the first sign that tells you that this is no ordinary classroom. The two wooden cupboards in one corner of the room are stacked with files and long notebooks that, as we discover only later, is the systematically kept evidence and perhaps a treasure house of documentation preserved by Ms Khan about her work with her students over the years. Another striking feature of the class is the candour with which the children express themselves, even in the presence of visitors! As soon as the pleasantries are done with, the children go about their business in the class as if they own it! They speak freely with one another, their teacher and with us. One can tell that autonomy of expression is a valued characteristic of Ms Khan’s classroom.
The Teacher and her pedagogy
Ms Khan has been a teacher for over 20 years now. That she is passionate about her profession would be an understatement considering her complete dedication to her work. She has been posted in the same school for more than 11 years and has spent every moment thinking about ways of helping her students learn better. And this is perhaps the most exceptional and inspiring aspect of her identity as a teacher. She shares how she struggled in the early days of her teaching at the Danda Jungle school to understand why children in classes III and IV were unable to read and write even the alphabet. Well aware of the social disadvantages of the children attending the school, as well as her inability to speak the local dialect, she felt helpless and inept in making them bridge the learning gap. It was this frustration and helplessness that motivated Ms Khan to search for solutions to her problem, herself.
She started by first making close observations of the children in her class on an everyday basis. She kept notes of these daily observations and very soon discovered that the children in her class varied significantly in their abilities and levels of learning. She realized that teaching all the children in the same manner while they displayed such different abilities would be a futile and ineffective pedagogy. She started reading and searching for literature that would provide her with answers to her quandary. This was the beginning of a long journey of learning, unlearning and reimagining her own teaching and classroom practices. Having identified the problem, she searched for evidence-based solutions for teaching in multi-grade and mixed-ability classrooms. The insights that she found in literature helped her design her own pedagogic practices. She decided that she would focus all her attention on language learning, to begin with, so that her students develop basic capabilities of comprehension and expression that would help them learn other subjects as well.
Among the practices she adopted was preparing detailed checklists of the capabilities that each child displayed in areas of comprehension as well as expression. For instance, whether or not the child is able to repeat a story she has heard; is able to answer questions based on the story; is able to reconstruct the story in her own words; is able to find connections between prior knowledge of concept to the new one; and, so on and so forth. She then divided her class into groups based on ability. The groups were named creatively after flowers and the children, of course, had no clue about the basis of their group formation. She created interesting and thoughtful exercises and activities for each lesson, for each of the groups. The groups then worked on their respective activities, with peer learning and cooperation being the important components of the pedagogy.
Keeping copious notes on each child’s progress and tracking their development at every step of the way, Ms Khan collected hundreds of pages of evidence showing how her students had progressed from being beginners to attaining mastery of reading and writing skills. As a matter of fact, she soon discovered that with some effort, she could encourage children in her class to perform at levels higher than those expected of their age-grade peers. This included activities like class IV and V children writing book reviews, creating their own stories and writing essays on topics that interested them.
The fact that she succeeded in her efforts is also evident from the vast collection of children’s work that she has been preserving over the years. Beautifully illustrated stories, and poems composed by the children-individually as well as collectively, activities that entailed children generating questions from taught lessons and asking their peers to test each other’s comprehension of a lesson; reviewing, rating and writing summaries of storybooks as part of monthly activities taken outside the prescribed curriculum, organizing summer camps, or making children in charge of charting out their own daily timetable, are all part of meticulously kept records of several ‘out of the box’ activities initiated by Ms Khan to make learning a truly joyful and empowering experience for her pupils.
Taking learning beyond the limits of the classroom and encouraging her students to become young researchers, Ms Khan often organized visits to the community where she encouraged students to interact and interview villagers on various topics of interest, collate the information, analyse the responses, and then present it using different formats.
As one marvels with deep admiration at this treasure trove, one cannot help but ask how this journey has shaped the person and the teacher in Ms Khan. The question evokes mixed emotions in her. While she expresses a deep sense of satisfaction at the many successes that she has witnessed in seeing her children learn better, there also appears to be some disenchantment with the way the system treats its accomplished teachers in general. Having received little or no recognition for all her efforts, Ms Khan feels the journey has been rather lonely with little recognition and no rewards from the system that she has been a part of for so many years. However, the cloud of sadness lifts almost immediately as her eyes light up again to share her trajectory of growth as a person, from being a teacher to a trainer and scholar.
From teacher to trainer
Over the long years that she spent discovering and reforming her pedagogic practice, Ms Khan acquired knowledge and skills that she was ready to impart to other teachers – to her peers on the same journey, facing similar challenges and questions about their students’ learning. With some support and guidance from the education functionaries of the Azim Premji Foundation, Ms Khan gradually became a master trainer, a published author and a conference speaker. She has published papers on her pedagogic experiments with her students, shared her learning and insights with her colleagues from across the state of Uttarakhand at various teacher development seminars and workshops, providing evidence-based solutions to problems that teachers in similar contexts face, and has presented scientific papers based on her practice at conferences organized jointly by institutions of higher learning, like The Ambedkar University, Delhi and the Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Videos demonstrating her pedagogic practices are shared on WhatsApp groups formed to help teachers improve their teaching practice.
Tahira Khan’s training session
This transformation is no mean achievement for a primary school teacher from any geographic location anywhere in India, let alone a remote village of Uttarakhand. It is in fact, rather rare for primary school teachers in India to be engaged in research or to author scientific literature. Undoubtedly, Ms Khan’s journey from anonymity to recognition as a Master Trainer and author is an incredible one. It is also clear that it is her intelligence, perseverance, quest to learn, scientific temper and unrelenting passion and dedication to her profession that have enabled her to take this leap. Of course, one needs partners along the way who can recognize the potential and provide the encouragement and guidance to move forward, but no amount of external support can bring about the transformation in an individual unless there is intrinsic motivation to learn.
Ms Khan’s story is inspirational at many levels. One, she epitomizes the teacher who believes in the learning potential of all her pupils. A teacher who believes that it is not the children who fail in studies but the teacher who fails in finding the most suitable ways of teaching her children. It is also the story of a teacher’s enduring quest to learn and grow. A teacher who takes on the challenge of finding answers to her quandary upon herself and then pursues a systematic, scientific study of ways and means not just to resolve her quandary, but to expand her repertoire of knowledge and then, metamorphosize into the role of a mentor and researcher. One hopes that teachers everywhere in the country will draw inspiration from her story, realize their potential and aim for roles and responsibilities that they have not imagined for themselves before. One also hopes that the education system sees Ms Khan as an example of a teacher whose potential knows no bounds and puts systems and structures in place not only to give due recognition to her achievements but also supports such efforts in every teacher, every step of the way.
AUTHORS
Ankur Madan, Associate Professor, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
Vartul Dhaundiyal is a member of the District Institute, Azim Premji Foundation in Uttarakhand. Vartul has a keen interest in language teaching, philosophy and research.
