India is a land of multiple religions, cultures, ethnic groups, and languages, which come together to give our nation its status as a diverse country. We also boast of the largest education system in the world, catering to more than 260 million children. Social mobility makes the crowd in the classroom more and more diverse by each year; with such a diverse population, a crucial need for inclusive learning arises, which can successfully cater to the diverse learning needs of each student.

The need for inclusive classrooms emerges right from early childhood, which is the critical period of brain development. 

The ASER 2019 report shows 90% of children in the age group of 4-8 years as enrolled in some type of educational institution. Of these, a large proportion of 5-year-olds was unable to perform expected tasks with ease, with children from less advantaged homes affected disproportionately. At this stage of development, early learning experts recommend students should be developing cognitive, social, and emotional skills as well as the conceptual foundations needed for formal schooling. While the recent policy released by the Department of Education (the NEP 2020) does mention a need to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030”, to create a force of literate future-ready youth, we need to translate the power of words into robust initiatives that can create a truly inclusive learning environment.

WHAT DOES INCLUSIVE EDUCATION LOOK LIKE?

The basic premise of inclusive education is that all children receive equal access to education rather than be segregated based on their individual, educational, social, emotional, financial, linguistic, or physical impairments.

Inclusive classrooms aim to bring all students together regardless of their strengths or weaknesses in any area and seek to maximize each child’s potential.

TODAY, WHAT ARE THE NEEDS AND CHALLENGES FOR ACHIEVING THE GOAL OF INCLUSIVE EDUCATION?

While the government of India has made strides in adopting inclusive policies to provide an equitable education for all, we still have a way to go before we can cater to multiculturalism and diverse learning needs successfully. The current education system in India faces some challenges for achieving inclusive education:

• A lack of trained educators.
• Large class sizes with multi-age classrooms.
• Linguistic diversity posing a challenge for educators.
• Marginalisation based on socio-economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.

HOW QUALITY EDUCATION CAN BE EFFECTIVELY AND EFFICIENTLY DELIVERED FOR DIVERSE GROUPS OF CHILDREN? 

The need of the hour is to have equal access to high-quality education right from the foundational ages, across geographical and socio-economic boundaries. For this vision to materialise, the Indian education system needs to adopt certain practices:

Educator Training, Empowerment, & Education: An educational system is only as good as its educators. If learning has to be streamlined, yet personalised and adapted to individual learning needs, educators, anganwadi workers, and balwadi workers across India need to be empowered to recognise and instruct as per the diverse learning needs. The NEP 2020 recognises the importance of training educators, by adding this clause to its document: “The awareness and knowledge of how to teach children with specific disabilities including learning disabilities will be an integral part of all teacher education programmes, along with gender sensitization and sensitization towards all underrepresented groups in order to reverse their underrepresentation.”

Adoption Of Adaptive Software: From the ground up, educational institutions need to equip themselves with adaptive software and technology, to help teachers create a holistic blended classroom that allows them to personalise learning as per each student’s learning level.

Changing The Mindset: While educators work on imparting education from the early stages itself, a collaborative effort needs to be undertaken to involve parents in the teaching-learning process. All stakeholders in the learning process-the parents, the educators, the policymakers-need to work in tandem to see successful learning outcomes in inclusive classrooms.

Need For Flexible, Adaptive Curriculum And Learning Tools: Every child learns differently, and a one-size-fits-all approach is detrimental to the acquisition of learning. Something that the NEP 2020 mentions too, an adaptive blended curriculum that works with each learner’s learning level, can serve to assimilate students of all kinds and ages into inclusive classrooms.

“Education is the single greatest tool for achieving social justice and equality. Inclusive and equitable education – while indeed an essential goal in its own right – is also critical to achieving an inclusive and equitable society in which every citizen has the opportunity to dream, thrive, and contribute to the nation. The education system must aim to benefit India’s children so that no child loses any opportunity to learn and excel because of circumstances of birth or background. This Policy reaffirms that bridging the social category gaps in access, participation, and learning outcomes in school education will continue to be one of the major goals of all education sector development programmes.” – NEP 2020

Policies provide a good model to promote inclusive education. Presently, we need to transfer learnings from the policy to the education sphere. In a diverse nation like ours, a multicultural perspective in the education sector starting from the foundational stages is what will help us create a truly unified country that boasts equality across the Indian educational landscape.

WHAT IS EXPERIENTIAL-BASED LEARNING & TEACHING ?

The term ‘experiential learning’ is used to talk about learning that is gained by experience or ‘learning by doing’. 

Fun Fact: The experiential learning concept has been around for a very long time, and was first explored in the education and learning context by educationists like Jean Piaget, among others. It was made most famous by American educational theorist Professor D.A. Kolb, who showed that mastering expertise is a continuous process of experience, reflection, conceptualisation, and experimentation. 

In India, experiential learning can be likened to the Gurukul education prevalent since ancient times across India. The students learnt by performing various tasks under the guidance of the Guru (teacher). Schools across India have already been practising some form of activity and experience-based learning, but the Department of Education has taken this one step further by necessitating experiential learning including learning that has elements of enquiry, gamified, activity-based, story-based, in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), along with parallel teacher training programs to help educators understand the right way to impart such instruction.

Read more about the crucial impact of teacher training on the NEP 2020 here.

Some examples of experiential learning in the classroom:

• The Rainforest Learning Centre in the USA includes experiential education in almost all aspects of their curriculum. Their daycare and preschool-age learners are introduced to environmental clean-ups and animal adoptions, where they not only clean garbage and play with pets, but understand the results of their actions on the environment and community.
• Square Panda conducted pilot studies with our early learning system across schools in India. We provided young students with access to our early literacy platform, where they were taught to start reading the English language using stories and activities. In a period of a few weeks, with no extra intervention at all, we saw a marked improvement in the students’ learning outcomes, in skills like word reading and sentence reading.
• Mahindra International School (India), takes its primary school children on field trips as a part of their academic learning programme. Incorporated during school hours, these trips introduce young children to physical learning environments like zoos and farms.

WHEN DOES EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING HAPPEN ?

True experiential learning takes place when learners get immersed cognitively, emotionally, behaviourally, while reflecting and processing each experience, which then leads to a change in perspective, comprehension, thought, and behaviour. The next step is the application of the newly acquired learning to real-time events, turning these students into individualised learners who are well on the path to future success.

WHY EXPERIENTIAL METHODOLOGIES ARE THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION IN INDIA

The pedagogical approach that is experiential learning has the potential to revolutionise early learning, changing the Indian educational landscape as we know it, for the better.

For Children:

• Future-Ready Skills: An experiential base of learning provides children with real-life experience to match textbook teaching, which can be applied to problems for more practical use of knowledge.
• Personalisation: Traditional learning in India works on a one-size-fits-all approach at present, which affects learning outcomes. With a more experience-based approach, the learning modules can be specifically catered to each child’s individual requirements, enabling better skilling.
• Increased Engagement: Fun stories, activities, games, music, and other aspects of experiential learning all serve to keep young children engaged and exhibiting high levels of motivation as they immerse themselves in the experience.

For Educators:

• Improved Teaching Skills And Competencies: Educators are a very crucial part of ECCE, being responsible for young learners’ development and growth in this foundational period. Personalised, experience-based instructions will help educators professionally develop at a much faster rate while strengthening their subject matter knowledge.
• Knowledge Of Experiential And Activity-Based Teaching Learning Techniques: When educators are trained using experiential methods, their capacity for imparting knowledge using those same techniques increases exponentially, improving the learning outcomes, creating a more holistic development of the students.
• Mindset Changes: Explaining to educators about various styles of teaching is vastly different from allowing them to experience it. Hands-on experiential learning activities have a drastic effect on the mindset of educators, allowing them to relate to the theory, and put it into practice in the classroom.

WHY BUILDING ECCE PROGRAMS USING EXPERIENTIAL TEACHING-LEARNING METHODOLOGIES IS A BETTER IDEA

To ensure a higher quality of foundational learning in ECCE programs across India, there is a need to incorporate the NEP 2020’s vision of a comprehensive experiential teaching-learning methodology. Here’s why we think integrating experience-based instruction into the early classroom has a higher learning outcome:

• Blended Classrooms Can Be The New Norm: Instead of rote learning and traditional classrooms, a new blended form of teaching takes its place, where digital learning is combined with physical instruction. Experiential learning will be interwoven with online learning, creating a virtual safe space for real-life simulations, increasing young children’s engagement, and overall learning outcomes. 
• Gamified Learning: An educational approach to get students inspired and learning via game-based elements, gamification increases the enjoyment of learning, and thereby, retention. When backed by a research-based curriculum, gamified learning develops critical and strategic thinking, supporting students across different learning levels.
• Educator Empowerment: It’s not just students who benefit from a holistic program that teaches via experience. Educators can be trained and empowered to deliver high-quality content, develop strong subject knowledge, and polish their professional skills, using experiential teaching methodologies.
• Playing-&-Learning Activities: “The importance of play-based activities, especially for young learners, cannot be highlighted enough. This approach to learning sees children develop essential life skills like critical thinking, gross and fine motor skills, and much more”, remarks the curriculum head for Square Panda India, Ms. Neha Shah, when asked about the impact this particular experiential learning method has on early childhood education. Even the NEP 2020 itself documents its importance, by stating, “The learning in the Preparatory Class (a class each young learner will attend before the age of 5) shall be based primarily on play-based learning with a focus on developing cognitive, affective, and psychomotor abilities and early literacy and numeracy.” 

This application of theory and academic content to real-world experiences within the classroom and other surroundings allows young children to learn, explore, and respond to situations appropriately. ECCE benefits from such experiential programs by promoting increased aptitude and cognitive development in the early years. India is shedding some much-needed light onto this teaching-learning methodology, increasing adaptation of 21st-century skills and techniques for a better, more literate India. 

Square Panda’s foundational learning program and educator empowerment programs have a holistic approach to teaching and learning, via experiential and activity-based methodology. These research-based techniques use multisensory elements, storytelling, music, play-based activities and other experiential elements to achieve better learning outcomes and optimal results.

What is your take on experiential learning in the Indian classroom? How do you think it benefits ECCE? Comment below.

The continued growth in information processing, and the advent of technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in education, is a game-changer for education, and consequently, the educators. The people we entrust with our children’s education have a very important role to play in their futures and the future of the country as a whole; to accomplish this crucial task, they need to be empowered with thorough guidance and training, with complete assistance in developing 21st century-appropriate skills. To directly quote research studies conducted over the years, “Students succeed when intensive, comprehensive, and high-quality prevention and early intervention instruction is provided by well-trained and well-supported teachers”*.

At present, the traditional method of learning in India involves a blackboard and reading from the textbook, a method of rote learning that is outdated for the changing educational landscape. To enable the well-rounded development of children, educators (especially ECCE educators), not only have to function as high-quality content creators but also have to understand the neuroscience behind early learning and the ecosystem that comes into play when a young child begins to learn.

Unfortunately, the teaching profession in India is faced with a multitude of challenges:

• A basic level of proficiency: Currently, educators across India only have basic skills needed to impart education and train young minds to be future-ready. The onus at present is on developing high-quality educators who help mould a stronger generation of future citizens.
• One-teacher-fits-all: Students across different grade levels study together in one classroom or Anganwadi, with only one teacher explaining all the subjects. Here, subject matter expertise is a problem, along with the appropriateness of curriculum as per the individual learning needs for every child.
• Administrative duties: An already burgeoning workload is further burdened by a host of administrative tasks. For example, teachers are required to handle extracurricular activities, data collation to help with the creation of physical reports, and more, along with teaching their young charges.

• Availability: A less than optimal pupil-teacher ratio, existing training curriculum that requires an overhaul as per the changing needs, and more challenges, see many opting out of choosing teaching as a profession. NEP 2020 has allowed for multiple provisions and considerations in its approach to teacher education, but finding and retaining a high calibre of educators remains a challenge.
• Other problems: Those in the education profession are also bogged down by limited resources (hardware and funding), a vast geographical area with many remote places, a lack of support, and, due to COVID, a drastic and sudden shift of the traditional classroom towards a more blended approach, which sees educators struggle to embrace technology like never before.

The Department of Education, in its latest National Education policy, states, “In all stages, experiential learning will be adopted, including hands-on learning, arts-integrated and sports-integrated education, story-telling-based pedagogy, among others, as standard pedagogy within each subject, and with explorations of relations among different subjects. To close the gap in achievement of learning outcomes, classroom teaching learning methodologies transactions will shift, towards competency-based learning and education”. 

This policy reiterates adopting new-age skills into the existing teaching framework, adding important experiential methods including gamification, storytelling, art, music, and more. The new education sector as envisioned by the policy aims for holistic, all-round development of young learners by qualified and trained educators.

To see a substantial positive shift in the Indian education sector, particularly in ECCE, educators existing and new will have to be trained in the pedagogy of today’s changing world while also gaining an in-depth understanding of a child’s neurological development as learning is imparted. And, as the coronavirus pandemic has taught us, to adapt to the changing educational ecosystem, educators across India must develop a strong understanding of digital literacy. 

The Impact Of empowering the Educators On Indian Education:

• Impact On ECCE: Robust educator training and empowerment programs have a strong impact on early childhood education. A deep understanding of subject knowledge coupled with an awareness of the neuroscience behind early learning results in powerful skill development in the young learners,  building a strong foundation for lifelong learning, setting them on a path for success. For example, an English language teacher who knows their subject can easily explain topics ranging from phonological awareness to idioms and puns, without any loss of understanding on the part of their students.

• Developing New-Age Methodologies Of Teaching: The National Educational Policy 2020 describes a whole new way of teaching, including a host of 21st century skills like ‘experiential learning via gamification and apps’, ‘holistic learning’, and more. These new techniques will entice learners more, enabling an improved attitude towards education, which results in an improved and enhanced academic performance.
• Subject Matter Knowledge Improves: A stronger grasp of the subject in question will see educators being able to explain concepts and ideas better, increasing the comprehension by students.

• Improved Performance Of Students: Studies have correlated teacher training to stronger student test scores, adding that the main reason for the improved performance was because the teacher had a better grip on the subject matter.
• Contribution To Economic Prosperity: High calibre educators who are trained, professionally developed, and dedicated, form the backbone of society, transferring knowledge and culture to batch after batch of learners. Forming an essential part of the radical changes we wish to see in our nation, these educators contribute a lot to the economic prosperity of a country.

“The quality of teacher education, recruitment, deployment, service conditions, and empowerment of teachers is not where it should be, and consequently the quality and motivation of teachers does not reach the desired standards. The high respect for teachers and the high status of the teaching profession must be restored so as to inspire the best to enter the teaching profession. The motivation and empowerment of teachers is required to ensure the best possible future for our children and our nation.” -NEP, 2020

A well-trained educator can not only mould a child’s entire future from the early years itself, but they also enhance their talents, helping them thrive in tomorrow’s world of work.

Square Panda is working towards the empowerment of educators via robust and innovative empowerment programs. 

*Reference: (c.f. Al Otailba, Connor, Foorman, Schatschneider, Greulich, Sidler, 2009; Al Otaiba & Torgesen, 2007; Rashotte, MacPhee, Torgeson, 2001; Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2006, Torgesen, 2007; Vaughn & Wanzek, 2014; Vellutino & Fletcher, 2007.).