We learned about photosynthesis five times. Every year, from Class 6 to Class 11, I forgot the exact definition so I had to relearn it even though I knew the concept. In the same way every year, I had to relearn that the boys in my class would sniff me out.
Hameeda has participated in the EduLog programme with The Third Eye for its Education Edition. EduLog mentored 12 writers and image-makers from India, Nepal and Bangladesh to remember – in the present continuous – their experience of education through a feminist lens.
In this series, we bring you gender stories from Nirantar’s archives as well as from the Hindi fictional world at large. These stories have been used in facilitation by various gender groups, and are also great conversation starters for difficult, tricky and conflicting issues that emerge while working with communities.
It was 1989. I think. I had been asked to speak to a group of women who worked in NGOs across Tamil Nadu. The meeting was organised by Legal Resources for Social Action (LRSA), a group in Chinglepet not far from Chennai. I was to unpack the historical contexts of legislation that pertained to women’s lives.
Meena, Annie and Nayantara–‘the three girls from St. Agnes’–feel that they rule the world. They are dancers, they light cities on fire travelling from festival to festival, they revel in each other, and oh that glory–friendships.
In 2005, a committee of teachers, academicians, NGOs and practitioners were invited by NCERT to write new textbooks for middle schools. Those Social Science textbooks have been in circulation and in classrooms for 15 years. In 2022, some of the work the committee did in chapters around caste was deleted.
On Dr. Ambedkar’s 131st Birth Anniversary, The Third Eye asked a few professors and teachers about how Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar influenced their teaching.
I once had a student who didn’t speak much and said only what she wanted to say and even then, very little. She wasn’t shy or afraid to speak. She was just so careful with words that she refused to speak until she knew exactly what she wanted to say.
It’s been over 20 years since I started working on women and adolescent girls’ literacy. Twenty years, and I still continue to feel that letter writing is a significant pedagogical tool in the teaching-learning process of any literacy or education programme.
In Part Two we discuss the limitations of anger, the potential for empathy instead if accompanied by rigour, and the underrated merits of using joy pedagogically.
