Education: What Makes It Feminist?
We have been meeting single women in small-town and rural India in our Ekal podcast series. In Episode 4, we meet a collective of single women in Marathwada, Maharashtra. What happens when the singular turns into a collective?
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.
This is a reported piece on the student groups at IITs, who work on educating and building awareness around caste-based discriminations in Indian institutes of eminence, particularly engineering institutes. These groups work under the larger aegis of Ambedkar Study Circles, which exist outside campuses too.
“Education must be spoken about outside the school. Being a student is easier outside the school,” believes Saba, who has been running the Savitribai Phule Fatima Sheikh Library with a team of educators (ex-members of the library) in Bhopal since 2010. She was referring to the library and its potential to be an educational institution, perhaps one that is more inclusive than a school itself.
It is a warm April day in New Delhi. The session we are about to conduct is our third with girls who attend a bridge course in a resettlement colony. The course helps girls who have dropped out or never enrolled in school to come on a par with the literacy and learning levels of those in school.
