Learning how to count or sorting out the alphabet can sometimes be taken for granted. Yet in some parts of the world children will never step foot into a classroom.
With the help of a unique teaching program, India’s poorest kids are getting an education and now the University of Manitoba is looking to help.
“They set up schools in some very impoverished communities, under roadways, overpass, if it provides some form of shelter they will set up a school there,” said Dr. Jerome Cranston, the Acting Associate Dean of Education Undergraduate Programs at the University of Manitoba.
Earlier this year Cranston travelled to Calcutta with his research assistant to learn more about the Barefoot Teacher Training Programme.
The name stems from the belief you only need your feet to walk.
The program doesn’t focus theory. Instead it gives people in some of the poorest neighbourhoods practical tools to teach children who would otherwise never get an education.
One place they teach in are brickfields, where children endure painstaking work to help their families survive.
“The seven months they will spend in a brickfield school, which is only a couple of hours a day, is their only experience of schooling,” said Cranston. “They will not attend another school in their life.”
With financial help from the University of Manitoba, Cranston put together a three part documentary on the innovative teaching methods used, including helping integrate predominantly spoken languages into villages..
It’s an idea that some people say could work on First Nations here and in Canada’s most remote communities.
“Taking a person from an indigenous community and training them to be a teacher within their own community is not something we focus on here,” said Elise Ahrens-Townsend, Cranston’s research assistant who also travelled to India.
Cranston is working to set up a course through the U of M with the program in India to give students a different perspective on teaching methods.
“Doing work but also going over there with a sense of humility and learning from them,” said Cranston.
You can view the documentary here:
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