The daily lives of the residents of Vikarabad district of Telangana are full of surprises. The land that was drought-prone, over-farmed and nearly barren due to fertiliser and pesticide overuse is now slowly recovering through organic farming. Lively discussions about low-cost, replicable ways to save the environment are overheard at child forums formed at schools, communities and environment protection committees (EPCs) in the communities.

Households tend to kitchen gardens which they passionately advocate for environmental and livelihoods support while others are learning to make seed balls that can fill barren lands with lush greenery again. This is the effect of ours “Child Friendly Schools in Environmentally Sensitive Communities” project. Run in 40 schools and neighbourhoods with support from Oracle India, the project is a part of our effort to prepare communities for climate change. The goal is to create model schools and enable children to become environmentally sensitive while realising their rights to quality education and holistic development.

The first-of-its-kind project in the state, it is in alignment with the government’s ‘Haritha Haram’ programme to raise awareness and greenery in the villages. It interfaces with panchayat, mandal and district level government agencies to strengthen community structures so that they can lead the initiative themselves. The project also raises awareness through behaviour change communication among children, parents, teachers, community members so that they can negotiate with their panchayat and government for secure futures.

Highlights

• 1,215 children (607 girls and 608 boys) from 80 child forums in 40 schools and communities trained
• 40 EPCs with 723 members (460 men and 169 women, 48 boys and 46 girls) strengthened through support and training
• 550 families across 40 communities supported for the development of kitchen gardens

Dettol Hygiene Education Project implemented in 11 districts of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Uttarakhand with an aim to inculcate hygiene culture in children and make them change agents. The project inculcates concepts around the importance of hygiene from a very young age in children and is structured to enable enthusiastic participation and engagement, supported by teachers and stakeholders.

The project focuses on the development of children as change agents by helping them develop safe hygiene practices for a healthy and sustainable future.

It is designed to reach the target audience through various training practices and product distributions which bring together the community with healthy hygiene habits along with the identification of new partnerships to improve reach through offline and online channels.

The project adopts a uniquely comprehensive approach to bring best practices of hygiene and sanitation among children by sensitising them on personal hygiene, hygiene at home, school, neighbourhood and during illness. The project is being implemented with the support of Reckitt.

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

• 11,583 Teachers trained on hygiene curriculum during onsite at school.
• 2,40,529 Students identified as change agents
• 1,346 Schools reached through the project activities
• 1,235 Child cabinet formed to maintain hygiene and sanitation
• 345 Schools qualified for Swachh Vidhyalaya Puraskar
• 65 Schools developed as model schools with hygiene corners that display messages on hygiene practices
• 230 Teachers honoured for supporting school hygiene education program

In 2015, the Government of India launched Smart Cities Mission, an initiative to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life by enabling local development and harnessing technology. The mission also includes developing school infrastructure and improving classroom activities. with USAID and Coca Cola India, launched the ‘Urban WASH – Swachh Bharat Swachh Vidyalaya’ (SBSV) project to support the Government of India’s Smart City Mission.

The three-year project which concluded in July 2019, has created a replicable model for developing need-based child-friendly WASH infrastructure in schools. It also advocated the effective use of this infrastructure and its eventual ownership by School Management Committees (SMCs). SBSV created age, gender and ability appropriate infrastructure in 20 schools each in three cities – Vishakhapatnam, Pune and Dehradun. All 3 of these will now scale the project across all government schools in their respective municipalities with support from our implementation partners.

The project aimed at helping duty bearers, teachers, SMCs, community members and children in realising their right to equitable and sustainable access to improved sanitation facilities and safe drinking water. It also worked to increase awareness on the impact of open defecation and hygiene on health. It prioritised developmental aspects to ensure better enrolment, retention and development of the children and building a conducive learning atmosphere to promote continued education.

We developed knowledge products and presented them to the government to ensure sustained maintenance of WASH infrastructure and continued hygienic practices. School WASH forums were established under the aegis of government officials, CSOs, multilateral organisations and the private sector for sustained impact and scalability. Of special note is the development of the children as agents of change to lead the interventions themselves.

Highlights

• 40 million rupees mobilised by Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) for SBSV model due to our efforts
• 24,870 children (58.2% girls) provided access to potable water and safe sanitation
• 14% increase (13% for girls) in school enrolment

SAKHSAM GIVES YOUNG PEOPLE THE INDEPENDENCE TO EXPLORE THEIR POTENTIAL.

Our Saksham Training Centre at Delhi, Lucknow, Dehradun, Jaipur, Mumbai and Bengaluru are full of young men and women taking avid notes as a trainer talks to them about workplace communication. In another section, youngsters launch into a role play that sensitises them on gender-relations in their personal spaces, within their communities and at the workplace. In yet another corner, girls engage in a lively debate about which strategies are best to convince their families to let them work, an opportunity often denied by the girls’ protective environment.

Started in 2010, Saksham focuses on ‘Neither in Education, Employment or Training (NEET)’ youth, especially girls, from urban and rural disadvantaged areas. The initiative arms them with free, market-oriented vocational skills, as well as job and entrepreneurial training. With support from corporates, our mission is to provide access to gainful employment to young girls in the age group of 18-29 years while also grooming today’s youth as representatives of a gender-just society. The programme also goes several steps further and includes basic IT skills, presentation, etiquette and basic business conversational skills in the training. Saksham has a strong focus on training that challenges gender stereotypes and widespread discrimination. Saksham engages parents, communities and employers on the subjects of gender equality, equal opportunities and economic empowerment of girls and women. The programme not only encourages young girls and women to take up skill training but also provides linkages to employment for mainstreaming their participation in socio-economic development.

Saksham was carefully designed after gathering market intelligence, researching available jobs and identifying the skill gap. Initial market studies identified potential trades for vocational training. Local employers in these sectors were then interviewed to gather skill requirements and gaps, which formed the basis of the training courses. Creating awareness among young people about job opportunities in the market, providing career counselling and imparting skills to negotiate with families, communities and employers were also designed into the course.

We take the training right into the communities to address the challenges raised by limited mobility for girls. Working in close association with their training and implementation partners, We leverages the trust they have built over the years with communities to lower resistance to the idea of girls seeking employment and bring about social behavioral change from within the communities.

Saksham provides experiential learning before placing its young graduates into job openings and mentors them through the first six months to ensure that there are no dropouts. The programme also focuses on gender mainstreaming by taking care of particulars like evaluating the safety of the location and timings of not just their own training centres, but also of the places of employment of the young girls.

The success of Saksham lies in creating an informed and empowered youth force that seeks to create an equitable, economically secure and sustainable future for themselves and their families. Girls who graduate from Saksham leave with skills for not just gainful employment, but with an ability to make decisions and negotiate their rights with peers, parents and employers. The hard work of the Saksham team is validated by the strong and constant demand for Saksham-trained young women from local employers.

Highlights

• 6000+ youths were provided job-oriented vocational and entrepreneurship training.
• 60% of trained young people were girls.
• 70% of the trained youth were placed in jobs including self-employment, of which 60% were girls.
• Over 80% of the trained young people joined higher/next-level education post-training.
• 3000+ young people were supported with career counselling.

Career planning has always been a problem for many children and young people, especially for girls and young women from low socio-economic backgrounds. Choosing the right career path becomes even more challenging for students of deprived communities as many of them are the first generation learners in their family. It is not feasible for them to access expensive counselling and guidance services that can help them decide their careers.

Acknowledging this needs of the young aspirants, We launched a project called “Paramarsh” which is a unique intervention for career guidance and counselling services in Delhi, Odisha and Telengana. It enables children and youth, particularly girls and young women in the age group of 13 to 24 years from vulnerable communities, to take informed career choices in higher education and skill building courses.

Paramarsh is designed on a well-integrated gender transformative approach towards higher education and skill building courses providing gender-sensitive career guidance and counselling services.

KEY PROGRAMME OBJECTIVES

• To provide career guidance services to children/young people, especially adolescent girls and young women
• To provide them information about access to relevant educational and vocational courses based on their Aptitude Test
• To identify expert institutions from the Government and private agencies for connecting potential children and young people with opportunities

There are an estimated 50,000 street children in Delhi and around 7,500 children involved in begging. Dreams on Streets aims to give freedom to children from begging at street lights.

We initiated the project for ending child begging at the traffic signals of New Delhi in November 2015. The overarching goal is to ensure freedom to children from begging and that they are gradually weaned away from traffic signals and mainstreamed in government schools where they can continue with their education. At another level, the project seeks to link the family/caregivers of these children with sustainable livelihoods so that household economic security is achieved.

Children aged between 3-18 years are given non-formal education in English, Hindi and Math and are also provided with art therapy. Apart from this, the children are given nutritious meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner), basic clothing facilities, psychological care and medical aid and life skill education. In some cases, children are helped in re-interaction and restoration with their families. Presently, the Dreams on Street project is designed as a pilot initiative and is supporting approx. 150 children who were forced into begging by their caregivers at two major locations – Munirka and Nizamuddin.

Though learning to write is a vital skill in today’s knowledge economy, writing is poorly taught in K-12 schools. And learning to write collaboratively with others is seldom taught at all. With funding from the Google Faculty Research Award, we investigated the ways that Google Apps for Education, and particularly Google Docs, is used in writing instruction in a successful public school district that provides one-to-one computer access with netbooks and open source software. Using interviews, observations, a survey, server data, and test score outcomes, this study investigated how Google Docs is integrated into instruction for diverse students, what the particular uses are for collaborative writing and receiving and responding to peer or teacher feedback, what the relationship is between use and student test score outcomes in writing, and how all of this can contribute to the design of an online writing environment that incorporates Google Docs and that matches the needs of K-12 schools.

A follow-up study sought to understand L2 students’ collaborative writing experiences in both K-12 and higher education settings. Specifically, we examined the processes and outcomes of these experiences, as well as the perceived benefits and challenges of engaging in collaborative group work. Multiple sources of data including interview, observation, survey, and student writing in Google Docs were collected to address these topics, starting from Fall 2015. This study also aimed to utilize new text mining tools (SCAPES) and Docuviz specifically designed to analyze writers’ collaboration patterns in Google Docs. These advanced methods can help elucidate document development and language-learning processes by analyzing the collaborative writing patterns (e.g., the duration and frequency of feedback and revision) across large numbers of exemplars.

This project is situated within an emerging body of special education research on inclusive uses of digital technologies. Research to date indicates that developmentally and linguistically diverse emerging readers and writers benefit from instructional supports that scaffold engagement in reading and writing.  Within this context, there is an emerging body of research specifically targeting the uses of digital technologies to scaffold learners’ engagement with, and development of, reading and writing. However, this research has not been conducted with developmentally and linguistically diverse learners in full inclusion environments. 

​We partnered with Tomorrow’s Leadership Collaborative (TLC) Charter School, a full inclusion school integrating developmentally and linguistically diverse students, with and without disability, to examine how digital technologies are used to engage learners as readers and writers. We used an embedded case study design utilizing inductive methodologies to analyze student, teacher, and parent interview, focus group, and field data. Outcomes of this project include an improved understanding of how practitioners and researchers can integrate digital technologies into developmentally and linguistically diverse learners’ reading and writing practices to support:

• Inclusion and engagement in reading and writing activities
• Identity and growth as readers and writers
• Reading and writing skills development
• Positive attitudes towards reading and writing

With 69% of higher education institutions stating that online learning is a critical part of their long-term strategy and 32% of higher education students taking at least one course online, new forms of virtual learning are raising the specter of radically transformed undergraduate education. This is particularly true for lower-division courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), which disproportionately rely on large lectures. The possibilities of providing lecture material online, as is done through the popular Khan Academy and new massive online open courses (MOOCs), suggest to many that virtual learning may have the potential to serve as a comparable or even advantageous alternative to traditional in-person lectures. Debates on this issue highlight both the high hopes and potential pitfalls. To date, few rigorous studies have convincingly demonstrated the effects of virtual learning. There have been a number of studies, including some meta-analyses, that have found benefits linked with virtual learning; however, only a handful have used rigorous experimental or quasi-experimental methods to identify causal effects.

In sum, despite their increasingly important role and fast growth in the national education landscape, the field has limited information about the impacts of different course delivery formats on student learning outcomes and on potential strategies to improve their effectiveness. To fill this research gap, the project systematically explored the effectiveness of virtual learning in the particular setting of STEM courses in large research universities. This setting offers the means to test moderation hypotheses regarding student populations, course content, and instructional practices within a context that plays a special role in the STEM pipeline to graduate study and advanced careers. In keeping with the theory of affordances in which we set our work, by conducting both experiments and observations across a broad swath of courses, we aimed to flesh out the heterogeneous effects of virtual learning environments and identify what kinds of environments and instructional techniques are most potent for aiding diverse learners.

This project had three major goals:

• to explore how different types of virtual learning environments affect teaching and learning processes, outcomes, and attitudes toward STEM, both in general and for particular groups of underrepresented learners;
• to examine how variation in instructional practices is associated with student learning gains for the purposes of distilling potential strategies to design high-quality virtual learning environments and improve student learning;
• to understand the student experience of learning within virtual learning environments through investigation of learning behaviors and the ways in which these behaviors relate to student outcomes.

English language acquisition around the world is increasingly being seen as a skill for personal as well as national development. English language skills are becoming increasingly more closely aligned with employability. A recent report found a direct correlation between household income and previous study of the English language. Consequently, governments are implementing English language policies grounded partly in an economic rationale, propelled by a focus on building the proficiency of the population in part to boost a country’s competitiveness in a globally integrated marketplace. For these reasons, many Latin American countries are united in their efforts to improve the English language levels of their overall populations. These efforts, however, haven’t been free of challenges. Some of the most pressing issues include the high cost of education, a shortage of hundreds of thousands of qualified English language teachers, and ineffective English language teaching methods. Interestingly, although government spending on education in countries has been significant and on a sharp upward trend since the 1980s, the results of English language programs in the education system are generally poor.

With the aim to support policy makers and developers of English language programs across India, the purpose of this study was to determine whether students taking blended EFL courses perform better, as good as, or worse than students taking the same course in a face-to-face format.

This project had three major goals:

• To measure the effectiveness of blended English language courses compared to traditional face-to-face instruction
• To examine whether the performance gap in favor of either method increases as the English proficiency level of the student’s increases
• To examine whether a blended delivery model of English language courses is more cost effective compared to traditional face-to-face instruction

Results indicated that after controlling for level and student fixed effects, students taking blended English-language courses outperform students taking the same course in a face-to-face format. This difference in test score in favor of the blended model was statistically significant. In addition, we found that the gap in favor of the blended model increases as the English proficiency level of the students increases.

The study used observations, interviews, document analysis, and video analysis to examine instructional practices in large undergraduate lecture courses at UCI, particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The study began in 2012 with the intention of documenting the relative presence or absence of practices that potentially promote more active and engaged learning (e.g., enhanced faculty-student interaction, enhanced peer interaction, greater attention to problem-solving strategies, more opportunities for personalized learning, opportunities to receive and communicate information across diverse channels and modalities, more data-based instruction). We compared instructional practices with student outcome data to determine the efficacy of these promising practices, with the long-term goal of improving undergraduate education and increasing retention of diverse learners in STEM fields and beyond.

Young children learn best from everyday social interaction. And young children love to communicate with "conversational agents" (CAS) such as Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. The Converse to Learn project puts these two together by creating CA-based books and videos to promote children's dialogic learning. For example, watch the one-minute video below to see how Elinor the bunny (CA) engages a young child viewer in dialogue to help her and her friends solve their science-based problem.

The Converse to Learn project is led by the Digital Learning Lab in the School of Education at the University of California at Irvine and the Intelligent Media Lab in the University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education.